Author Archives for jacobwilliamson

Live-blogging Question Time.

22.34 – Here we go, folks. I’m hoping for not too much on Kate Middleton. It’s Peter Hitchens, Giles Fraser and Diane Abbott amongst others tonight, so debate should be diverse and hopefully fruitful.

22.40 – First up is whether we should overhaul the jury system in light of the Vicky Pryce case calamity. Abbott takes the easy and sane and anti-reactionary position. But Hitchens calls for an overhaul! He thinks eighteen years old is too young, and he wants some sort of educational qualification. He calls the status quo the product of an ‘egalitarian thrust’. He implies that anybody would be worried by the idea of being tried by people of low intelligence.

Look, I’m not one to jump to the defence of juries as a concept, but if we’re going to stick with them and deem this the way of doing things, then the idea of violating equality and imposing some sort of Platonic intellectual criterion on participation is repulsive and can never be compatible with a decent society respecting all citizens.

22.45 – Heseltine picks up on the point about age – again, it’s a matter of consistency here. We can’t suggest that at eighteen years old, you’re fit to leave school, have a house, pay tax and fight for one’s country, but one cannot judge one’s fellow citizens. He also notes the inevitable arbitrariness inherent to any educational criterion, not to mention the political problems in setting such a bar. That catchphrase about democracy being the worst form of government except all the others springs to mind. It seems we should say the exact same thing about jury duty.

22.48 – Three side points here. 1 – A lawyer-friend wrote on my Facebook earlier:

The root problem is, as I’ve said before, that trial by jury is simply an outright awful method of assessing evidence – the problem is that a majority of my ‘peers’ are prejudiced, inconsistent and downright moronic.

2 – I remember Lois McNay telling me in a political theory class in my first year that sociological studies show middle-class white men overwhelmingly tend to dominate jury discourse and sway all others.

3 – For philosophers, this story is, frankly, hilarious. Just read the details the BBC provides us:

Would religious conviction be a good enough reason for a wife feeling that she had no choice, ie she promised to obey her husband in her wedding vows and he had ordered her to do something and she felt she had to obey?

“This is not, with respect, a question about this case at all,” said the judge. “Ms Pryce does not say that any such reasoning formed any part of her decision to do what she did and the answer to this question will therefore not help you in any way whatsoever to reach a true verdict in this case.

“I must direct you firmly to focus on the real issues in this case and thereby to reach a true verdict according to the evidence.”

It’s like they got distracted in some sort of Socratic dialogue and engaged in pure contemplation! This tweet tickled me:

22.52 – Hitchens asks who sincerely wants sixteen year olds deciding the future of this country. The disrespect stinks. And he clearly hasn’t watched The West Wing:

22.56 – I missed the start of this next topic, but it sounds like a discussion of benefits based on some tabloid story about one lady’s excessive claims. I haven’t been following it and the debate is sounding formulaic. I’ll sit this one out.

22.59 – Lol:

23.01 – So it did develop into something of more interest. A guy in the audience denied the right to live in Central London on the grounds that he has worked all his life and could never afford such a thing. Giles Fraser asks, very wisely, what sort of country and city we wish to create here: a ghost-town monopolised by Russian oligarchs and Saudi Sheikhs, and as most of Mayfair is nowadays? Or a London where everyone can live and prices aren’t sent soaring by unregulated free market forces? Or is this just another egalitarian thrust like the one that Hitchens just snarled at?

23.05 – Vince Cable is talking about the deficit again and the necessity of hacking away at a bloated welfare state, as if he genuinely believes in the pseudo-economics that his coalition partners are committed to. Well, I labelled him Mr. Mediocre when I met him last summer for a reason.

23.08 – Next question: “Is whites being a minority in London a good thing?” (Census data here). I’m not sure how to feel about this being a question proposed to us on tax-funded television. This wasn’t just raised by an audience member ad hoc. Dimbleby will have picked her knowing what she was about to say. So why air it? Why is this the sort of debate we need to have? Even Heseltine and Hitchens are deeming it a non-issue, for Christ’s sake. I can’t see Cable or Abbott or Fraser offering much dissent.

23.12 – Hitchens does make a good point here. It’s easy to laugh at right-wing rhetoric on this point, but I think he’s spot on in saying that we lack, and desperately need, some better and firmer sources of national identity to enhance social cohesion, and this need not be couched in the nasty language of assimilation, and it need not contradict multiculturalism, despite what Fraser is now suggesting. I remember hearing Ed Husain – who wrote The Islamist – speak here in Oxford, and he said that the fundamental difference between Islamic terrorists in the States and in Britain is that the latter don’t even refer to themselves as British. If we watch the 7/7 videos, you’ve got men who grew up in Yorkshire referring to their ‘brothers’ in Iraq which their actual fellow citizens went over to kill. Could the alienation and lack of identification with one’s surrounding be any more extreme? The feelings of exclusion from democratic discourse, for whatever host of reasons, is quite something. That doesn’t mean we must deny diversity. It does mean that there is work on race relations to be done. There should be far more room for agreement between the left and right on this.

23.18 – Diane, you old Marxist. She’s probably right, though. It’s class, not culture. The latter is just a misnomer which tends to track and obscure the core former issue. But I’m bordering on the sort of pop-speculation I disdain now, so I’ll stop.

23.20 – Hah. Someone asks Hitchens to define Britishness, and he stalls and pleads lack of time. Look, I know I said I’d agree with him in principle on the need for a core national identity. But there is no doubt that he’d imbue it with all sorts of particularistic, contentious and illiberal properties that would appal me. I’ve written about this before. I see it working something like this:

But it seems to me there is at least one form of patriotism that is perfectly consistent with liberalism, both in the sense that liberal citizens should embrace it and liberal governments need not shy away from it. Namely, a patriotism focused on celebrating the liberal state itself. If when flying the flag, what is going on mentally is a celebration of fundamental liberal principles like equality, and core freedoms such as that of thought and speech – what could possibly be illiberal about fostering those sorts of feelings?

And I think this sort of thought is intrinsic to and dominant in the American identity. It is reflected in their other key national symbol, the Statue of Liberty. So perhaps Britain is at a disadvantage here. As we know too well, our flag is too tied up with the monarchy and football. But maybe British liberals should get to work on changing that.

23.22 – And finally, we move on to the issue related to the current government’s raison d’etre: austerity. Fraser makes the opening attack. Let Cable’s squirming begin. Oh, no, wait. He’s invoking Keynes. He’s embracing deliberately allowing the deficit to grow to stabilise the economy! He’s talking about borrowing to help stimulate growth. He just doesn’t think, presumably, any of that violates the practices of the government he partly constitutes. I don’t understand the man. He’s talking of the combination of stimulation and discipline. Dimbleby calls him out and gets him to say ‘Yes’ to the question of whether Osborne’s current policy is Keynesian. Oh Lordy. Cable clearly can’t hack balancing what he truly believes with what his position requires. He’s a walking contradiction, just like he was when I asked him about education policy.

23.27 – You can count on Heseltine to churn out the stale Tory rhetoric about how the pain is absolutely necessary, blaming it all on Labour. We must ‘sweat it out’, as he puts it. Krugman has described this idea well as ‘a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding.’ Abbott seems to call the austerians out on their bull, but then she backtracks and denies that the deficit should be allowed to rise. Her point seems to be about the distribution of the cuts hitting the poorest hardest, rather than the principle of cutting per se. That’s not the thing to say here. At least she’s not Chancellor. Ed Balls knows it.

23.31 – Abbott has a great line though. “Dr. Cable is a reasonable man propping up an unreasonable Tory government”. She sees the insufferable schizophrenia too.

23. 36 – Well, amazingly, we avoided Kate Middleton completely. That’s a wrap, anyway, so here’s signing out.

Managing without meat, continued.

I felt like a bird in Holland and Barrett yesterday when I walked out with what was basically a bag packed with grain. Green lentils and more quinoa to go along with pumpkin, sunflower and sesame seeds.

Breakfast was fine because I take poached eggs, but if I decide I should go vegan than I’ll struggle, because cereal both bores and often fails to fill me. Maybe toast with beans, spinach and mushrooms would do the trick – that’s the form that vegetarian breakfasts in cafés seem to take.

I munched on the seeds before lunch, anyway, and gladly the mild flavour quickly grew on me. These are, allegedly, full of vitamins and minerals, and at an average protein content on 25%, I really can’t complain.

For lunch I did this quinoa and fennel salad, pictured above. It was an Ottolenghi recipe once more, and despite looking great it tasted horrific. He’s certainly a fan of loud, mouth-shaking flavours, and the lime and dill here were too sharp for my stomach to handle.

His curry-roasted root vegetables recipe, however, never fails me. I just boiled some lentils in vegetable stock and sprinkled them over for some further protein. Dinner went swell:

I’ve prepared a mixed bean salad for tomorrow, and I think I’ll try roasted sweet potatoes with figs for dinner. And more seeds of course. Peck, peck.

Extinction through starvation.

Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich paint a bleak picture of what the future will most likely bring:

Our guess is that the most serious threat to global sustainability in the next few decades will be one on which there is widespread agreement: the growing difficulty of avoiding large-scale famines. As the 2013 World Economic Forum Report put it: “Global food and nutrition security is a major global concern as the world prepares to feed a growing population on a dwindling resource base, in an era of increased volatility and uncertainty.” Indeed, the report notes that more than “870 million people are now hungry, and more are at risk from climate events and price spikes.” Thus, measures to “improve food security have never been more urgently needed.”

They acknowledge various essential steps to solving the problem, including a large decline in meat consumption. But they see the key lying in reining in population rises. Empowering all women in the world with effective birth control rights is deemed crucial to this process.

This fits a comment Broome makes in his book about how China, believe it or not, is doing more than many nations to curb climate change and thereby prevent future suffering, just by sticking to its one-child policy.

And let’s just emphasise the fact that 870 million people in our world will go hungry today. We saw yesterday how 40 million tonnes of grain a year would be sufficient to make food poverty history. We currently produce 760 million tones – almost twenty times the amount necessary. The problem, of course, is that 97% of it goes straight into the mouths of animals in order to inefficiently make meat. Yes, I’m going to have no trouble staying far away from this morally bankrupt practice.

Capitalism as anti-conservative, continued.

PM Carpenter points out a paradox:

[P]olitically it’s a wonder that conservatives, who have always purported a righteous superiority over grubbily material socialists, are in reality today’s most formidable materialists. They pay all the necessary lip service to what we might call higher values, but their political platform is indistinguishable from the Almighty Dollar. What you need is a tax cut, so you can buy, buy, buy.

Odd, isn’t it? I get why Mormons are like this, but how conservatism came to be in bed with libertarianism will forever baffle me. The latter is characterised by a radical commitment to the absolute morality of property rights even when they cause vast inequality and poverty, undermining social stability and personal security in our world to a staggering extent. The former is supposed to be about sustaining systems that work to shield us all from suffering, minimising if never entirely eliminating our vulnerabilities. Libertarianism has little that’s conservative about it.

Previous thoughts on this here.

Carbon tax comes to China.

Largely symbolic, inevitably littered with loopholes and unlikely to do much good, of course. But as Plumer notes, it’s a step in the right direction, and it’s more than the US Congress is currently proposing. And we pretty much have to clutch at any glimmers of good news we get nowadays in this doomed, apathetic world.

Quote for the day.

Galloway’s preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a “popinjay” (true enough, since its original Webster’s definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—”slipped down to the mezzanine floor.” In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

– Who else but Hitch?

Context for Galloway’s latest stunt here.

Theism as a basic belief.

My philosophy of religion class this week revolves around the topic debated below. The discussion is surprisingly interesting and extremely clear. Plantinga’s big idea is that in the same way we are justified in believing certain things – like the existence of other minds – regardless of and before we have good arguments for doing so, the same applies to belief in God:

The hands that design our junk food.

Photo: Lunchables, by Grant Cornett for The New York Times.

Photo: Lunchables, by Grant Cornett for The New York Times.

Michael Moss, won has previously won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the meat industry, has a new book out on junk food which is excerpted this week in the New York Times Magazine. It’s a long but staggering and important piece. What it shows is an industry intent on maximising its profits at any cost: fine-tuning tastes to give our brains immediate kicks, creating textures that convince us we’re still hungry, and having no concern whatsoever for the impact upon a generation of children who are gradually conditioned to develop an addiction which will hinder their health for life. The social costs of this deception, especially in countries like America which now suffer from an epidemic of obesity, are unfathomable. Fuelled purely by the desire of companies to maintain market shares.

And the worst thing is that the people involved which Moss interviews are largely remorseless. They rationalise their involvement by saying they were just giving people what they wanted, wilfully ignoring the fact that if people understood the impact of what they were eating, they wouldn’t want it, and not considering how demand is in fact deeply determined and shaped by supply. If it all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Not only because we all already suspected these stories were waiting to be told, but because it reads like a sequel to the scandals of the tobacco industry that came to light in the 90s.

This is how Moss frames the thrust of his findings:

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

The example of Lunchables in particular strikes a chord with me. I remember gobbling these up as a kid, and as the article notes, a large part of the appeal was the power you feel over constructing your own lunch, however fatuous that is and now feels. The company knew this and used that fact. They targeted ads at children using the line “All day, you gotta do what they [your parents] say. But lunchtime is all yours.” And because Lunchables were simple and offered meat and cheese and an alternative to a sandwich, parents played along and helped build a billion dollar market. Meanwhile, this all unfolded behind the scenes:

Eventually, a line of the trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day’s recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar… When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for criticism. “One article said something like, ‘If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.’

I think the question of how we regulate information as a society, legislate against commercial deception and regain control and understanding of what enters our mouths – I think that’s going to be a key question of our time. The food industry has grown into an untamed, amoral and unimaginably dangerous beast. We’ve allowed a system to be constructed in which CEOs are the main determinants of our social direction. It’s the crazy side of capitalism that undoubtedly needs curing.

Home news.

Today has been the best day for this blog in over six months, with over four hundred views. Most of those were for the ‘Your diet is destroying the world‘ post from late last night. If the unanimous and widespread positive feedback on Facebook is anything to go by, I should have convinced – or at least begun to persuade – more than a handful of you that our meat-eating practices need to be seriously reconsidered. If so, then this is certainly worthwhile. I hope all the information and arguments I’ve been airing have spurred some small-scale contemplation, in which case doing my civic duty will be partially complete. Once more, all environmental posts are available and archived here.

Managing without meat, continued.

A friend writes:

[Y]ou might be sad now, but you won’t be for long. Going full-on vegetarian comes with countless bonuses. For example, learning more about what you eat, generally eating better, trying new and excellent foods, becoming a better cook, never having to look at a menu for more than ten seconds to figure out what you can eat, and most importantly inflicting a sense of smug superiority on any and all meat-eaters (that is why you’re becoming a vegetarian, right?). If you stick with vegetarianism, I think you’ll quickly become happy with it, and wish you’d started earlier.

Defending quinoa.

A primer on that strange grain that I mentioned last night:

Quinoa is the grain-like seed of a plant in the goosefoot family (other members include spinach, chard, and the wonderful edible weed lambs quarters), and its appeal is immense. Twenty years ago, NASA researchers sung its praises as potential astronaut chow, mainly for its superior nutrient density. No less an authority than the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization hails it as “the only plant food that contains all the essential amino acids, trace elements and vitamins and contains no gluten.” The FAO is almost breathlessly enthusiastic about quinoa—it has declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa and even runs a Facebook fan page for it.

Joanna Blythmann questions its ethical credentials:

The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.

Mimi Bekhechi of PETA pushes back by contrasting these costs with the meat-eating alternative:

Vegans aren’t gobbling up all the soybeans – cattle are. A staggering 97% of the world’s soya crop is fed to livestock. It would take 40m tonnes of food to eliminate the most extreme cases of world hunger, yet nearly 20 times that amount of grain – a whopping 760m tonnes – is fed to farmed animals every year in order to produce meat. The world’s cattle alone consume enough food to sustain nine billion people, which is what the world’s human population is projected to be by 2050.

Because vegans eat plant foods directly, instead of indirectly eating bushels and bushels of grain and soya that have been funnelled through animals first, even vegans who sometimes eat exotic foods grown in other countries still make a fraction of the impact on the environment that meat eaters do (many of whom also eat exotic foods). Enough food for a vegan can be produced on just one-sixth of an acre of land, while it takes 3¼ acres of land to produce sufficient food for a meat eater. Vegfam, which funds sustainable plant food projects, estimates that a 10-acre farm can support 60 people by growing soybeans, 24 people by growing wheat or 10 people by growing maize – but only two by raising cattle.

(Photo: Parsley, lemon and cannellini bean salad, with quinoa. Created by Ottolenghi, executed by me.)

Yes, a carbon tax would work.

See British Columbia’s experiences as a case in point.

That Plumer piece also links to a semi-old Ezra post, which explains perfectly why conservatives should leap at the opportunity to back this. It’s an obvious double-win:

Martin Feldstein, who was the top economist in Ronald Reagan’s administration, proposed a carbon tax in the Wall Street Journal back in 1992. When the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, had to submit a deficit-reduction plan as part of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2011 Fiscal Summit Solutions Initiative, the four scholars in charge of the project included a $26-per-ton carbon tax in order “to address environmental concerns in a more market‐friendly manner.” Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who advises Mitt Romney’s campaign team, has written that there is “broad consensus” among wonks for a global carbon tax.

Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Republican who lost a 2010 primary challenge, is crisscrossing the country trying to build support for the idea. “From a conservative perspective,” he told me, “this is a fabulous opportunity to reduce taxes on something you want more of, which is income, and to put a tax on something you want less of, which is harmful emissions.”

But Ezra called Norquist at the end, and he clarified that the GOP opposes it. Because a carbon tax would be a new tax, and all taxes are intrinsically unconservative and bad.

Capitalism as anti-conservative.

I meant to link to this yesterday. Do yourself a favour and go read Sullivan at his most reflective in a long while. His conclusion offers a good summary:

All I know is that it is a core conservative idea that revolutions can end in nightmares. But we conservatives also long supported and indeed recently breathed new life into the industrial and post-industrial revolution. We see the consequences far beyond the suicides of elderly Koreans. And in my bleaker moments, I wonder whether humankind will come to see this great capitalist leap forward as a huge error in human history – the moment we undid ourselves and our very environment, reaching untold material wealth as well as building societies in which loneliness, dislocation, displacement and radical insecurity cannot but increase. It seems to me this is not the moment for Randian purism.

Do we not as conservatives have a duty to tend to the world we helped make?

Yet in the midst of what Stephen Gardiner has rightly called the “perfect moral storm” (due to the literally deadly mixture of climate change’s undeniable severity, and our apparent inability to care), “conservative” politicians aren’t only silent. In America, they’re caught up in a wave of denial that causes them to actively oppose and openly mock environmental efforts as unnecessary job-destroyers. Senator Inhofe believes a passage in Genesis refutes all climate science. In contrast, conservatives in Britain may by and large accept that the phenomenon is real, but they’re not doing much more to deal with it, and they’re certainly not leading the efforts. The coalition is too caught up with short-term present-day economics to even turn its attention to the plight of future generations. How is the Conservative party’s symbol still a tree? When did Cameron last mention, nevermind make a serious speech about, climate change? This is an abject, unforgivable failure of leadership. A large part of politics is about electing people to counter our own biases and guide us towards the tough but brave and necessary decisions we ought to make. And yet we see no such foresight and wisdom. We only see the same short-sightedness we all suffer from in our daily lives.

And what’s worse is that the solutions aren’t beyond us. Externality theory in economics has been around for decades, and there’s a vast consensus, body of literature and empirical data on what legislative proposals would effectively curb carbon. Cap and trade would be a start, and a carbon tax probably even better. That’s our only hope of collective action to reverse our current tendency to deplete the earth’s resources and cause unparalleled pain, suffering and instability for humans well into the future.

But what happened when such a proposal reached the floor of the US Senate the other year? The “conservative” party blocked it.

Your diet is destroying the world, continued.

A friend writes:

I was wondering if you could talk me through the complete chain of ethical reasoning. I have seen a lot about how meat consumption is responsible for a large percentage of CO2 emissions. And so I guess if we have a responsibility to cut CO2 emissions we have a responsibility to cut meat consumption.

But what is the responsibility to cut CO2 emissions? Is it due to immediate harm caused by the additional CO2 in the atmosphere? (If so, forgive my ignorance, but what is the harm?) Or is it due to a responsibility to stop global warming, which will in turn cause harm to future generations through flooding, drought, and eventually cutting short the life span of the earth?

Also, surely the main problem is beef, so why not continue with white meat and fish?

Yep, it’s really this simple. As John Broome characteristically puts it in his book: “Emissions cause harm in two steps. First, emissions cause global warming. Second, global warming causes harm”. That’s all there is to it. This thesis doesn’t depend on any contentious claims which fetishise the atmosphere as intrinsically valuable as an end in itself. We only need to claim that insofar as the climate is a vehicle by which the well-being of future individuals is deeply determined, we have a responsibility to cut emissions. Remove the floods and droughts and thereby the suffering and deaths, and this wouldn’t be the moral crisis of our time that it so clearly is.

Now, some philosophers do doubt this. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for instance, makes some metaphysical manoeuvres when reflecting upon causation and counterfactuals to help him conclude that no individual is responsible through her emissions for any harm in the world. In short, because the phenomenon will occur regardless of what we do, he thinks it’s futile to say we are ‘obliged’ to act differently in any meaningful, traditional sense. I plan to say something about this shortly – probably in my essay, which I will link to. But I have little doubt that Armstrong is deeply misguided. It is still the case that our actions as individuals cause harm at the margin, whatever other people do.

It’s true that beef is the main problem here, as I’ve previously noted. Even meat-eaters could do vast good in the world by only eliminating beef from their diet. But just because one thing is the main problem, that doesn’t mean other things aren’t also problems. And the impact of other livestock like chicken is still bad. So I don’t see how I can avoid concluding I need to cut it all.

I am less clear about fish, but once more, it’s certainly comparatively better. Perhaps someone reading can help me. Does anyone know the fact of the matter here? Does the fish industry in its entirety cause more carbon emissions than regular inevitable food-producing practices?

Managing without meat.

As I plan this change and figure out how to keep myself functioning, I think I’ll blog the key lessons I learn. With smart-phone apps nowadays, never mind the reservoir of information already available online, maintaining a balanced diet should be easy. It will be nice to offer personal proof, though, that it can be done; and that I won’t be physiologically deficient by virtue of being deprived of steak.

Your diet is destroying the world.

Regular readers of this blog will already know this fact. But the more I read, the more I grow convinced that the data I have cited on here has downplayed the problem. Most figures put meat consumption as contributing to about a fifth of global emissions. Try changing that figure to more like a half. Mark Bittman explains:

Five years ago, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization published a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which maintained that 18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food. The number was startling.

A couple of years later, however, it was suggested that the number was too small. Two environmental specialists for the World Bank, Robert Goodland (the bank’s former lead environmental adviser) and Jeff Anhang, claimed, in an article in World Watch, that the number was more like 51 percent. It’s been suggested that that number is extreme, but the men stand by it, as Mr. Goodland wrote to me this week: “All that greenhouse gas isn’t emitted directly by animals.  ”But according to the most widely-used rules of counting greenhouse gases, indirect emissions should be counted when they are large and when something can be done to mitigate or reduce them.”

Robert Goodland himself illuminates his own findings:

The key difference between the 18 percent and 51 percent figures is that the latter accounts for how exponential growth in livestock production (now more than 60 billion land animals per year), accompanied by large scale deforestation and forest-burning, have caused a dramatic decline in the earth’s photosynthetic capacity, along with large and accelerating increases in volatilization of soil carbon…

[R]eplacing at least a quarter of today’s livestock products with better alternatives would both reduce emissions and allow forest to regenerate on a vast amount of land, which could then absorb excess atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level. This may be the only pragmatic way to reverse climate change in the next five years as needed.

Elsewhere, Goodland makes similar points and adds:

[A]n astonishing 45% of all land on earth is now used for livestock and feed production. So we propose that, contrary to popular belief, the key to reversing climate change in the next five years — as needed — is actually the food industry.

More from Goodland here. But here’s Bittman again:

It’s seldom that such enormous problems have such simple solutions, but this is one that does. We can tackle climate change without inventing new cars or spending billions on mass transit or trillions on new forms of energy, though all of that is not only desirable but essential.

In the meantime, we can begin eating less meat tomorrow.

Reading all this, I don’t think there’s any way I can continue to hold this half-way house position which commits me to trimming meat consumption without eliminating it. I have consoled myself with self-deceiving weasel words about how I’m doing more than most, but there’s just no way anyone can become conscious of the consequences of their actions here and not feel compelled to stop eating chicken and beef and bacon. Through weakness of will, of course, we may slip back into these bad habits. But there’s simply no intellectual defence available here. Every time I buy meat, I send market signals which help to ensure we continue to fuck over future generations. And I’m supposed to justify this how? By insisting that the pleasure of tasting steak is more important than preventing the deaths of millions of people through floods? Please. Again, there’s no real moral dispute here. Everyone who knows the facts must know they should change. It’s just that being moral is hard, and when the consequences are as complex, convoluted and distant as they are with climate change, it’s easy to rationalise away one’s duties.

The lazy get-out is to invoke the necessity of protein, as if it isn’t perfectly possible to get it elsewhere. Yes, it takes effort and vast dietary reform. But learning to love lentils and discovering the delights of alternative foods like quinoa needn’t be difficult, and with care and attention the food can be equally rich in taste, if not richer. In that respect, Ottolenghi’s New Vegetarian blog archives are going to become my new best friend. Having to take the time to plan one’s diet and shop more at Holland and Barrett rather than the butcher’s is a small burden when put aside the stringency of the duty at hand here. And before any vegans jump in – yes, I need to look more into the status of dairy produce, and I need to firm up my understanding of the situation with fish. But, baby steps. In the mean time, no more meat. If you know me personally, you can hold me to that. And please do.

Analysing relationships.

Conversations with friends recently have got me wondering what the boundaries are between friends, lovers and casual partners, and whether we can draw some firm conceptual lines here. My guess is not, and vagueness is inevitable. But it’s bugging me. I think the bones of the problem have been around since Aristotle, but the rise of the casual category in modern society has certainly spiced things up and made the question more practically urgent. But to map out some of the questions here, the SEP seems like a good guide:

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have.

The same issue arises when considering friendship:

The relationship of friendship differs from other interpersonal relationships, even those characterized by mutual caring, such as relationships among colleagues: friendships are, intuitively, “deeper,” more intimate relationships. The question facing any philosophical account is how that characteristic intimacy of friendship is to be understood.

And the problem, it seems to me, is that any such analysis of the depth inherent to love is going to struggle to distinguish itself from the depth in friendships. Take, for instance, Scruton’s view:

[He] claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome”… The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake.

But the ideal in friendship – of Platonic, mutual identification; becoming ‘soul-mates’ – seems to map this model of reciprocity too, and yet there need not be anything romantic about it. So what’s the difference? We may be inclined to say the addition of physical intimacy, but surely not. First, because friends could regularly fuck and remain single. Second, because the socially uptight could easily wait until marriage, but that doesn’t mean their relationship doesn’t start earlier.

There’s also the question of whether views like Scruton’s can accurately capture the value of such relations. After all, they’re supposed to be good things, but on this model they seem to impinge upon our freedom and perhaps our ‘autonomy’. I’m tempted, however, to agree with Nozick and Fisher on this one:

Nozick seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.”

In the entirety of the two Stanford entries, though, this passage jumps out to me as crucial:

To begin, Thomas claims that we should understand what is here called the intimacy of friendship in terms of mutual self-disclosure: I tell my friends things about myself that I would not dream of telling others, and I expect them to make me privy to intimate details of their lives. The point of such mutual self-disclosure, Thomas argues, is to create the “bond of trust” essential to friendship, for through such self-disclosure we simultaneously make ourselves vulnerable to each other and acknowledge the goodwill the other has for us. Such a bond of trust is what institutes the kind of intimacy characteristic of friendship.

Again, however, we’ve got to wonder whether the boundaries between friends and partners is being blurred here. This kind of self-disclosure seems equally essential to and characteristic of both types of relations. We can’t even say that the difference is to be understood in terms of time spent together and who we prioritise, because I know of plenty of people in relationships who make equal if not more time for their long-term friends.

Perhaps the solution is really as simple as saying that we need a contractualist component here? Maybe it’s by virtue of agreeing, or at least mutually seeing yourselves as in a relationship, that a friendship becomes precisely that? So then the status doesn’t depend on any intrinsic features. It boils down to an ad hoc choice. That doesn’t make me feel comfortable (being with someone has got to be for a reason, right?). But for now I don’t have anything better to say.

Why America must act first, continued.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong reinforces the case (2005):

[D]espite these costs, the major governments throughout the world still morally ought to take some of these steps. The clearest moral obligation falls on the United States. The United States caused and continues to cause more of the problem than any other country. The United States can spend more resources on a solution without sacrificing basic necessities. This country has the scientific expertise to solve technical problems. Other countries follow its lead (sometimes!). So the United States has a special moral obligation to help mitigate and adapt to global warming.

Conservatives against Prohibition.

Ian Birrell makes the conservative case against Prohibition today. About time. It’s good to finally see ripples reach across the Atlantic and begin to raise this issue on our radar. And Birrell is surely right to suggest not only that the logic would be sound – since when did conservatives so warmly embrace wasting money and forcing upon us such futile laws? – It would also go a long way to repairing the party’s image amongst people of my age.

Unfortunately, the party has been united by an awkward bond for a while now, between a socially uptight faction with a gut-inclination against anything new, and a vote-winning more liberal-minded leadership able to see what their ideology must and should entail. In that respect, marriage equality was a precursor to this future fight. But few should doubt that insofar as conservatives tend to flirt with libertarianism, drug liberalisation just has to be on the cards.

I’m sure the prime minister is not comfortable with his hypocrisy. And he would have to consider the question of whether this could even get passed. Labour’s potential position isn’t obvious (let’s not forget the David Nutt debacle), and no doubt his own party would split on any non-whipped ‘moral’ issue. There probably wouldn’t be sufficient support for a while yet. But we’ll get there, slowly. With marijuana, at least, it’s inevitable.

Bangladesh’s burdens.

If you’re wondering why this country seems to get singled out and disproportionately mentioned in all the climate change literature I’ve been citing, I think this Dale Jamieson article may offer an explanation:

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has been quoted as saying that climate change is ‘an act of aggression by the rich against the poor’. The data seems to bear him out. Most of the emitting is done by the rich countries of the North, but most of the climate-change related dying is done in the poor countries of the South (Patz et al. 2005). When we look at some countries in particular the case seems even stronger. A recent paper suggests that climate change will lead to a 1-m change in sea level by the end of the century (Grinsted et al. 2009). Such a sea level rise will flood one third of Bangladesh’s coastline, creating an additional 20 million environmental refugees. In addition, saline water will intrude even further inland, fouling water supplies and crops, and harming livestock. This will occur as cyclones and other natural disasters become more frequent and perhaps more intense. In order to begin to adapt to climate change by building embankments, cyclone shelters, roads and other infrastructure, it is estimated that four billion dollars would be required. Yet Bangladesh’s total national budget in 2007 was less than $10 billion. Bangladesh suffers in all these ways, yet its carbon dioxide emissions per capita are one twentieth of the global average. Several small island states, such as the Maldives, will lose even more. They will literally cease to exist as their landmass is swallowed by rising seas.

The power of blogging, continued.

If you want to understand the potential of this medium, go see what Ta-Nehisi is currently doing over at The Atlantic. As he researches black history and civil rights in America for the sake of writing something longer on those topics, he’s taking a tour through the social contract tradition and his readers are tagging along for the ride. They agree to read a chapter of Leviathan each week, he posts some thoughts on Friday, the comments section grows and then key reader contributions are flagged. Everyone involved in his online community learns something. Philosophy is made digestible for people through digital interaction without any multi-thousand pound degrees and institutions being in sight.

Why America must act first.

Whilst the footprint graphic I posted may seem to suggest that China is the chief culprit now facing the greatest obligation to act, there’s strong reason to think the ball remains firmly in America’s court. Some more staggering facts from Gardiner:

[T]he USA is responsible for 29% of global emissions since the onset of the industrial revolution (from 1850-2003), and the nations of the EU 26%; by contrast, China and India are responsible for 8% and 2% respectively. Second, theories based on moral equality support the consensus because the developed countries consume many more emissions per person than developing countries. For example, in 2005 average global emissions per capita were 1.23 metric tons of carbon. But the US average stood at 5.32 tons, the UK was at 2.47, China at 1.16, India at 0.35, and Bangladesh at 0.08 (Boden et al 2009). Third, theories that prioritize the interests of the least well-off endorse the consensus because the developing countries are much poorer than the developed countries. Internationally poverty and inequality remain profound. In 2007, average per capita income in 2007 in the United States and United Kingdom was above $45,000 per year; in China it was $2604, in India $976, and in Bangladesh $428 (United Nations 2009). Moreover, these averages conceal some of the worst problems. In 2005, more than 10% of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty, on less than $1 per day, unable to meet their basic needs.

Graph: Carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption in China, via Wikipedia.

The distribution of emissions.


Stephen Gardiner expresses the inequalities:

At the international level writers on justice often point out the sharp differences in national emissions levels.  For example, the USA and China each have total carbon emissions that are roughly four times those of India, and more than eighteen times those of Bangladesh.  Similarly, the average American’s emissions are roughly equal to those of nearly five Chinese, fifteen Indians, and sixty-six Bangladeshis.  Moreover, since, at the present time, such differences appear to be strongly correlated with economic prosperity, much is at stake in deciding how to distribute future emissions, at least in the near-term.

Further information from The Guardian’s Data Blog (2011):

• China emits more CO2 than the US and Canada put together – up by 171% since the year 2000
• The US has had declining CO2 for two years running, the last time the US had declining CO2 for 3 years running was in the 1980s
• The UK is down one place to tenth on the list, 8% on the year. The country is now behind Iran, South Korea, Japan and Germany

Graphic via Stanford Kay at Pacific Standard Magazine.

Quote for the day.

Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.” (“It was raised many times with him,” a senior Romney official told me, “and he was very categorical about not wanting to and not thinking it was worth it.”)

Robert Draper, in an enormous NYT piece on whether the Republicans can be saved from obsolescence. Also note Plouffe’s comments on Rubio. The short version: he’s not worried.

Lincoln, Locke & Kant.

Steven B. Smith surveys attempts by political theorists to locate Lincoln within the history of their subject:

Unlike Jaffa, who projected Lincoln through the long history of natural law from Plato and Cicero through Aquinas, Locke and the American framers, Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.

Burt begins from the problem of how to resolve conflict in an open society. Does liberalism presuppose agreement around a common moral core — all men are created equal — or is it merely a modus vivendi for people with different values and interests who consent to work together for purely opportunistic reasons? James Madison, in The Federalist No. 10, thought it was the second. He saw a vast republic of competing factions that would cooperate because none could muster the resources to exercise a permanent dominance over the others. But what happens, as in the case of slavery during the 1850s, when these factions cease to pursue interests that can be negotiated and become wedded to principles central to identity? Compromise over interests is possible; compromise over principles is far more difficult.

I don’t know where the historical Lincoln fits into this debate, but if the film is accurate, he certainly seems to see room for both the pragmatic value of adhering to democratic procedure and the need to be guided by prior moral convictions. The speech about a compass directing you due north but failing to note the chasms along the way wouldn’t really make sense without this. But that in turn makes me wonder whether there really is an ideological conflict at all here.

To demonstrate, my position runs something like this. Of course the moral status of minority rights shouldn’t be determined by the whims of prejudiced people, so that the victimised only have legitimate claims if a majority deems them to do so. In that sense, most contentious issues are about how democracy is framed. Rights aren’t the material content that people should deliberate about. They are the presuppositions that regulate how things are deliberated about. So in that respect, I have no objections to judicial review and all sorts of values being integrated legally through constitutional provisions. And this isn’t to be seen as undemocratic. It is, rather, a precondition for genuine democracy.

At the same time, however, I recognise that this method, whilst perhaps right in principle and the most respectful to the claims of victimised parties, is also empirically less effective. When passions run high, the number one way to arouse and intensify opposition and make progress even trickier is to attempt to change things this way. Engaging with dissenters through deliberation and winning over hearts and minds in legislatures or through referenda is far more likely to stir lasting success and social change.

The marriage equality movement is a perfect example of this phenomenon. No, I do not think the legitimacy of marriage equality is contingent on whether fifty per cent of American citizens happen to understand the arguments for it. But yes, I do see that change is moving so quickly because the courts have shied away and left sentiment to shift state by state. In that respect, a top-down federal decree would be polarising and counter-productive. So how could it be justified, even if it is in principle the right way to do these things?

I think Lincoln will have grasped this distinction. His commitment to the immorality of slavery was surely unwavering, and in this respect he was on board both with natural law theorists like Locke and constructivists like Kant. But that’s consistent with understanding that when we leave the halls of academia and turn to enacting actual change, we need to consider competing factions with the colder eye that Madison emphasised. And this is why purist philosophers could never make great politicians.

An exercise in doubt.

Phillip Lopate ponders the essay as a writing format:

Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled “What do I know?” and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution and self-doubt. The essay’s job is to track consciousness; if you are fully aware of your mind you will find your thoughts doubling back, registering little peeps of ambivalence or disbelief.

According to Theodor Adorno, the iron law of the essay is heresy. What is heresy if not the expression of contrarian doubt about communal pieties or orthodox positions? This is sometimes called “critical thinking,” an ostensible goal of education in a democracy. But since such thinking often rocks the boat, we may find it less than supported in school settings. Typically, the exercise of doubt is something an individual has to cultivate on his or her own, in private, before summoning the courage to air it, say, in an essay.

I’ve treated my entire time in higher education this way. I don’t know if I was actively encouraged to at some point, and have since forgotten the initial source, but something conspired with the fact that it’s simply impossible to offer definitive positions on issues when you’re churning out 2,000 words every three days as an undergraduate here, and it meant that I quickly adopted a philosophy in which the purpose of the essay was primarily to think out loud and stimulate future discussion. And I still do that to this day. Yes, I develop positions and push for a particular viewpoint. But I also openly offer up the doubts I inevitably have in order to provoke my supervisor.

And this all applies equally to the method of blogging, which goes some way to explaining why Montaigne is one of Sullivan’s heroes. And insofar as blogging grants such liberty with regards to length – anything between a hundred and over a thousand words for a post can be justifiable – it is arguably superior to the essay. You can entertain ideas and reach a global audience immediately for feedback without having to perfect a narrative and drag out the idea, as essays may oblige you to. Sullivan also linked us to Alan Massie, who was surely right to speculate that if Orwell were alive today, he’d be blogging. Prolifically.

“One of the best writers in the country”.

That’s Fraser Nelson’s take on Rod Liddle, who blogs at The Spectator, which Nelson edits. A typical post of Liddle’s from last month:

Does it matter that white Britons are now a minority in three towns or cities in this country? … Those who welcome more and more immigration usually wave their hands and say listen, change happens, and we should welcome it – for the white people in those towns it is a chance to meet new neighbours from a vibrant culture, an uplifting experience for them. But of course this is not always how it feels if you actually live there…

Well, I can hardly accuse Liddle of lacking views, as I did Paul Staines. The problem is just that his views are so obviously awful.

Green news.

Chuck Wilson reviews the new critically-acclaimed documentary, “Chasing Ice”:

[This is] director Jeff Orlowski‘s beautiful yet sobering documentary about the world’s rapidly melting ice caps. His guide is James Balog, a renowned nature photographer who has become obsessed with documenting the staggering speed with which the icebergs of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska are crumbling into the sea. Orlowski films as Balog and a small team of young scientists go on a mad mission to embed dozens of time-lapse cameras into the rock walls above various ice fields. Those cameras take one image every hour, and when Balog and his team, known as the “Extreme Ice Survey,” assemble the footage, they discover that glacier fields the size of Lower Manhattan are receding at an astonishing rate.

I’m going to try to catch this later in the week.

Elsewhere, over at the NYRB Ian Frazier reflects on Subhankar Banerjee’s new book, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point:

Alaskan hunters must now go farther out in the sea to hunt because the ice is receding, and that puts them in more danger. The direct effects of pollution hit people and animals harder in the Arctic, too. Airborne pollutants emitted in the mid-regions of the planet swirl north (that’s why you can find lead from the forges of Rome in Greenland), collect in organisms, and continue up the food chain. In an excerpt Banerjee includes from a book called Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, the environmental journalist Marla Cone writes, “The Inuit living in northern Greenland, near the North Pole, contain the highest concentrations of chemical contaminants found in humans anywhere on earth.”

This fact is key to John Broome’s argument that climate change is primarily a matter of justice, which explains why political philosophers have tended to dominate the debate. The distribution of emissions is deeply skewed towards us in the developed world. And as we gut the world by depleting its resources, the first people we screw over – and the people we screw over the most – are those that do nothing to contribute to this crisis.

Meanwhile, as the UN Environment Programme publishes a new study today, The Guardian reports that it will urge us to halve our meat consumption:

The quest for ever cheaper meat in the past few decades – most people even in rich countries ate significantly less meat one and two generations ago – has resulted in a massive expansion of intensively farmed livestock. This has diverted vast quantities of grain from human to animal consumption, requiring intensive use of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides and, according to the UNEP report, “caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health”. The run-off from these chemicals is creating dead zones in the seas, causing toxic algal blooms and killing fish, while some are threatening bees, amphibians and sensitive ecosystems. The UN scientists said so as not to cause environmental harm, the move to meat in the developing world must be balanced with a reduction in the amount consumed in developed countries.

John Harris adds his two cents to the case for vegetarianism:

[O]ver the last decade or so, the case for vegetarianism has grown ever-more urgent, and unanswerable. A watershed came in 2008, when Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, highlighted the links between meat consumption and environmental crisis, and advised anyone listening to “give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.” Now as then, the meat industry accounts for around a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is directly responsible for huge levels of deforestation. When it comes to wider arguments about sustainability, the arguments are just as stark. Sixteen years ago, a Cornell University study established that 800 million people could be fed with the grain used to fatten up US livestock; the majority of corn and soy grown in the world is now set aside for cattle, pigs and chickens.

And at Wonkblog, read Brad Plumer on which cities have most reason to fear rising sea levels.

Paul Staines is not a blogger.

He really isn’t, and this should be obvious. I wouldn’t feel the need to say it but for the fact that the Guardian blessed him with this title yesterday in their Saturday interview. The following line was laughable:

His online persona is relentlessly mocking; it is also, compared to many online offerings, strikingly concise. Few entries, unless they contain a leaked memo or email, are more than 300 words long; you may object to their point, but there is never any doubt what it is.

That may be because there never is a point.

Look, I just opened Order Order’s homepage and it currently reads as follows. First, a promotion of his own column in the Sunday Sun. Second, a video of Keith Vaz performing karaoke. Further down, more self-promotion, this time of a Guido app. Then a flagging of the Telegraph’s “Big Mac Blooper“. You get the picture. They tell us their top-clicked story this week was “Sally’s Boozy Night Out With Tory Boys“.

And yet, courtesy of the Guardian again:

Guido Fawkes now has a column in the Sun on Sunday, thus reaching a potential readership of four million, on top of the 50-100,000 readers the blog gets every day.

We should collectively weep at the fact that this man’s readership is so large. There’s only one difference between vacuous joke non-stories in the tabloid press and Guido Fawkes blog posts: the former are printed and the latter are digital. And now that he writes for both and sells one using the other, even that boundary is blurred. There is no commentary or analysis to be found here. Staines doesn’t use his platform to think out loud and debate policy and ideas with others. He barely writes thoughts at all. And yet that is the essence of blogging. We’re really going to refer to this man using the same title we apply to Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein, granting it to anybody that posts anything online on a regular basis? What is the point of that?

Still, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that there’s nothing of intellectual significance to find on Order-Order. A friend pointed out to me a particularly pathetic part of the interview, which pretty much sums the man up:

[Staines] went to Catholic school in Harrow, and although he lost his faith at 13, he and his wife intend to raise their daughters with all the rituals of the Catholic church.

So not only poisoning young minds with bullshit, but doing so believing it’s bullshit yourself? Classy.

No serious person with even the inclination to critically reflect on life would ever say or do something this utterly fatuous. If there’s major space for this man in the British ‘blogosphere’ then we can consider it doomed.

“Lincoln” and virtuous lying.

I saw it again today. This time, the following exchange stood out to me the most. It takes place after Stevens tried to keep Democratic opposition in the House calm by insisting he believed only in equality before the law, rather than racial equality simpliciter:

Asa Litton: The basis of every hope for this country’s future life – you denied Negro equality! I’m nauseated. You refused to say that all humans are, well, human! Have you lost your very soul, Mr. Stevens? Is there nothing you won’t say?

Stevens: I’m sorry you’re nauseous, Asa, that must be unpleasant. I want the amendment to pass so that the Constitution’s first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition. For this amendment, for which I have worked all of my life, and for which countless coloured men and women have fought and died, and now hundreds of thousands of soldiers – No, sir. No. It seems there is very nearly nothing I won’t say.

I hope Kantians were listening.

My thoughts on the film here.

Defending Damien Shannon, continued.

The judge has reserved his decision. I’m waiting for lawyer-friends to confirm what, if anything, that most likely means, but my guess is not much. So we’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Meanwhile, The Mail is the only paper so far to let this little but staggering detail slip out:

The court heard that the college’s estimation for living costs included items such as £453 for clothes for the year, £67 per week for meals provided by the college, and £2500 for general expenses.

There was a separate amount for the costs of entrance into local nightclubs.

Let’s repeat that. Oxford University has openly stipulated that in order to study here as a graduate, it is necessary to demonstrate you have an amount of money to live on which includes £453 to spend on clothes.

It isn’t even worthy of commenting on, is it? This fact alone is enough to repulse me. It’s hard not to feel ashamed at being part of this place when you read things like that.

How is this not page one Guardian material? It should be headline news everywhere until the university is embarrassed into either defending or ditching these insane requirements that stink of elitism to the bone.

If only gay sex caused global warming.

In one of his papers on the ethics of climate change, Stephen Gardiner points us to this gem of a quote from a 2006 LA Times Op-Ed by Daniel Gilbert:

[Global warming] doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn’t force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.

Weak wills and causing people to care.

When I’ve told friends in recent weeks that I’m working on the ethics of climate change at the moment, a common reaction has been for them to confess that they don’t really care, before immediately acknowledging that that is probably bad. I felt and acted similarly for a long time. It is a boring issue, and I have no natural appetite for scientific literature on the effects of carbon and economic articles on externalities. But as is so often the case in the world, things that are really boring often really matter. We need to overcome our instincts.

There’s another sense in which this point is true, and its lesson is even more important. Not only is climate change intellectually dry. Morally, it is difficult to grasp its significance because the impact is so diffused and distant. There’s no doubt that if I handed you a gun and gave you the chance to kill someone now, knowingly depriving them of six months of healthy life which would unfold were you not to shoot – then you wouldn’t shoot. You’d deem shooting this person abhorrent.

And yet your carbon footprint, over your life time, does on the best estimates cause the terminating of six months of healthy life. The difference is only that you do not see it. It doesn’t feel intimately connected to us, so we easily deceive ourselves and rationalise our duties away. Again, we need to fight our instincts and start to care, as most people know deep down that they should.

The exact same issue arises when we deal with global poverty. As Singer famously argued, we wouldn’t hesitate to save a dying child at little cost to ourselves if we walked past him on the way to work one morning. But place him on the other side of the world and we suddenly feel no special duties, even though helping is just as easy. Donating is a click away, and it’s very hard to see why physical distance makes any moral difference.

I’ll take a slight risk and cite the discredited Jonah Lehrer here. The following facts are reported elsewhere too, for the skeptics:

Consider the work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. He told undergraduates about a starving child named Rokia — she lived in a crumbling refugee camp in Africa. His students acted with impressive generosity. They saw her emaciated body and haunting brown eyes and they donated, on average, about $2.50 to Save the Children.

However, when a second group of students were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa — like the fact that more than five million children are malnourished — the average donation was 50 percent lower.

At first glance, this makes no sense. We should give away more money when we are informed about the true scope of the problem, not less.

Why do we do this? The depressing statistics leave us cold, even when they are truly terrible. That’s because our emotions can’t comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water.

This explains why the new start-up charity, Watsi, which I criticised earlier this week, is becoming so successful. By offering anecdotes and including photos and encouraging charity for individual persons, it taps into our sentimentality. The narratives attract us, even though for the amount of money it takes to cure one person on that site of a disease, you could do far more good for far more people.

I don’t think correcting our biases here is too tricky. Can we not just use our imaginations? Yes, my donation of $300 to Deworm the World last week doesn’t sound heartwarming in the way sponsoring one child might. But I know that if I were able to follow my money, fly out to see the drugs it paid for and then observe their benefits, then I would see around six hundred children in school, able to focus without all too common intestinal infections, because of my decision. Six hundred children. Why can’t that thought motivate more people? Why can’t we employ similar thought experiments to get ourselves to care more about climate change?

But until we can, perhaps green movements have it all wrong. It’s sadly likely that we could only spur real behavioural change by finding and filming actual kids suffering from droughts. If that’s necessary, it should be done. But it would be far better if it wasn’t needed because we all woke up, and allowed the power of reflection to guide our choices.

Defending Damien Shannon, continued.

It’s surprising that after so much coverage, so many people commenting on this case have false information. A quick Twitter search brings up a sea of ignorance.

So just to set the record straight. It is not the case that Shannon is suing St Hugh’s for wealth discrimination because he had no money, couldn’t afford his degree, and so wasn’t granted a place. That would be absurd.

Fact: Shannon had sufficient funds to cover the cost of his college and tuition fees, and he had £9,000 to cover his living costs. The only reason he wasn’t granted a place was that he didn’t have £12,900 to live on, which is how much Oxford requires us to prove we have, regardless of the fact that we all can and do live on less. Damien explained all of this in his CiF piece.

That’s the crux of the issue here: whether Oxford has the right to impose an absurdly high living expenses requirement on applicants, when this is not necessary to ensure our well-being, no other university in the UK has a similar policy, and the consequences are discriminatory insofar as they needlessly cause the exclusion of people like Damien on lower incomes.

We should be hearing from the court shortly.

Previous posts here and here.

Remembering Ronald.

Godfrey Hodgison summarises Dworkin’s career:

[H]e developed a powerful, scholarly exegesis of the law, and expounded issues of burning topicality and public concern – including how the law should deal with race, abortion, euthanasia and equality – in ways that were accessible to lay readers. His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue.

Kevin Vallier concurs with my perception of his prominence:

Save Rawls’s death, Dworkin’s passing is perhaps the major event in the passing of the Rawls generation into the history books. I understand the Rawls generation to include those egalitarian liberal political philosophers who rose to prominence soon after Rawls led the revival of political philosophy in analytic philosophy (Dworkin’s famous Taking Rights Seriously was published in 1978, only seven years after A Theory of Justice). The Rawls generation has had extraordinary influence over the direction of the profession and will surely be remembered as such.

David Wagner notes how he defied convention:

Dworkin didn’t conform to stereotypes of the cloistered, academic specialist who can only converse with field experts about his or her ideas. His articles were often witty and provocative, passing issues widely discussed in the mainstream media through a philosophical filter.

As an example, he cites one particular NYRB article Dworkin wrote on what a ‘good life’ is:

In my own view, someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, marking time to his grave, has not had a good life, even if he thinks he has and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had. If you agree, we cannot explain why he should regret this simply by calling attention to pleasures missed: there may have been no pleasures missed, and in any case there is nothing to miss now. We must suppose that he has failed at something: failed in his responsibilities for living.

An article Dworkin wrote for the Index on Censorship defending free speech is also doing the rounds on Twitter:

How can we expect people who are committed to a particular faith, as a value transcending all others, to tolerate its open desecration? John Stuart Mill’s argument On Liberty says that we should tolerate even the speech we hate because truth is most likely to emerge in a free intellectual combat from which no idea has been excluded. People with passionate religious convictions think they already know the truth, however, and they can hardly be expected to have more confidence in Mill’s doubtful epistemology than in their own bibles. Nor could Mill’s optimism justify, even to us, tolerating everything that those who believe free speech is a basic human right insist should be tolerated. Pornographic images hardly supply “ideas” to any marketplace of thought, and history gives us little reason for expecting racist speech to contribute to its own refutation. If freedom of speech is a basic right, this must be so not in virtue of instrumental arguments, like Mill’s, which suppose that liberty is important because of its consequences.

It must be so for reasons of basic principle. We can find that basic principle, moreover. We can find it in a condition of human dignity: it is illegitimate for governments to impose a collective or official decision on dissenting individuals, using the coercive powers of the state, unless that decision has been taken in a manner that respects each individual’s status as a free and equal member of the community.

Adam Liptak outlines Dworkin’s driving thought:

Professor Dworkin’s central argument started with the premise that the crucial phrases in the Constitution — “the freedom of speech,” “due process of law,” “equal protection of the laws” — were, as he put it, “drafted in exceedingly abstract moral language.”

“These clauses,” he continued, “must be understood in the way their language most naturally suggests: they refer to abstract moral principles and incorporate these by reference, as limits on the government’s power.”

Liptak also directs us to an old paean from Tom Nagel:

Ronnie also did something else: he wrote for the public. Rawls, who did not have this gift, greatly admired Ronnie’s capacity to explain difficult moral issues about law, politics, and society in lucid terms to a general, nonacademic audience—without in any way watering them down or simplifying them. He said that in this respect, Ronnie had made a contribution in our own day comparable to that of John Stuart Mill in the 19th century—a just and memorable tribute.

(Photo: Ronald Dworkin at Oxford University in the 1970s, by Terrence Spencer/Time & Life/Getty)

“Hurt is the bedfellow of love”.

Anthony Lane reflects on the truths in Blue Valentine:

“Blue Valentine” is that rare creation: a love story that doesn’t shy away from sex, ignore its consequences, or droop into pointless fantasy. The result is adult entertainment as it should be, in other words, right down to the laugh that Cindy lets out, in her leaping delight, when Dean goes down on her. Needless to say, the M.P.A.A., which cannot bear very much reality, took fright at all this and hobbled the movie with an NC-17 rating, which was overturned only after a concerted challenge. It is now an R-rated picture, and rightly so, although you have to ask: In what circumstances would you take a teen-ager, let alone a child, to see it? Who, on the verge of growing up, would wish to learn that the first heady bloom of rapture is doomed to rot and fall, and that even someone as devoted as Dean will wind up pleading to his paramour, with a kind of bullish grovel, “Tell me how I should be”?

… “Blue Valentine,” true to its title, is overwhelming proof that hurt is the bedfellow of love. For anybody who already knows that, or has been the cause of it, the film may be very hard to take. I saw it months ago, and I can’t forget it, but I’m not sure that I’ll be seeing it again.

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks.

RIP Ronald Dworkin.

AP broke the news. He was far from a hero of mine. He’s cropped up occasionally in my political philosophy classes through the years. I can recall reading him on rights and civil disobedience and perhaps a little on luck egalitarianism. But his contentious work on pornography as free speech and his central work against positivism escaped my attention, because I don’t study jurisprudence.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible in this business to escape his shadow entirely. His reputation looms large, not only because he was a prolific writer, but because he was also evidently a great one. There will be few doubting today that his name will still be batted around decades from now. In that respect, today brings the biggest loss since Rawls.

I’ll defer to and eagerly await the paeans of those better placed to pen them. In the mean time, here’s the New York Review of Books’s collation of his contributions.

But one small thing from me. As I noted last summer, his paper just titled ‘Liberalism‘ is the most succinct, accurate and explanatory exposition of the ideology I’ve read. If you want to know what it’s all about – Liberalism, but also Dworkin – then start there.

Quote for the day.

‎We want to be great. Like Neil says in his book, “Be great or be gone.” We want to be great, we want to be important in your life. That was all that mattered to me. I didn’t care if I was going to make it rich or famous, but I wanted to be great more than anything else and I wanted to be important in your life. Because you keep us in search of the force that reignites our gifts, our ability to make you want to move, to dance, to love, to make love, to be angry, to act. When we play, we want the hair to stand up on your arms, we want you to feel the glory and we want you to be glad of being alive. And really, at the end of the day, that’s all there is to it.

And to think that I doubted for a while what made me want to write about why creativity is a virtue, and why artists can be just as important in this world as moral saints. Is that some account of the importance and value of art, or what?

I love you, Bruce.

Update: Now I’m remembering this quote from the Remnick profile and thinking how apt it is:

Thousands of fans, many of whom had been waiting outside since morning, were allowed to enter the stadium grounds at six o’clock for a show that would not begin until ten. I noticed a few young Spaniards carrying a sign, in English, reading, “Bruce, Thanks for Making Our Lives Better.” I tried to imagine a sign like that for—whom? Lou Reed? AC/DC? Bon Jovi? (“Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better.” Doubtful.) The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to the uninitiated and the uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances.

The virtues of casual language.

Peter Elbow has looked into the stylistic differences between academics and ordinary people:

People who care about good language tend to assume that casual spoken language is full of chaos and error. I shared this belief till I did some substantial research into the linguistics of speech. There’s a surprising reason why we — academics and well-educated folk — should hold this belief: we are the greatest culprits. It turns out that our speech is the most incoherent. …

[W]e drift into sentence interruptus: a phrase is left dangling while we silently muse — and we never return to finish it. When we academics were in graduate school, we were trained to write badly (no one put it this way of course) because every time we wrote X, our teacher always commented, “But have you considered Y? Don’t you see that Y completely contradicts what you write here.” “Have you considered” is the favorite knee-jerk response of academics to any idea. As a result, we learn as students to clog up our writing with added clauses and phrases to keep them from being attacked.

Recent posts on writing style here and here.

(Hat Tip: The Dish)