October 13, 2010
Sympathy and Threshholds
Ben Goldacre recently highlighted the worrying finding that the greater the number of victims resulting from a crime, the less intense the feelings of disapprobation or concern onlookers felt. This was mirrored in legal punishment: paradoxically, the more victims some perpetrators hurt, the lower their sentence tended to be.
Why might this be? Goldacre points somewhat inconclusively to some failure of “empathy”. But a subtly different explanation may be more illuminating.
My answer – you may not be surprised to hear – lies in 18th Century Scottish philosophy. Specifically, in the principle of “sympathy” introduced by David Hume, and developed with great care by his friend Adam Smith. Although their concepts of sympathy are far too technical to be properly expound here (especially in the case of Smith, who differs from Hume in some crucial and highly detailed respects), a brief and basic exposition may be fruitful.
We begin to “sympathise” with others when we represent their feelings or mental states to our own minds. This can be done by conscious reflection, or automatically without stopping to think at all (e.g. the difference between actively “thinking yourself into somebody else’s shoes” and spontaneously wincing at the mere sight of them being hit by a stick). The crucial development is that after we have represented the feelings (or mental states) of another to ourselves, we then have a subsequent reaction: we feel ourselves to some degree reproducing that person’s feeling (or mental state), and experience a fainter version of it ourselves.
Thus, if I see you being hit with a stick I represent this action in my mind (possibly reflectively, but probably automatically) and imagine feeling the pain you are feeling. As the stick rises against you, I may even reflexively move my leg away such is the extent to which I “sympathise” with the experience you are undergoing. Similarly, if I know that you are currently in a state of extreme psychological anxiety, I may represent your feelings to myself and come to feel a fainter impression of anxiety myself.
Hume and Smith thought this tendency of humans to sympathise with the experiences – both good and bad – of their fellow creatures constituted a crucial plank of shared morality, and ensured the ability to live socially without constant recourse to self-interest. They also thought that as human knowledge developed, further discoveries would expand and enrich their hypotheses about the functioning (and importance) of sympathy.
The cases Goldacre illustrates may do something just like that. This is because there is a problem to explain here: why is it that we apparently “sympathise” (in the Humean/Smithean sense) with a few victims, but not so easily with larger numbers (and correspondingly, feel strong disapprobation to perpetrators in the former but not the latter case)?
Hume and Smith were keen to emphasise the extent to which “nature” has “fitted” us with the right mental equipment to navigate the world and survive extremely competently. But as pre-Darwinians they were somewhat at a loss to explain how “nature” does this. We may fare a little better.
Consider: creatures that are able to “sympathise” with large numbers of sufferers will have to represent the suffering of that large number to their mind, and then feel corresponding impressions of copied suffering themselves, on a scale reflecting the large amount of suffering taking place. To put it bluntly, that may end up being a lot of suffering to represent, and in turn feel. Yet creatures so-representing large amounts of suffering to themselves would surely be most likely to experience debilitating psychological breakdown, as other (vital) functions are crowded out.
By contrast, creatures who only represent to themselves the sufferings of relatively limited numbers will be able to “block out” large-scale suffering that might otherwise debilitate them. Yet such creatures will nonetheless possess enough “sympathy” to be able to form common bonds with their nearest and dearest, overcoming brute self-interest, benefiting all their lives accordingly.
From a Darwinian perspective it’s obvious which sorts of creatures will be most likely to survive (or rather, evolve in the first place). Put slightly differently: the collective evolutionary benefits of being able to “sympathise” with your friend being stalked by the saber-toothed tiger are considerable; of sympathising with several thousand victims of a natural disaster far less so. “Nature” has “fitted” us to sympathise with others – but only below a certain threshhold.*
Thus 18th century Scottish philosophy, with a helpful splash of Darwin, may go a long way to solving what might otherwise look like a tricky modern puzzle. What a shame, once more, that the great Scots have fallen so far from favour in recent times.
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*Proximity and familiarity of victims will also be important factors – but let’s leave that to another day.
October 12, 2010
The Environmental Rot?
I refrained from blogging about the shocking 10:10 climate change video when it appeared online a fortnight ago. Partly this was to allow myself some critical distance. Partly I was so overwhelmed by it’s monumental stupidity that I didn’t know what to write.
For those who missed the video, here it is:
It’s fair to say that 10:10 couldn’t have come up with a worse video if they’d tried.
You’d be forgiven for suspecting that this must be a fake; climate-change denial’s answer to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But it’s not. It’s for real. Campaign group 10:10 thought-up, wrote, commissioned, and hired celebrities for this video. They then shot, produced, and watched it. And then they still chose to release it.
Yet precisely because this video must have gone through a lengthy process of commission and execution, it suggests that the evident and appalling lapse of judgement on display is not a one-off aberration. Rather, it may be a product of some deep pathologies within the environmentalist movement.
I should say now that I am not a climate change “sceptic”. I am convinced that climate change is happening, that it is caused by human activity, and that it will be disastrous if not mitigated quickly. Nonetheless, the 10:10 video appears to indicate at least 3 potential pathologies at work.
First, 10:10′s strikingly callous attitude towards those who don’t sign up to their brand of anti-climate change action. In the video those who dissent are firstly lied to – “no pressure” – before being murdered in graphic and shocking detail. It seems likely that only an organisation holding utter and deep-seated contempt for dissenters could find this an acceptable way to portray opponents in public.
Second, the 10:10 video demonstrates a complete lack of basic political acumen, strategy and common sense. It’s one thing to find it appropriate to symbolically blow-up those who don’t care about climate change (however worrying or not that might be from a psychoanalytic point of view). It’s quite another to be so politically stupid as to not realise that depicting the blowing up of children in particular will gift a vast arsenal of ammunition to opponents, whilst also alienating reasonable people in the middle ground.
Third, this video manifests a staggering penchant for stunt and shock-factor over likely political gain. For what, after all, is the message supposed to be? That if you don’t agree with 10:10, they’ll kill you? That is the only coherent suggestion I can draw – and it’s hardly a smart one to be sending out. If the video was meant to highlight that lack of action on climate change will endanger us all, it fails spectacularly. If there was some other message here, it’s been destroyed by allowing a childish desire to pull stunts take priority. (Those who question the wisdom of preventing Easyjet flights packed with middle-England holiday-makers from taking off may sense a pattern emerging).
Again: given how much planning and preparation went into this video, how many people must have been involved with making it, and that nobody senior realised that it was a really stupid idea, indicates that this may not be a one-off cock-up.
I say this not to attack environmentalists. They have the best of intentions, and they are undoubtedly on the side of the angels. I say it because many environmental campaigners need to recognise that if there is a deep rot in aspects of their movement and its thinking, then they need to sort that out quickly. If they don’t, they are likely to fail in their goals and objectives. And we will all be significantly the worse off for that.
October 11, 2010
Intelligence, Wealth and Voters
Chris Dillow remarks:
“Whilst the public are happy to be ruled by people much richer than them, they don’t want to be ruled by those much smarter.”
This appears to be a general truism of 21st Century mass democracy. Tony Blair got a lot further selectively dropping his ‘aitches and being an apparently ordinary bloke than Gordon Brown did with his PhD and battering ram of statistics (or even worse, his attempts to fake normal human behaviour). Or consider George Bush, re-elected American president despite being apparently borderline retarded.* That Dublya appeared to be a man of the people was more potent than his membership of a billionaire, globetrotting elite.
Why do people tolerate being ruled by the ultra-rich, but not by those they perceive as being (significantly) cleverer than them? I have some hypotheses leading to some philosophical implications. (If anybody knows of relevant psychological research that confirms or denies my speculations, I’d be glad to hear of it).
My first hypothesis is that voters are (sensibly) worried about being dominated and exploited by those who wield power over them. Voters are faced with having to give power to one bunch of mendacious bastards over another, and it makes sense to give it to that bunch they believe least likely to abuse it. If you think somebody is much cleverer than you, then you may sensibly worry about them hoodwinking you. As most voters have middling to poor views of politicians already, they are perhaps predisposed to expect attempts at hoodwinking. Correspondingly, they are more likely to choose politicians whose intelligence (apparently) approaches their own, such that the chances of being hoodwinked (apparently) decrease accordingly.
Secondly and connectedly, we know that similarity breeds familiarity. If you think “hey, this bloke is a pretty straight kinda guy who is by all appearances a lot like me”, you may quickly jump to the conclusion “this guy will look out for people like us”. Such a sense of commonality, however, is likely undermined by evident differences in intelligence: “this egghead isn’t like me – can I trust him?”
This, however, is surely only part of the story. It’s also a fact that people, in general, don’t like to feel stupid. They are thus likely to be favourably disposed to people who don’t make them feel stupid. Hence politicians who are of average-voter-level intelligence (or at least appear to be) will resonate better with average voters, than will eggheads inducing a sense of inferiority.
Nonetheless it remains to be explained why voters don’t express the same antipathy to wealth as they do intelligence. Perhaps it’s that wealth is generally seen as a sign of success, rather than (say) an intrinsic superiority of character. We live in a culture which routinely equates success with money, and there may therefore be a widespread cognitive bias in favour of assuming the rich to be successful and therefore competent.
Accordingly, many voters may even be encouraged if potential leaders are wealthy; they may interpret this as proof of competence. Greater intelligence, by contrast, may lack the kind of strong socially enforced approval that wealth enjoys, thereby not offsetting the negative effects considered above.
But there remains a potential puzzle: wealth, after all, can give its possessors significant power over the poorer. How to explain the discrepancy between my hypothesis that voters are suspicious of being exploited by the more intelligent, but apparently worry less about exploitation by super-rich elites?
The answer might be widespread cognitive bias in capitalist societies exhibiting capitalist norms. Or as a Marxist might put it: the false consciousness of an exploited proletariat. Although G.A. Cohen (one of the late-20th Century’s leading Marxist theorists, incidentally) comprehensively demonstrated that wealth is power in many social contexts, this view is apparently not privileged in a society ordered to the interests of wealthy elites, and which has been so-ordered for centuries. The result may be that people worry (too?) little about how much money their rulers have, and a great deal (too much?) about how intelligent they are, or appear to be.
So: if my hypotheses hold any water, we’d have another example of how ideas (or rather, the priority of ideas) can shape everyday politics. And we’d also have another example of a political principle – wealth is power – being privileged by philosophical leftists, but whose concerns are not shared by ordinary voters.
As to whether any water is indeed being held…over to you.
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* Though this was almost certainly more act than reality.
October 8, 2010
The Passing of Blair Rage
I used to be angry with Tony Blair. Really angry. About the Iraq war (especially). About his continuation of Thatcher’s legacy. About the assault on civil liberties. About the wasted opportunities which followed the two largest Labour majorities in history.
But I’ve recently started to change my assessment of the man himself. And my anger is mutating into something else.
Take David Runciman’s unmissable review of Blair’s memoirs in the LRB. It is focused on two defining features of Blair’s premiership: his 10-year battle with Gordon Brown (or rather, his 10-year resistance to the assassin next door), and his decision to back an American invasion of Iraq. In Runciman’s withering assessment, Blair not only got two of his biggest decisions wrong, he got them the wrong way around.
The time to be decisive and head-strong was mid-2001, after Labour had been returned with a second landslide. Blair could have dispatched Brown there and then. The rest of his premiership, and New Labour’s record, would have been profoundly different. The time for hesitancy and refusal to land a body-blow was 2002-3, when the American war effort was going into full effect. But instead Blair embarked on the worst foreign policy disaster in British post-war history.
Runciman’s assessment is broadly shared by Andrew Rawnsley in his The End of the Party. Yet what comes through most clearly in Rawnsley’s treatment is what a terrible judge of situations, and what an ineffectual decision-maker, Blair was at crucial junctures.
Blair lacked the stomach for a fight with Brown, and mistakenly thought he could charm Bush out of bellicosity. The result was disaster at home and in the middle east. Yet what Rawnsley claims, in particular, is that on crucial occasions Blair made shockingly bad political decisions: he brokered lop-sided bargains with Brown that left him totally exposed; he pledged unconditional support to Bush and thereby forfeited any potential British leverage. There are many more examples.
I had long assumed that image of Blair projected whilst in office reflected the real thing: a supremely talented politician with a ruthless Machiavellian gift for the back rooms of politics, combined perfectly with the buckets of charisma that made him a media-manipulating genius.
What Rawnsley (and to a lesser extent, Runciman) bring out is the extent to which Blair charmed and bluffed his way to the top, believing in his own vacuous rhetoric along the way. Yet when the really big moments came he turned out to be made more of straw than steel. For a politician so obsessed with his legacy, Blair may end up very disappointed with how history remembers him.
But two other things have also influenced my reassessment. First, over at Potlatch Will Davies has a very funny – but also incisive – post suggesting that Blair is incapable of feeling embarrassment. Read it; there’s definitely something there.
Second was Chris Brooke’s epic (and slightly bonkers) marathon tweeting of A Journey. What struck me reading Chris’ summary was the extent to which Blair was apparently deluded in his basic grasp of the world. Indeed I asked Chris if he shared this impression, and he replied:
“Yes — I think he has become a fantasist. He says at the end that he’s much happier now he’s out of office, and obviously part of that is that he doesn’t have to deal with Gordon Brown or the British media every day, but I also wonder whether part of it is that he isn’t so constrained by the real world any more, and so can just live in a fantasy of his own construction.
The final chapter of the book seems pretty delusional to me — as Blair insists he is “progressive” while defending an exceptionally right-wing approach to dealing with the economic crisis which involves low direct taxes on rich people, allowing banks to write new rules for regulation, jacking up indirect consumption taxes, & so on.”
These two factors – the dispelling of the illusion of Blair as political colossus, and the possibility that he may actually be psychologically unhinged – have had the effect of making me considerably less angry at Blair. I’m still – don’t get me wrong – angry at what happened over those 10 years. But towards Blair himself I’m starting to feel something decidedly different: a bizarre form of condescending pity.
Again, I’m fairly sure that’s not the sort of legacy Blair had in mind for himself. Fittingly, that compounds my emotive revaluation of him.
October 7, 2010
Fairness: The Academy vs. the Electorate?
Did academic “luck egalitarianism” yesterday receive it’s most unexpected convert? I ask because David Cameron apparently affirmed one of its core principles:
“Fairness means giving people what they deserve – and what people deserve depends on how they behave.”
Luck egalitarianism is built around thoughts which very much include a principle like Cameron’s. Namely, that the level of inequality a society tolerates needs to be responsive to the choices and actions individuals make in the process of generating that inequality. For example, if I work hard whilst you surf all day, then it seems fair that I should end up with (at least some) more money than you. I worked for it, therefore I deserved it; you didn’t, therefore you don’t.
Yet I fear that any hopes of David Cameron coming out of the (luck) egalitarian closet are soon to be dashed. A commitment to academic (luck) egalitarianism would also mean Cameron affirming another closely-connected idea: that inequalities that are undeserved are, in turn, unfair – and that ceteris paribus we have reasons (though not necessarily decisive reasons) to correct such undeserved unfairness.
For example, if I have more money than you because my Daddy was a banker and left it all to me when he died, this is unfair. I did nothing to earn that money, therefore I do not deserve it, and it’s unfair I should have it when you receive no such inheritance because of brute bad luck that your father was a lowly bin cleaner.
Similar thoughts apply to private education: we know that people who are privately educated are much more likely to go on and earn higher salaries. But children do not deserve to receive this privilege of private education; they get it from the brute good luck of having wealthy parents. So how can fairness tolerate this undeserved privilege?
Plainly, David Cameron is not going to announce a massive increase in inheritance taxes and a ban on private schools. Even though failing to do so makes his rhetoric of fairness and desert, aimed squarely at society’s poorest, obviously hollow.
Then again, I’m hardly surprised by this (and I’m sure you’re not either). There is, however, an important observation worth making; one that will bring even more gloom to leftist egalitarians.
The people of Britain are clearly not up in arms about Cameron’s inconsistency. Rather than decrying his talk of fairness as hypocritical due to a manifest lack of concern for undeserved inequality at the top end of society, this attack on (by implication) “scroungers” is greeted as free-standing, and even praised by many.
There thus seems to be a disturbing (for egalitarians) asymmetry in popular views of equality and desert. Many ordinary people spontaneously agree with one quite specific (luck) egalitarian thought: that if you don’t work hard, you should have less (nothing?) than others who do. But a logically corresponding thought, travelling in the opposite direction, is not affirmed with anything like as much commitment, by anything like as many people: that inequalities that are undeserved and result from brute luck – rather than the responsible choices of individuals – should be corrected for.
This asymmetry allows Cameron to bash the “undeserving poor”, Victorian style, whilst heading a party that wants inheritance tax cuts for millionaires and supports private education. And that, I suggest, is a severe practical problem for egalitarians (whether “luck” or otherwise) who affirm that a basic principle of fairness is that undeserved inequality is objectionable and should be corrected, whatever we may or may not think about deserved inequality.
Or, to end on an esoteric note, Samuel Scheffler has his finger on the button:
“If, as I have argued, there is a surprising degree of agreement among contemporary philosophical liberals [Scheffler means liberal egalitarians] and their critics about the advisability of avoiding any appeal to pre-institutional desert, then why should it be a special problem for political liberalism if it too avoids any such appeal? The answer is that although liberalism’s most prominent philosophical critics may be reluctant to appeal to preinstitutional desert, its most prominent political critics most certainly are not. On the contrary, conservative politicians do not hesitate to invoke traditional notions of desert and responsibility in attacking liberal [egalitarian] positions. Thus if political liberalism does require the rejection of pre-institutional desert, then although it will be in tune with the prevailing philosophical consensus, that may not suffice to prevent its political isolation.”
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Update: Stuart White is exploring similar thoughts at Next Left
October 6, 2010
Consequences bleg
I expect this week’s long Wednesday philosophy post is going to prompt people to call me an idiot. Please, try and be patient and recognise that I’m focusing on something quite specific, so pause before hitting your keyboards to decry my stupidity. This is a bleg rather than a blog; an appeal for the philosophically inclined who read this blog to try and help me out.
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Faisal Shahzad – the man who tried to blow up a car bomb in Time Square – has been sentenced to life in prison. Would he have received the same punishment if the bomb had successfully gone off, killing and maiming thousands? I ask because New York State has the death penalty, and despite being unused since 1976 it’s feasible it might have been revived in such an eventuality.
To tease out the underlying point I really want to get at: we tend to think that it is right for successful criminals to receive harsher penalties than unsuccessful ones, and indeed tend to cast greater moral condemnation on those who are successful than those who aren’t.
But things can start to seem odd if we ask why we feel this way.
To illustrate: imagine a parallel world in which Shahzad had the exact same motivations as in this world. However, imagine that this parallel world differs in one single respect: Shahzad makes a successful car bomb. Instead of his device failing to detonate, it goes off and kills hundreds.
Parallel World Shahzad is duly caught and brought to trial, just like Real World Shahzad. Yet the former receives a more severe punishment (the death penalty) than the latter (who gets life in prison). Yet Real World Shahzad did everything he could to achieve the results that Parallel World Shahzad actually brought about, namely mass death and destruction.
The motivation in each case is identical; the intent to kill is the same. But in one case people die and in the other they don’t. Yet it seems in some sense bizarre to say that Parallel World Shahzad is more evil than Real World Shahzad, simply because the former succeeded and the latter failed. Real World Shahzad wanted to bring about exactly the same ends Parallel World Shahzad managed to achieve, and indeed did everything within his power to do so. Real World Shahzad was thwarted by (let’s say) the bad luck of not setting up his bomb properly, which he would happily have corrected he’d been aware of it. And yet he receives a lesser punishment and less moral disapprobation simply because he failed even though he meant entirely to succeed.
To stop using silly abstract examples, a concrete illustration: I’m presuming that most people join me in having stronger feelings of moral aversion to the successful 7/7 tube bombers than the unsuccessful Glasgow airport terrorists, even though the intent to cause mass death and suffering was the same in both cases. The fact that one group succeeded, and the other didn’t, appears to carry important moral weight. Even if we condemn both groups, we apparently condemn the successful group even more severely because they were successful. Or even if people don’t quite share my moral intuitions here, it remains to be explained why legal punishments increase in severity for successful murders as oppose to unsuccessful ones, and why most people are apparently quite comfortable with that.
So to attempt (and probably fail) to avoid misunderstanding, the specific question I’m focused on is: why do we tend to think a successful terrorist is more evil than an unsuccessful one, even when they both have identical motivations and the latter failed only because of bad luck. What work in our moral thinking is the successful bringing about of consequences doing, even when that success (or unsuccess) is external to the agent, say because of uncontrolled luck?
Hume famously remarked that:
“`Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produc’d them.”
And this may look like no solution at all: haven’t we just established that consequences matter over and above the motives of evil-doers? But a solution perhaps begins to present itself if we recall the Humean observation that actual events have a stronger and more lively impact on the mind than mere imagination.
Seeing the attrocities of successful terrorism transports our ideas to the evil motives of the terrorist far more powerfully than merely imagining what the consequences would have been if the terrorist had been successful (knowing that they weren’t). Our increased disaprobation for the successful over the identically-motivated yet unsuccessful (reflected in more severe legal punishments for successful criminals than unsuccessful ones) can thus perhaps be explained. The difference lies not in the consequences themselves, but in the greater power of real consequences than imagined ones to excite moral disapprobation for another’s evil motives.
The problem, however, is that I’m not satisfied with that answer. It feels like what matters here is whether people really do die - and not simply whether the person who killed them had a motivation to do so, and that his success more effectively transports our thoughts to that motivation than if he had failed and the work was left to imagination.
And I’m not sure what to do about that, because I feel quite stuck and can’t get my head clear on exactly what work consequences are doing here – and at the very least, the Humean account needs to be expanded (though I would hope, not abandoned).
Thoughts, anyone?
October 5, 2010
The Unconservative Conservatives
Yesterday George Osborne announced some big changes.
A cap system that will reduce income, housing and council tax benefit is going to affect a lot of people’s lives. You can read various good analyses here, here, here, here and here. Personally, I’m still reeling from the extent of Osborne’s assault on those receiving state support, disgusted at his fig-leaf excuses about preventing people seeing benefits as a “lifestyle choice”. But one thing strikes me about these reforms: how cavalier and unconservative the Conservative Party is now being.
As we heard from Adam Smith the other week, politicians should always bear in mind the law of unintended consequences. Changing A with the intention of bringing about B, might inadvertently also cause X, Y and Z – and the end results may be far from pretty.
Think, for example, of an imposed cap on housing benefits. One group I bet Boy George hasn’t thought about who this might affect is battered women. As Hopi Sen tweets:
“Another point on welfare cap. Emergency housing is expensive. Say you leave abusive partner with family, need rehousing, what then?”
Now, I don’t know for sure if it’s the case that women trying to flee partners will now find it even more difficult to leave abusive households (on top of, y’know, the fear of being tracked-down and murdered, which is a common and very real fear in a country where one woman a week dies at her partner’s hands). But it seems likely. I would sincerely like to know if George and Team have factored-in the impact on all similarly vulnerable groups, in every possible permutation of possibile outcomes. My guess is not, because it’s impossible. But they are going ahead regardless. What bold and brave steps our leaders take for us.
Or consider what’s happening here at Cambridge University. Anticipating huge government cuts over coming years, the University has drastically increased the number of fee-paying graduate students admitted. The University Colleges have apparently been ordered to accept this – regardless of whether they have sufficient accommodation or teaching resources available.
On the flip side, the new Coalition immigration cap is causing havoc for overseas students. Many now find themselves struggling to secure entry to the UK, with knock-on effects for the University bureaucracy who are struggling to cope with the myriad resultant problems. I would imagine that many, if not all, universities in Britain are in the same position. The knock-on effects for both UK higher education and – in the longer run – the whole economy simply cannot be fathomed.
These are just two particular illustrations. There must be hundreds more.
What intrigues me, therefore, is the disregard for the radical change that must now surely arise – with unknowable, unforseen consequences. Michael Oakeshott, possibly the greatest modern conservative philosopher, would surely be appalled. Oakeshott likened the running of a state to the sailing of a ship cast adrift on a boundless ocean. The ship could be sailed safely only by the use of tested practical wisdom, and that came only from experience which demanded only gradual and organic change. By contrast, theoretically-driven sojourns – i.e. the pursuing of politics by way of abstract ideology – were more likely to sink the ship than keep it afloat.
Frederick von Hayek, however, wrote a famous article called “Why I am Not A Conservative“. This fascinating essay contains much to think about, but one of its central messages was that Hayek, under the right circumstances, would accept anti-conservative change if it brought about the small-state libertarianism he believed best for all.
George Osborne, it would seem, is not a conservative either.
October 4, 2010
MPs, Second Jobs and Freedom
If the News of the Screws is to be believed, 87% of MPs receive additional earnings to their Parliamentary salaries of £64,766 per year. I think this is a problem, for at least three reasons.
First, an MP’s job is over-loaded with work already, without adding time-consuming commitments. Having been a Parliamentary researcher, I know that an MP can labour from 9am to midnight, and still have duties to fulfil. I am extremely sceptical that any MP is so adept as to have enough spare time to work privately whilst also fulfilling their elected responsibilities. MPs are elected to serve their constituents and the national interest – they should be doing that, not topping themselves up.
Second, there is already a dearth of legislative oversight in the British Parliament. This has the ironic result that the indefensibly unelected House of Lords provides vital oversight, correcting a great deal of shoddy and ill-thought out law passed in the lower chamber. MPs skimping on their elected roles so as to secure extra pocket money can only make this worse.
However, you might fairly reply that most MP top-ups come from private directorships that take up very little time over the course of a year. Which makes my third point the most important: the problem of influence.
I don’t believe all MPs are (easily) influenced by external bodies that pay them a tasty salary. But it seems naïve and utopian to assume that none are. As MPs are elected representatives, it is an affront to the basic fairness of representative democracy if some of them push the interests of employers at the expense (directly or indirectly) of constituents. This becomes especially pertinent when you recall that MPs are already bombarded by lobbyists and interest groups, who enjoy far greater access then ordinary voters.
I would therefore propose that MPs be banned from taking second employment. Although some MPs may well be capable of both working privately and fulfilling ther elected duties, it is dubious that all (or even most) can pull it off. And as there’s no way a priori of differentiating the good from the bad, and certainly no way of practically enforcing any such distinction, the only solution is a universal ban.
Now, rightists may complain that this unfairly restricts the freedom of MPs. To which I have two replies.
- To make things fair, reforms should take effect at the start of the next Parliament. That way any MP who doesn’t want to give up an additional paid role can choose not to be an MP at all. In other words, think of being elected as a contract MPs agree to. Insofar as people agree to be MPs, they will in future agree to only be MPs. As rightists generally privilege the enforcement of contract über alles I’m sure they’ll greet this warmly.
- If rightists continue to complain that this is an affront to MPs freedom, I want to know why they think it’s an important freedom that people earning three times the median average salary should be allowed to earn even more money. And I want especially to know why this freedom to earn ever greater sums is so important it trumps the considerations outlined above, which cut to the heart of the citizen-politician relationship in representative democracy.
Or shorter: it’s not just about equality, stoopid.
September 30, 2010
Changing the Law…but Changing Nothing
There is no requirement for letting and estate agents in Britain to be part of a regulatory body. This means any cowboy who chooses can set up shop. And many do.
Since 2007, however, tenants have in theory gained peace of mind. It is now illegal for letting agents not to register tenancy deposits in a licensed Deposit Protection Scheme (DPS). Failure to do this entitles tenants to a compensatory sum of three times the original deposit, should this a) not be returned at the end of a tenancy and b) not have been placed in a DPS.
Has this prevented dodgy letting agents from continuing that age-old practice of stealing tenant’s original deposits?
Not exactly.
Imagine you leave a property – without causing any damage – and apply to your letting agent for a return of your original deposit. Imagine they refuse. Imagine you then ask for proof that they registered your deposit in a DPS. Imagine they can’t do this, because they didn’t. Imagine they persistently refuse to return your money nonetheless.
What happens next? Do you assume you’ll be able to straightforwardly take the agent to County Court, getting both your money and legally-entitled compensation in due course?
Think again.
To try and get your money back you must start by sending a claim form to county court, explaining that your agent has breached both your original contract and also the obligations of the Housing Act (2004). The Court then writes to the agent.
But imagine the agent opens the court’s letters, re-seals the envelopes, writes “gone away” on the front, and returns the documentation pretending the business has folded. When you go to the agent and try and serve them a claim form in person, they refuse to accept it from you.
What next?
Sensibly, you press for a county court hearing to rule on your dispute with the agent, which is granted. But the agent doesn’t turn up to the hearing. So you win the judgement by default. The agent now owes you three times your original deposit value – a sum likely to be in the thousands. Will you get your money now?
Not likely.
The Court sends the agent an order demanding that they pay you the money that is now legally yours. But imagine the agent sends this order back, again writing “gone away” on the envelope (which is a lie, because they are still trading). At this point you might expect the court to take matters into its own hands so as to extract the money owed.
You’d be wrong.
There are now three options. 1) You can send in bailiffs to take the agent’s property up to the value you are owed. However bailiffs cannot take property essential to the business’ operations, so if you’re dealing with a shoe-string agency (as is likely) the bailiffs will be able to take very little and almost certainly nowhere near the sum you are owed.
2) You can file to have the business declared bankrupt. The problem with this is that it is likely to be expensive, and if anybody else is owed more money by the agent than you are, they will get paid first (and as you’re dealing with a dodgy letting agent this is quite likely).
3) You can attempt a third party debt order, whereby an income stream intended for the business is diverted into your bank account instead of theirs.
Let’s say you (sensibly) try to pursue option 3). However you can only do this if you secure key information, such as the businesses’ bank account details. The only way you can get this is by having the business attend court for questioning. To make that happen, you need to serve a notice-to-attend-court to the manager of the business personally, and then swear an affidavit to the court that you did so.
Now imagine that the manager avoids you for several weeks. Imagine that bailiffs are no use because they cannot track down the manager personally, and the papers have to be served that way. But imagine you eventually pin-down the manager at work one day, give him the papers, then swear an affidavit accordingly. Are you any closer to getting your money?
No.
Because now imagine the agent writes to the court and lies, saying that the manager has left forever. The court (somewhat reassuringly) says this is not acceptable, and the court date for questioning goes ahead regardless. But the manager (unsurprisingly) doesn’t turn up. A judge then issues a Suspended Committal Order. This means that if the manager does not turn up to a second hearing, a warrant will be issued for his arrest.
Is the process over? Is your money on the way?
No, because you have to serve the Suspended Committal Order to the manger, personally. The Court won’t help you do this. But the manager knows who you are, and isn’t going to let you do that. So are you going to get your money back? It really doesn’t look like it.
Imagine over a year has now passed. Imagine you are an Oxbridge educated British citizens whose first language is English and whose current flat mate just qualified as a solicitor. Would you conclude that the much-touted Deposit Protection Scheme has done anything whatsoever to rebalance power between tenants and dodgy letting agents? Do you think that vulnerable people with limited resources, who may struggle with reading English and legal documents – i.e. the worse-off, who are most likely to be at the mercy of dodgy letting agents – are better protected than before, let-alone the highly educated and better-resourced?
I think the evidence speaks for itself.
But there’s a wider lesson here, too: for those (like me) with faith in the power of the state to improve society, we must nonetheless remember that simply changing laws does not necessarily guarantee the good consequences we desire.
September 29, 2010
How to think about…vegetarianism
Self-indulgent long philosophy post of the week. My super-long-term readers have seen this argument before, at my old (now deleted) blog. I am unrepentant in my recycling.
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The other day Andrew wanted to know why I gave up vegetarianism. And as it happens, I was recently listening to Jeff McMahan claiming that we should all be vegetarians. I’ll therefore use McMahan as a stalking horse, by way of answering Andrew.
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I’m prepared to go easy on McMahan. I won’t make any controversial claims that animal suffering is not necessarily bad (as McMahan simply assumes it to be). So I’ll leave out quasi-Nietzschean thoughts about the suffering of animals enhancing the reasons to eat them.
I’ll also abstain from calling into question some of McMahan’s question-begging manoeuvres. Like assuming that the enjoyment animals experience is straightforwardly commensurable with that of humans.
I’ll even leave off snarking too hard on McMahan’s bizarre remark that his children have been vegetarian since birth “by choice”.
Instead, I’ll focus on a simple argument I take to be final in these matters.
It is a brute fact that the vegetarianism of any individual neither saves any animal lives, nor stops any animal suffering. This is because – given the scales of production involved in modern meat-rearing and processing – the decisions of any single consumer have no appreciable impact on market demand. This demand is so large, being constituted by so many thousands of individual consumers, that the removal of one specific consumer has no appreciable reduction for the net demand for meat, and thus no consequent reduction in supply will follow.
Simple vegetarianism – i.e. abstaining from meat purchase/consumption, but doing nothing else – does not save animal lives (or prevent their suffering). If you want to make a difference in terms of consequences to animals themselves, then do something practically useful. Like buying a herd of cows, putting them in your field, and feeding them until they die of old age. That sort of action affects animal lives. Abstaining from meat in a modern mass-consumer economy does not.
Of course, what we have here is a nasty little Sorites Paradox. If everybody acted in concert to give up meat, then market demand would fall, supply would contract, and fewer animals would be killed or experience suffering (largely because many would never be born in the first place). But here’s another brute fact: any individual considering going vegetarian must face the truth that the vast majority of others won’t follow suit. A mass vegetarian revolution is simply not a realistic prospect. As a consequence, any individual’s decision to abstain from meat can have no appreciable impact on market demand, meaning no fewer animals suffer and die. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
But this isn’t the end of the matter. Integrity is also important for moral agents.
People like McMahan are appalled by the meat industry. The mass suffering – and as they see it, exploitation and murder – of animals is to their minds indefensible. In turn, such people may decide they want to have no association with such an evil (as they see it) industry. They do not want to benefit from, or even enjoy, the products of such processes. Nor do they want to be (even symbolically) complicit in them, say by handing over money for flesh. To do otherwise would cast a stain on their moral character – and they want their characters to be clean.
For people who reason this way, vegetarianism will probably be the right option, insofar as it guarantees of their own personal integrity. But not everybody needs to end-up at that decision.
Let’s grant that what is done to animals, via the meat industry, is highly unpleasant. Animals die and suffer for our pleasure, and yet most of us tend to think that suffering is prima facie a bad thing. However it doesn’t follow that everyone must give up eating meat, even if they condemn animal suffering as morally wrong.
For people like me, the “clean hands”/“not in my name”/“I don’t want to be a beneficiary of nasty processes” type thoughts simply don’t have decisive motivational purchase. Other thoughts carry more weight. Like knowing that life as a vegetarian is considerably more difficult than one as an omnivore. Or believing that being the beneficiary of a process which would go on regardless of whether or not one abstained is no particularly bad thing. Or even just liking the taste of meat more than worrying (with somewhat pointless futility) about how it arrived on one’s plate.
Accordingly, because I don’t feel that my personal integrity is compromised by meat-consumption, there’s simply no reason that I should give it up. Indeed, because my giving-up meat would have no consequences for any animals’ lives, even if I think killing animals (or making them suffer) is wrong, it doesn’t follow that I must go vegetarian.*
McMahan, of course, may disagree. He may find he can’t sleep at night if he eats sentient beings. But that will be a decision for him, about his integrity. The philosophical rub, however, is that vegetarianism turns out to be rather less about the animals, and rather more about McMahan.
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*Note: if I were to fear that others might view my meat-eating as callous and so hold me in disregard, that might be a reason for me to go vegetarian. But what would be doing the motivational work would be a desire to avoid the disapprobation of others, not a concern for the lives and well-being of animals.
