Tech Bros Are Weak Men

When I look at men like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, I see men who are fundamentally weak.

That sounds judgmental. And it is, to an extent. But maybe not quite to the extent one thinks.

All of these men were at one point self-identified Democrats. Zuckerberg flirted with a run for President before he realized that nobody, you know, liked him. Bezos positioned the Washington Post as a guardian of democracy before taking it dark.

As these men, and others in their cadre, have pivoted to the right, one narrative one often hears is that they were effectively bullied into changing their views by mean anti-big tech sentiments amongst progressives. This is far too pat (not the least because Republicans certainly held their own in highly publicized attacks on the big tech companies), but what is fair to say is that these men see themselves as having promoted liberal causes and they did not get the adulation and adoration from Democrats that they felt they deserved. They were not feted as heroes. They were not recognized as titans of industry. They were not handed the reins of leadership. They weren't even generally recognized as progressive allies. They continued to face pressure and mockery and criticism -- much fair, some not -- and they were deeply, deeply resentful for it. 

It's most obvious in the case of Musk, whose desperation to be liked is transparently obvious and who has transformed an entire social media platform into a Potemkin village of praise for the new tsar. But one sees it across the cohort -- this frustration at not being loved, and the beckoning temptation that if they just sold out then at least somebody would cheer them and make them feel like part of the team.

In theory, this shouldn't matter. For those with requisite moral fiber, one does the right thing because it's the right thing, not because one gets plaudits and cookies from it. But in practice, it is a very ordinary vice to thirst for validation and gravitate towards whatever community seems most liable to hand it out. In the face of that temptation, it takes a strong man to align with a given set of values when others holding those same values can't or won't provide that respect.

And our big tech bro leaders? They are not strong in this way. They are weak -- weak in a way that is very familiar and very human, but weak nonetheless. And we all must unfortunately live with the consequences of their weakness.

Indonesian Parliament Unanimously Passes Texas GOP Platform

Ted Cruz must be so jealous:

Indonesia’s Parliament unanimously voted on Tuesday to ban sex outside of marriage and insulting the president and state institutions.

Once in force, the bans will affect foreign visitors as well as citizens. They’re part of an overhaul of the country’s criminal code that has been in the works for years. The new code also expands an existing blasphemy law and keeps a five-year prison term for deviations from the central tenets of Indonesia’s six recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The code still needs approval from the president, and the government says it will not be fully implemented for several years.

The amended code says sex outside marriage is punishable by a year in jail and cohabitation by six months, but adultery charges must be based on police reports lodged by a spouse, parents or children.

Citizens could also face a 10-year prison term for associating with organizations that follow Marxist-Leninist ideology and a four-year sentence for spreading communism.

Making it illegal to be Communist and Jewish? The Fifth Circuit might have to reconsider its stances on citing foreign law!

Cynicism as "Realism" as Cowardice

Among the many, many terrible things Mort Klein has written -- well, I don't actually want to rank them, because there's a lot bad. But this is bad.

If these illegals were all conservatives who would likely vote republican, none of these leftwing supporters of these illegals would be supporting the illegals.None! https://t.co/uEJMhj5u0x

— Morton Klein (@MortonAKlein7) November 26, 2018

Indeed, it's not just bad. It is one of the more despicable rhetorical ploys one sees in politics today. It is cynicism dressed up as realism. But it's worse than that, because what it's really intended to do is to serve as a buoy, a life raft to allow people to ignore obvious moral obligations by pretending that nobody really follows them anyway.

First of all, as Jill Jacobs notes, it's not like anybody has polled these migrants, so we actually have no idea how they might vote if and when they become U.S. citizens. The blithe assumption that they'll obviously vote Democratic is itself a pretty brutal self-own -- "clearly, given how terribly we've treated immigrants there's no way they'd ever vote for us!" is now right-wing orthodoxy -- and the Republican extension that this justifies xenophobic policies is the epitome of murdering your parents and crying orphan.

But if we lived in a different sort of world -- one where Republicans weren't committed to explicit policies of gratuitous cruelty towards refugees and immigrants, one where bipartisan immigration reform had succeeded instead of being torpedoed by an ascendant racist right -- would these groups be automatic liberal constituencies?

I hardly see why. It wasn't that long ago that Latinos were a swing bloc. It wasn't that long ago that Asians were a swing bloc. It wasn't that long ago that Muslims voted Republican by crushing margins. To the extent these groups are now viewed as reliably Democratic, it's caused less by unalterable cultural properties and more by the GOP's increasingly brazen embrace of open White Supremacy.

And on the other side: there have been refugee groups whose politics have coded "right" -- generally those fleeing socialist authoritarian nations. Cubans and Vietnamese would fall into this category, as would (I suspect) Venezuelans more recently. Yet contra Klein, I've seen no evidence that Democrats have abandoned their generally positive pro-refugee stances as applied to these groups. Just because conservatives can't imagine not acting based on partisan motives doesn't mean nobody does it. It just emphasizes how morally bankrupt contemporary conservatism is -- it's lost the ability to even fathom a principled stance. And as for Democrats, when faced with new constituencies that might start off suspicious of progressive politics, you know what we do? We try to win their votes, by making the case that our policies are better. Our success in doing so has translated to flipping a few south Florida and southern California House districts -- and that's the way it should be. Oh boo hoo -- it's so unfair that you need to actually appeal to different constituencies, even when they're not White! Welcome to democracy!

What's going on here? Why is Klein making arguments of this sort? The specific answer, obviously, is that Klein is a xenophobic hack with a loose allegiance to factual reality. The general answer, though, is that it's offering conservatives a way to be moral cowards while saving face.

Here's the thing: everybody understands that morality makes certain demands of us in the political realm. And everybody also understands that those demands might sometimes incur costs, or cause dissonance, or otherwise make us feel uncomfortable. So we're all vulnerable to pied pipers suggesting that we can dispense with those commitments -- who tell us what we already long to hear, who let us recode our cowering instincts as a form of nobility, or at least savviness.

Klein's cynicism styles itself as realism -- the hard-headed political realist understands that all this noble talk about "loving the stranger" is only so much political posturing, you'd be a sucker to be taken in by it. It's an attractive message because it disguises moral cowardice for clear-eyed vision, and that's exactly why it's so despicable. Messages like these do immense damage to the moral fabric of our political world; they don't just unravel the sense that we have duties to one another that extend beyond momentary political advantage, they undo that sensibility in a way that is masked as a virtue.

But make no mistake: it is cowardice. Telling oneself that just treatment of refugees is a sucker's game because it's just Democrats playing politics is a way of avoiding an obvious moral duty. It exploits a vulnerability in our collective psyches to make our politics coarser and crueler, and that makes the activists who peddle it utterly beneath contempt.

The Judge as Moral Arbiter

Commenting on Judge Brown's opinion that I talked about in my last post, Professor Kerr also expresses his discomfort with "the propriety of placing such views in the Federal Reporter instead of a law review or published speech." I strongly disagree -- while obviously I disagree with the content of Judge Brown's opinion, I see nothing at all improper with Judges Brown and Sentelle registering their opinion about what the law should be in their opinion about what the law is (Kerr does say he recognizes the differing views on this topic). I actually swing sharply the other way -- I'd like a stronger norm of judges doing things like this, so long as they divorce it from their legal judgment of the case.

Opinions of the form "the law is constitutional, but moronic" (or vice versa, for that matter) serve at least two important functions. First, they serve a dialogic function that can help make better law. Courts see how laws play out on the ground, this experience gives them insight on how (and whether) the law works and whether it is worth preserving. Why should the judiciary not provide the public with this perspective, parallel to (not replacing) their primary obligation to interpret the law in front of them?

But more importantly, these opinions help sap judicial decisions of unwarranted and unintended "moral endorsements" by the judiciary. When a law is upheld by a court, this usually is followed by a press release by its supporters bragging about how "this demonstrates we were right all along and this law is the bestest thing ever and totally just and fair." Of course, courts often mean to imply none of these things -- the decision might be based on anything from a jurisdictional block to a contested turn of a statute. The blurriness by which courts are seen as moral as well as judicial arbiters means that, absent language to the contrary, a favorable ruling on the law is considered to be a favorable ruling on the underlying ethical merits of the dispute.

For example, the Affordable Care Act might be perfectly constitutional and an awful, awful idea; it also might be unconstitutional and an entirely salutary and appropriate piece of legislation that nonetheless lies beyond Congress' commerce power. But, particularly if the law is struck down, that's not what we're going to hear from conservative opponents -- they will take the opinion as vindication that the law was an unconscionable socialist usurpation nipped in the bud. If the court wants to send that message, it might as well, but it should take affirmative control of what it is communicating. Judicial silence is not read neutrally -- fairly or not, amongst the public the baseline presumption at the moment is that legal victory means moral approval and legal defeat means moral disapproval. The stronger a norm there is of judges explicitly telling us what they think about the underlying policy merits of a dispute, the less likely we will be to conflate their legal discussion with a policy endorsement.

Or consider the infamous recent case where a Texas school district kicked a cheerleader off the team because she refused to cheer for a man who had assaulted her. The school district won in court; many were outraged by this, as it seemed to condone truly appalling conduct by the District. I argued that the district probably was acting perfectly legally -- but the Court should be clear to indicate its disapproval of conduct in the course of dismissing the suit. This is not just to assure the public that it still retains a conscience. It also has to do with the messages received by the parties -- what they are allowed to "take" from their victory or absorb in their defeat. The last thing we want is the school district thinking its legal victory constitutes any sort of imprimatur for their flatly inhuman conduct. Nor do we want to the message heard by the young woman in question to be "the Judicial Branch of the United States thinks you're a big ol' crybaby." The message we want to put out is that the school district is within its legal authority to act in this way, even though its actions were horrifying and demonstrate an incredible lack of empathy and prioritization that should cause all persons of conscience to question their fitness to serve.

Does Race Have Everything To Do With It or Not?

A friend was surprised I haven't written on the Henry Louis Gates arrest. Meh, I've been busy. I think the arrest was probably a dumb move -- I'll agree with the President on that -- but in general this struck me as a confluence of unfortunate events where I'm not all that interested in talking about "fault".

But oblique to the topic, I wanted to comment briefly on this Ta-Nehisi Coates post, entitled "Stop Telling Me About The Racial-Profiling Course":

I don't care if the dude tried to take a bullet for Malcolm in the ballroom, and ran guns for Huey P. Either it's smart to arrest a dude for being rude to a cop in his own house, or it isn't.

Quite often, mostly in affirmative action cases but sometimes elsewhere, folks attacking the progressive vision on race relations (the one that says race still matters) argue "it's not race, it's class!" or "these things (police abuse, bad schools, job discrimination) are bad no matter who they happen to -- why you got to make it about race?" I've noted before that this is an argument which magically appears only in the context of trying to dismiss the minority claim. People who say that we should be focusing on improving urban elementary education instead of having high school affirmative action programs don't turn around and advocate for those improvements.

And so it is here. Just as we should be able to say "children of all backgrounds should have the opportunity to receive an excellent, top-notch education", we should also be able to say "arresting someone in their own home while investigating a suspected burglary after you know that they're actually the owner is bad police behavior -- even if they're yelling at you." Race doesn't enter into the general principle. Except it does -- because the people who are bent on discrediting Gates seem to think that race is the only relevant axis here. So if they show this cop doesn't harbor ill will towards Black people (and I'm sure he doesn't), that's game set and match.

Top Comes Down

I've worked really, really hard to stay out of the Carrie Prejean story. She's free to defend "opposite marriage" as much as she wants; I am in turn free to think (or even speak!) of her as a hateful bigot. What could be more American?

Anyway, CNN reports that Ms. Prejean has some undisclosed topless photos in past. This is news because (a) it could cause her to lose her title as "Miss California" (topless modeling has to be disclosed to the competition organizers in advance) and (b) because it seems, er, in tension with her conservative Christian views on matters of sexual autonomy.

I find myself conflicted, as usual. I do not have any problem with Ms. Prejean posing however she wishes -- for fun or for profit. And while it is up to the pageantry officials to determine whether they wish to enforce the rules against her, from a public standpoint I reject any efforts to say what she is doing is morally wrong or abominable. That commitment stems directly from the same set of principles which causes me to believe her views on gay marriage are vicious and cruel. The persons who condemn her for her nude modeling often do so from the same moral standpoint which nourishes her own views about gay marriage. Clearly, Ms. Prejean has found some alternative foundation upon which to live her life. It's an open question whether it is morally or logically coherent. I'd be interested to hear her views why gay marriage is wrongful, but nude modeling is not.

Bobs and Weaves

Responding to my post on why it's wrong to be happy when the suffering of marginalized people gets worse, Larry, aka the Barefoot Bum says a number of interesting things. He has an interesting perspective on the way libel law works, for example, and he has an interesting view that simply asserting that someone doesn't understand the word "palliative", without any warrant for why the way I applied it is wrong, is a meaningful argument.

But most interesting is the fundamental shift in position Larry takes. Recall what I was criticizing in my previous post: the view that we should oppose marginal improvements in the lives of the oppressed (which don't really effect the overall structure of oppression), because in doing so we make it less likely that they were get so fed up with their position that they will actually go out and revolt (we'll call this Reason "A"). There are a lot of reasons why that position is pretty appalling, which you can find in the post and in the comments section.

But in the new post, Larry, without telling anyone, quietly but dramatically changes stances. Now he argues against supporting marginal improvements for the subordinated absent corresponding structural reforms for two quite different reasons. The first is a simple deontological, "I don't want to get my hands dirty supporting even the lesser of two evils" (Reason B). The second is a consequentialist sop to the first: arguing that staking out seemingly radical (but "right") positions can help shift the political terrain and make the hitherto impossible, mainstream -- shifting the "frame" of the debate rather than accepting as inevitable two bad choices (Reason C). It's unclear whether these positions are inextricably linked together; that is, if C (which is primarily an empirical question) doesn't hold true, whether B is still justifiable. In any event, these are certainly superior grounds for Larry's position than the one he previously held, though I don't think actually succeed either.

A sub-point of my last post was a note on how abstract analogizing tends to be more obscuring than illuminating when making philosophical points (in that case, the body politic can't be analogized to a human medical patient, because particular human cells aren't morally relevant individuals, whereas particular citizens are). Here, we see this same beast roaring again, this time in the form of a hypothetical about killing babies. Political Party 1 "wants" to torture and kill 1000 babies, Political Party 2 (the "liberal" one) wants to torture and kill only 500. Radical Party 3 wants no babies killed or tortured.

Of course, in the real world no American political party "wants" to kill babies. However, there are certainly differences on how much different parties might tolerate babies dying. There's a fascinating debate on how much intentionality matters in these sorts of things (I think it matters very little in terms of assessing consequences and quite a bit in terms of assessing moral culpability), but the point of framing the scenario in this way is to put us in the realm of cartoon villains cackling about how they will soon shroud the world in evil and misery. It's simply not productive. The goal is to elevate the third party to a position of moral superiority: even though it's participation in the political sphere may yet lead to the death of babies -- indeed, perhaps more than certain less "radical" alternatives -- it's different because they don't want the babies to die. Unfortunately for them, that doesn't make them different from anyone else. The only standard for evaluation is seeing what blend of political participation produces the least number of dead babies.

So let's take a scenario we can imagine happening, one that strips out the self-congratulating and distorting elements best left to Marvel Comics. Suppose each year in a particular inner city, 1000 babies starve to death. We'll imagine Party 1 doesn't address this at all -- it's policies will basically continue the status quo, or even increase the amount of dead babies moderately (say, to 1,500). Party 2 has a package of proposals which make it so only 500 babies starve to death, but which doesn't strike at the root problem that leads to starving babies. Fringe Party 3, which will never get elected, has a set of proposals which they say would reduce the amount of starving babies to a negligible amount. Note that I'd consider any baby starving to death to be an example of injustice even if I believed that society had done everything possible in its power to prevent it.

Under Larry's original position (Reason A), of course, the right thing to do is to try and increase the number of starving babies dramatically, in the hopes that the oppressed will wake up, mobilize, and make Fringe Party 3 not so fringe anymore. In the "torturing babies" hypothetical, perhaps Revolutionary Communist Party members could start kidnapping babies and torturing them in the public square, and broadcast it on national television, in hopes that it might shock the nation into passing a "no torturing babies" law. If that's too visceral, maybe they could just give an award to the killer of Dantrell Davis, who finally managed to create the political will necessary to do something about violence-plagued high-rise projects.

Reason C, as I said, is an empirical claim that depends on the strategic impact that flows out of each particular political move. It also seems to assume that voting is exhaustive of one's ability to influence political framing: that while voting Party 2 there is no way to nevertheless challenge the dominant framing of the issues. I highly doubt that is true, and I think a superior counterplan to voting Party 3 and ignoring the fact that it will immediately and directly lead to more starving kids is trying to get as much mitigating policy as possible passed (through voting for Party 2) while simultaneously engaging in advocacy, grassroots organizing, letter writing, blogging, whatever to increase the profile of the radical alternative. I don't believe these are mutually exclusive. One might argue that the "palliative" effects of Party 2's mitigating policies will dissipate the momentum needed to put together a radical organization, but that's just the discredited Reason A method of thinking that complains that the underclass isn't miserable enough to listen properly to the revolutionary music. Color me (still) unsympathetic.

But even restricting the scope of analysis just to voting, I think Larry is off base. Larry says that leftists who "hold their noses" and vote for the center-left party are likely to alienate moderates who then will cross-over to the right, obviating their impact. Not only do I not really think that's true, I think the effect is probably worse if the leftists go it alone. The presence of Danny Davis in the Democratic Party doesn't make the Party that much less appealing to moderates because he's just one guy in a big tent. An undiluted, pure communist movement is far more likely to elicit visceral revulsion from the middle. Revolutionary Communists have an annoying habit of over-estimating their appeal to the proletariat, when in general they're "anti-persuasive": the greater presence they have amongst the leadership of a particular political position, the less likely it is that position will be seen as viable by the majority of voters. Unfair as this may be, if you're going to play politics you have to understand the shape of the political terrain, and there is absolutely no evidence that the Communist Party in America has ever even nudged our nation to the left -- but a lot of right-wing crap has come together under the guise of suppressing it.

Put less polemically: There is good reason to believe that political outcome of defecting from Party 2 and voting Party 3 will be both an increase in the number of starving babies (both because Party 1 is likely to gain more support, and because Party 2 is likely to tolerate more dead babies as the most vocal proponents of feeding infants leave) and a decrease in the credibility of the "no starving baby" position (due to it being now associated as a position held only by fringe radicals). To the extent this is true, and assuming that even with the defectors Party 3 still will be a negligible player on the political scene (both of which -- given just how fringe the communist movement in America remains -- I think are quite reasonable), Reason C cuts entirely against Larry's argument.

So finally, we get back to Reason B -- the wonderful moral purity of deontological ethics. Of course, even Larry seems to concede that this isn't really the case: he has blood on his hands for all those who would have been saved through "the expedient path"; just as I have blood on mine for all those who will continue to suffer in the status quo (and I do accept that I am, at least in part, morally liable for this injustice). Whom, it must said, Larry isn't actually accomplishing anything for either -- he's just making himself feel good. So even had this argument not collapsed back into consequentialism, I'd still label it as pretty self-indulgent. Larry asks at what point slightly better marginal benefits cease to justify participating in fundamentally unjust social arrangements (10,000 dead babies versus 9,999?). My answer would be: at the point at which alternative practices are reasonably likely to lead to actual superior consequences for the oppressed -- a standard under which participating in revolutionary communist politics (even if I believed that ideally they'd lead to better results) dramatically fails to meet.

But turning the question back onto him -- at one point does one's desire to stay pure from the corrupting effects of the real world collapse against the need to produce actual, tangible improvements (even if only "palliative") in the lives of breathing human beings? One can imagine the purist of them all -- refusing to even sanction the "framework" of contemporary Western bourgeois capitalist democracy -- engaging in a piece of performance street theater to protest against the structure of contemporary capitalism. But if their actions merely alienate the public, and end up blocking an S-CHIP expansion that gives millions of kids insurance, is it still worth it? At least Nero didn't cloak his fiddling in the drapes of self-righteousness.

A final point which I put down in the comments to the last post, but feel compelled to raise on the front page. Nowhere in Larry's analysis is there even the slightest nod at respecting the desires or agency of oppressed people themselves. Oh sure, they'll make noises about the need for the revolution to occur with democratic support, but when push comes to shove the lack of such a mandate is held to be a failing of the people, not a fault in the ideology. This, perhaps, is why he uses the example of babies: who don't have articulated desires or agency to speak of anyway. We don't have to wonder why babies aren't communists -- it's their intellectual maturity, certainly not anything problematic on our end. It's a perfect metaphor for how he envisions the oppressed more generally: helpless infants whom he can swoop in to save from themselves with his message of revolution and communist brotherhood. The fact that the damsels in distress do not now, nor ever have, really found the message compelling doesn't even seem to give Larry pause.

There are many reasons why oppressed persons in America might not be rushing to join the RCP, that don't rely on tagging them as intellectual infants. They might not find the ideology compelling. They might not think that the RCP truly has a grasp on the realities and particulars of their current existence (crazy as that might sound). Or, they might not believe it is the best repository of their limited political and social capital. All these compete with the RCP line, which is that these people are crazy and don't know what's best for them -- but we do, and we'll get it for them over our their dead bodies!

If the marginalized classes in America -- the poor, people of color, women, LGBT persons, religious minorities -- were working actively on behalf of the RCP, then I think we'd have an obligation to take that view seriously. But of course, most members of these classes do not support the RCP. Most of them vote Democratic, often by overwhelming margins. Insofar as they seem to think incrementalism is the way to go, then by golly, I'm going to incrementalize to the best of my ability. If they want to get tactical, then it's not my place to sabotage their efforts because it interferes with my "strategic framing".

Iris Marion Young -- a greater exponent of progressive philosophy than either I or Larry could ever hope to be -- once wrote that "Normative judgment is best understood as the product of dialogue under conditions of equality and mutual respect. Ideally, the outcome of such dialogue and judgment is just and legitimate only if all the affected perspectives have a voice." There is no question that the status quo is a massive failure in this regard, but this is also one axis where revolutionary communism can't even claim theoretical superiority. At every step of the way, it is sectarian, exclusivist, anti-democratic, condemning of alternative worldviews arising out of the experiences of the oppressed (when it isn't actively ignoring them), disrespectful, arrogant, and ultimately elitist. No wonder it's fringe.

What's a Few More Deaths for the Revolution?

Larry Hamelin, husband of The Apostate, has a post making the type of old, old-school leftist argument that I haven't heard in awhile. Here's the gist:

There's an important sense in which Barack Obama is actually worse than John McCain. Obviously, Obama is not an explicitly theocratic fucktard like McCain; Obama is a bright guy, and I'm sure he means well, but he knows precisely what the capitalist imperialist system demands of him, and he was supported by capitalist elite because they know he will deliver. Obama is a palliative, not a cure. A palliative is just fine when it relieves suffering while one is curing the underlying disease. But a palliative is actively bad when it removes the motivation of pain for curing the underlying condition while it worsens. And that is precisely what the Obama administration aims to do.

A McCain administration would have given tremendous impetus for progressives to actually organize. "Let's make the patient sicker," says Dr. House, "so we can diagnose the disease and cure it before it kills the patient." An Obama administration just masks the symptoms and has visibly and provably sucked the oxygen from the mainstream progressive movement.

As far as I know, this is the primary reason why someone sufficiently "on the left" (i.e., actually socialist or Marxist -- so not me) would decline to vote Democratic even granting that they might be -- on face -- marginally better than the GOP.

This really didn't sit well with me, and for a few days I couldn't put my finger on it as to why. At first, I assumed it was simply a function of the fact that I'm not that far to the left such that I only vote Democratic as "the lesser of two evils". There are plenty of issues in which I'd prefer the Democratic Party be significantly more liberal, but there are other issues where I think the policies on their platform right now will lead to actual, positive good things for millions of Americans (not to mention the rest of the world). I'm clearly not as far left as Mr. Hamelin, and so of course his argument wouldn't seem compelling.

But it was still nagging at me, and I think I've finally nailed down my problem. When phrased in abstract terms like "palliative care", perhaps Mr. Hamelin's argument might be convincing. But what such abstractions mask is that when you let the body politic grow sicker, people actually die. This isn't a side issue, it's what Mr. Hamelin is counting on: he wants enough people to die so that the underclass finally gets fed up and launches the revolution. Such calls, you might notice, are far easier to make when your own life isn't on the line.

When the head of the American Communist party was asked if President Roosevelt's New Deal policies had carried out the communist party agenda, the leader responded: "yeah, on a stretcher." He was making a similar observation to Mr. Hamelin: that by reducing the abject misery and desperation of the Great Depression -- by putting millions of Americans back to work, by getting Social Security established, by funding aid for the needy -- President Roosevelt dissipated would otherwise could been a revolutionary build-up in the American working class. But it'd be selfish bordering on obscene to say that we should have opposed Roosevelt's efforts, for the simple reason that the lives of the poor are not rightly pawns in our political fantasies.

And yes, this is the state of the Democratic Party today. Are they as liberal as I (much less Mr. Hamelin) would like? No. But they'll probably get S-CHIP funding passed, and that means millions of children who otherwise would lack health care will be able to see a doctor. And lack of access to basic medical care gets kids killed. You can talk until you're blue in the face about how S-CHIP won't solve the structural conditions that lead to unequal access to medical care: and you'd be right! But to say that even one child should have to die in the (speculative!) hope that it might aid the broader revolutionary goal is sickening. Barack Obama may not be as strong on choice as many would prefer. But he does mean that Roe v. Wade is likely safe for another generation. And were that not the case, in a world where Roe was overturned, women would die. Women died when President Bush enforced the "global gag order" on abortion alternatives. Women die when the safest abortion practices are outlawed. And for some people, that's the point.

Let's take one more example. Over break I'm trying to finish Waiting for Gautreaux, a book about efforts to remedy public housing segregation in the Chicago region. The litigators in Gautreaux were pushing for "scattered-site" public housing: basically, instead of concentrating all the Black public housing tenants in concentrated centers of urban poverty, scatter public housing sites all over the Chicago area, integrating a few impoverished tenants each in all the various working- and middle-class communities around Chicago (wealthier neighborhoods were excluded because HUD rules prohibit spending too much on public housing, and land in wealthy communities is outside their price range. Also, the wealthier the community in which public housing tenants reside, the more resentment bubbles up in working and middle-class communities angry that the poor get to live in communities that they themselves can't afford).

The author, Alexander Polikoff, was also the lead attorney on the case, and he gives a very sober assessment of the results of several decades of litigation. Most of the book covers the period after Polikoff won the original 1969 court ruling holding that Chicago had, indeed, practiced segregation. Over and over again, local politics, community opposition, White rioting and violence, and city and federal bureaucracy intervened to prevent scattered-site housing from ever actually taking root. By the time the book was published in 2006, only a few thousand families had successfully relocated away from the blighted urban core -- a mere fraction of the original class of 20,000, much less the total number of Black families crowded together in hyper-segregated Chicago slums.

From a structural standpoint, Gautreaux was a resounding failure. Originally designed to crack "American apartheid" once and for all, it ended up barely making a dent in the segregated structure of Chicago's residential community. But for the families who did manage to make it out, Gautreaux was a wonderful thing. Not every Gautreaux family was a success story, of course. But most studies showed that Gautreaux families were more successful, had higher quality of life, and were just plain happier than their peers who remained inside the city. And the difference was most noticeable for the children who -- despite often starting significantly their peers in higher-quality suburban schools -- managed to make up incredible deficits and post exceptional educational records far surpassing their brethren elsewhere. This is perhaps why each year far more families try to make it into the Gautreaux program than there are slots available.

You could argue that Polikoff and his team of attorneys were merely relieving the pain in the inner cities, but not addressing its source. There still is the problem of crushing, grinding poverty and hyper-segregation in America's inner cities, and Gautreaux is unlikely to solve it. Perhaps the children inside the high-rise urban projects are more likely to revolt. But that's precisely because they're more likely to die along the way -- and the fewer Gautreaux's we have, the more that will be killed. When this fact is viewed as a feature rather than a bug, leftism becomes nothing more than a self-indulgent obscenity.

Two different children were interviewed by two different journalists around the same time in the Chicago area. One was a Gautreaux kid, the other, a resident of one of inner-city Chicago's most notorious projects. Both were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. The Gautreaux child hadn't decided yet: "construction worker, architect, or anesthesiologist" were his top choices.

And the other girl, the one skipping rope outside her urban high-rise?

"I might not live to be grown up. My life wasn't promised to me."

Feeling It

In the comments to this Southern Appeal post, we had yet another discussion about the meaning of Jeremiah Wright's "chickens coming home to roost" sermon, and whether it was morally condemnable. I argued that Wright was making a positive, not normative, claim: We supported terrorism in, among other places, Latin America; now we're experiencing it here at home. And it turns out, being victimized by terrorism really sucks. There is no explicit normative component to this argument, which makes it difficult to condemn. Had Wright taken the normative step of saying: "because we engaged in terrorism abroad, we deserved to experience it here at home", that would be unjust. But he didn't say that. Indeed, I argued, if anything the implied normative dimension of his statement was that -- having experienced terrorism for ourselves -- hopefully it would expand our empathy so that we do not ever again support such terrorist atrocities enacted upon other human beings.

Today, The Washington Post reports on a study that demonstrates that people become desensitized to injustices perpetuated by their group upon others when they are reminded of injustices they themselves experienced. Americans, for example, are far less concerned about innocent Iraqi suffering brought on by the Iraq war when primed by 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, than we are if primed by the Nazis invading Poland. Jews are less likely to express sympathy for Palestinian suffering when primed by the Holocaust than when primed by the Cambodian genocide.

The study's authors concluded that people who experience injustice and victimization are prone to "lash out" in an effort to make sure they do not experience it again. But this tendency does not necessarily restrict itself at the actual perpetrators of the crime -- creating new classes of victims and new circles of pain and retribution.

In this light, the role of ministers, rabbis, pastors, imams, and other spiritual leaders, in the role as moral guides, have a particular obligation to counter this instinct. The authors also say that the instinct for revenge can be, with effort, turned -- from "never let this happen to me again" to "never let me be the type person who causes this to happen again". That is the message that mass atrocity should create in is. The easiest thing to do, when one is victimized, is to promote more pain. The hard thing, but the right thing, is to try and build a world where that pain no longer is created.

I Don't Want To Get Blacker

This is a chilling story recounted by Bishop T.D. Jakes:

I have twin boys who are almost 30 years old now. But when they were very young, I was sitting with both of them in the predominantly white environment of my home in West Virginia talking about things fathers discuss with their sons. I shared with one of my sons, that when I was his age my skin tone was very much like his, very light. In a matter of fact way, I mentioned that as I got older, my skin darkened and changed to become much more like his brother’s skin, which was darker.

My son, whose skin tone was lighter, began to cry profusely. I was befuddled by his reaction, but when your 7-year-old is crying without a reason and you love him, you investigate it immediately! So I asked him why he was crying. He blurted out, “I don’t want to get blacker, Daddy!” He looked at me in total anguish and said something that left me astounded. He said, “Because if you are black they hate you more.” He cried so hard that I took him in my arms so that he couldn’t see that I too was shedding a tear or two, myself. I was hurt for both of my sons, and I was hurt with them.

People wonder why so many Black writers focused on creating a sense of self-love from within the Black people. Shouldn't we encourage them not to think about race? But when even seven-year-olds are terrified by the thought that they might become Blacker, it is clear that the need to reclaim Blackness from the scourge of racist hatred is a moral imperative. Jakes' essay is a fantastic defense of that argument.

A Black Power writer once remarked that (I'm paraphrasing from memory here) "we were taught to love Whitey before we learned to love ourselves, and that ain't good." Love for all of humankind is important. But when you've been beaten down, denigrated, abused, and told to be worthless your entire life, learning to love yourself might be even more so.

Hating America

Last year, I wrote a post asking whether or not people would have thought it morally justified for Blacks in 1856 to engage in a full-on revolution in America, violently marching on Washington and overthrowing the government. Most people, somewhat to my surprise, agreed that it would have been.

In my post yesterday on the detainee rights ruling, I noted that -- in response to reports that some released Guanatamo detainees had committed acts of violence against American troops -- it's entirely possible that they were radicalized by their time in American detention. Limitless, lawless detention mixed with torture does tend to have that effect, as countless authoritarian dictatorships can testify.

So off of that, my question for today is: what would have to happen for us to say that an individual person is justified in "hating America", to take up arms against her and seek to ruination (the same way an Iraqi might have rebelled against the Hussein regime)? It seems to me that detaining and torturing someone in an isolated, extra-legal prison with no legal proceedings or due process rights would easily cross that threshold, such that, even if I had no particularly negative feelings towards America prior to the ordeal, I'd sure have some rage at the country afterwards.

The type of activities we engaged in when we authorize these detentions and allow for this torture, these are terrorist methods. They are the sort of things that are worthy of hate. Which means that when we sanction them, we are rendering ourselves worthy of hate. It is terrifying to me to watch as so many in my country -- people who claim to be patriots -- want to make America into an object deserving of contempt and rage.

Stuff That Gets People Killed

Tom Lasseter's report on innocent people detained by the United States in our war on terror (remember this case?) reminds me of my reaction how Scalia characterized the majority's ruling in Boumediene. He said that the court's ruling, giving detainees Habeas rights against their indefinite detentions, "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

He might be right. He might not be -- I'm skeptical there is no trade-off by which our continued flouting of human rights doesn't redound back against us in the form of more violence (when Scalia pointed to several released detainees who engaged in acts of violence against American troops, my response was "well sure -- if they didn't hate America before, they sure as hell do now!"). But he might be right. It is entirely possible that, in the wake of this decision, our jobs will become harder, and more Americans will be killed.

You know what else has that effect? Rights. The fact that the police can't just bomb apartment buildings with suspected criminals inside puts officers at risk. Some, inevitably, will be wounded or killed as a result. Yet, we restrict ourselves anyway. Every right afforded to criminal suspects (a significant concern of our bill of rights) could be cast as putting Americans at risk. The "safe" thing to do would be to shell "bad" neighborhoods into submission and then round up the survivors and place them in internment camps. That would keep Americans alive. It would just be hideously immoral, so we don't do it.

The point is that being a moral human being means that there are some things we can't do, even if they're in our immediate security interests, because they're wrong. In the context of war, certain tactics definitionally cause us to lose the war even if they help an individual battle. When Scalia makes this sort of argument, he betrays a basic misunderstanding of what it means to live in a free society -- in a society that cares about morality, in a society that is constrained by the constitution. "Security" simply does not give us free license to do whatever we want. What Scalia wants is for America to have the liberty to become terrorists. Our founders were wise enough to chart a different course.

Bear Bottom

As someone who keeps a casual eye on the stock market (and who, of course, wants a functioning economy upon graduation), obviously I'm concerned with Bear Stearns sudden collapse. When a titan that big falls, the shock waves are going to be massive no matter how swiftly the government moves to stem the damage. One hopes that our public institutions are up to that task -- but the track record of this administration hardly inspires confidence in that respect.

But the other thought that persistently nagged on me was the very fact that Bear Stearns (through J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Federal Government) was getting bailed out in the first place. Obviously, I superficially see why this is so -- if they didn't, we'd be faced with a massive economic meltdown. But something rings uncomfortable to me that the powerful are insulated from the risks that they take by virtue of their power. If I kidnap folks and enslave them, I face life in prison at least. If a corporation does it, they're faced with a fine. A stiff fine, perhaps -- but shouldn't the executives and officials who concocted this deal also face criminal charges? Cigarette companies knowingly released a poison on the market without telling anyone of the risks. Yes, they get sued -- but the CEOs aren't being arraigned for manslaughter. Powerful actors consistently get to privatize the gains and publicize the busts. It's only the little people who have to worry about their own skin.

Like Darren Hutchinson, I'm not opposed to the Bear Stearns bail-out per se. But when I see it juxtaposed against strident opposition to public aid for other folks, who haven't behaved nearly as irresponsibly as Bear Stearns and whose mistakes have not wreaked nearly the havoc on American society, I grow white with anger. All this talk about "personal responsibility" and "welfare queens" and "no hand-outs", it's utter bogus. If you matter enough, the government will be there to back you up in the end. It's merely a question of who we think matters.

Spitzer-fire

On NY Governor Elliot Spitzer's "links" to a recent prostitution bust, what LGM says:

# If I were in charge of writing laws, I do not believe that anyone belongs in jail for procuring or (certainly) selling sex for money, or that any criminal offense more severe than a ticket for the purchaser should be involved.

# If poor sex workers are thrown in jail under existing laws, then affluent white johns sure as hell should be too. This goes double for people who have positions that might allow them to work to repeal laws they don't feel are just

Unlike, say, David Vitter, Spitzer hasn't made a career over making one's sex life a political issue, but he has as AG broken up quite a few prostitution rings. That's hypocrisy enough for me to call him out.

Of Fugitive Slaves, Gay Rights, and The Line Through My Heart

The latest salvo in my and Mark's ongoing debate on questions of race focused specifically on whether states qua states should apologize for past moral atrocities (slavery, Jim Crow, the "lost generation", Native American genocide, the Holocaust, etc.). I argued that insofar as state actors are often instrumental in the promulgation and implementation of these atrocities, the state bears a share of the responsibility for which it must atone for. This is especially true when the victims conceptualize the wrongdoing as emanating from (at least in significant part) the state, as oppose to disorganized or irregular individuals (as in all four of the examples I mentioned above). Moreover, governmental sanction channels, directs, and legitimates power and violence. I can't sentence a person to jail no matter how snappy a black robe I buy, and I can't keep them there just because I own a natty blue uniform. It is the weight of governmental authority, in the form of a judge or a police officer, that grants me such authority. Indeed, this imprimatur transfers moral authority beyond our own personal knowledge and experience. A prison guard doesn't "know" that his wards deserve to be locked up -- he conducted no fact-finding mission, he held no trial. Yet he is morally allowed to imprison them (through threat of violence) because another governmental actor (a judge) tells him that this one committed murder, that one treason, that one robbery. That transfer of knowledge is only considered legitimate because it is governmental -- if a random person off the street points out a pedestrian and says "he's a murderer", the moral authority does not carry.

Mark responded that states are really just "phantasms", mere collections of individuals, and that there is no absolution or even relevancy in that "the state" (which, Mark would argue, is actually just individual legislators, bureaucrats, judges, etc.) is urging you to kill the Jews. He put forth, once again, his beloved quote by Solzhenitsyn about how the line between good and evil is drawn through every human heart. "[I]t is every human heart," Mark writes, "that needs to repent for things done, not those heartless state organs."

Unfortunately, I had to drop the thread while I was traveling to Virginia. I still think that it is more than obvious that the state in its own right creates power that did not exist before, which is why Judge John Anderson in chambers can sentence me to prison (and the guard will listen) but Mr. John Anderson on the street cannot. But I want to pick up this discussion of state relevancy, and the idea that the only thing that matters is the line through the heart, because I think it will lead to some positions Mark will be quite uncomfortable with.

The one of the main works of the late, great Robert Cover was an exploration of how Northern, anti-slavery judges reacted when they were asked to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. The Fugitive Slave Act, I think we'd all agree, is an unambiguously monstrous law. It also, at least as far as lower court judges were concerned, was almost definitely constitutional under Article IV, Section 2 of the constitution. What does Mark think that these judges -- in their capacity as judges -- should have done?

One answer is to simply refuse to enforce the law. The law is evil, even if (in the words of Mark Graber) it is a "constitutional evil", and ultimately they must be guided by that line through their heart. If government demands evil, government must yield.

But let's take that idea and apply it to the modern day. I don't know Mark's position on Lawrence v. Texas (which outlawed prohibitions on sodomy in America). I suspect, however, that he does not believe that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage. For my part, laying the legal question aside, I find laws which prohibit gay marriage to be profoundly, monstrously evil. Not evil on the scope of slavery, but comparable to laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage, with the difference being only that of the number of people affected. Many people agree with me. Many people disagree with me quite profoundly -- they find the prospect of gay marriage to be that which is evil. Were I a federal court judge, would Mark advise that I push the legal questions aside and decide a prospective gay marriage case solely based on the "line through my heart" (which would lead me to invalidate the prohibition with extreme prejudice)? What of my colleagues who believe the reverse, and would prohibit gay marriage regardless of law if they follow their own line? Is Mark willing to allow for this sort of legal anarchy? And we could observe this same paradox in other cases -- most notably abortion -- where advocates on both sides see the alternative universe as being not just "wrong" but utterly and profoundly evil.

Of course, the prevailing rhetoric out of the right points in the precise opposite direction. They are outspokenly opposed to deciding cases based on the judge's personal moral precepts. Apply the law, don't make the law. Don't legislate from the bench. Don't impose your agenda on society. Mark has seemed to buy into this theory as presented by Scalia before, albeit more in the context of "dumb" laws than of evil ones (but then, I truly consider the laws at stake in Lawrence, to which he and Scalia were referring, to be evil, not stupid). And yet, as far as I can tell, from Mark's perspective this is letting the mechanics of government supersede the line through my heart. The legislature, the polls, the laws, the precedent, the constitution -- these are all the work of people. They have no special hold on me. Their power is phantasmic. And insofar as they point me towards the evil of anti-gay discrimination, I should simply ignore them.

But I do believe that I-as-a-judge have some obligation to the government, of fidelity to my position. It is a fidelity with limits, but it does exist, it is not a phantasm, and at times it will force me to write decisions I think are at odds with my vision of a moral society. And it is because of that, that I do not believe we can simply push away the question of governmental responsibility. The line may be through my heart, but government can influence the stroke of the pen. At the very least, governments know that their status as government is almost assured to alter the course of history. That's power. Power can be abused. And abuses require apologies and atonement.

Why Say Sorry?

One of the typical arguments trotted out against official apologies for historical atrocities (slavery, genocide, apartheid, etc.) is that "we" (that is, the folks still alive) weren't the ones who did the wrong. Indeed, often times we're not even descended from the wrongdoers. So why should we say we're sorry?

In his discussion about Australia's upcoming apology for "the lost generation" (where Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families on the grounds that the Aborigines were going to die out soon anyway), John Quiggin flagged the best response to that argument I've heard yet, from Raimond Gaita's book A Common Humanity. Simply put, "any moral position allowing pride in the achievements of our forebears and our community necessarily entails shame in their failings."

So, if I express pride in America's fight for freedom in WWII, or the emancipation proclamation, or the development of democratic political theory as part of my identity as an "American", then I similarly as part of that identity must express shame for the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black Africans, and the other myriad failings of American society. They're part and parcel of the same commitment I have as a member of this community. But too many people want the sweet without any of the sour.

Truth Squad Avengers!

Over at The Plank, Michelle Cottle reports that John McCain is establishing a "truth squad" specifically to counter negative attacks in South Carolina.

Can't say I blame him. Say what you will about McCain, but he was brutally smeared in South Carolina 2000, the worst being "Black baby" calls (McCain has an adopted child from Bangladesh, "unknown" operatives implied that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child). I find it amusing that South Carolina has become nearly legendary for low, dirty, vicious campaign tactics that really should shock the conscience of any sane, moral human being. It's yet another reason why the region's flaunting of its moral superiority over the rest of us grates me (others on the list: its leadership in committing treason-in-defense-of-slavery, politically charged "irregularities" in the state Bar scoring). It's a culture that developed out of its Jim Crow days, and has not dissipated to this day.

The Philosophy of the Limit

Note: This post has nothing to do with the book by Drucilla Cornell (to my knowledge; I've never read it) aside from the fact that she's awesome.

One of my ultimate pet peeves is people replacing the reality of justice with the perceived capacity to obtain it. By this, I mean folks who argue for a particular definition or conception of justice specifically on the grounds that it would be attainable, or against alternative conceptions because they have no identifiable stopping point. An "attainable" philosophy is one that we can realistically imagine "completing", so there is nothing left to do. An unattainable philosophy, by contrast, is not necessarily a futile one, it just means that its conceptual endpoint probably will never be reached. For example, "nobody should (unwillingly) die of illness" is an unattainable philosophical position -- we probably will never reach a point where nobody dies of a disease. But we can still move towards that reality, by making it progressively less likely that people will die of disease. Someone wedded to the idea of attainability, however, would argue that beyond some point it is no longer unjust when people die of disease -- there is an achievable "limit" at which point the requirements of justice have been met. Demands beyond that are unreasonable insofar as they effectively posit that we can never have a completely just health-care system.

This mode of argumentation pops up all the time. For example, liberals attack the sufficiency of negative liberty by noting that non-interference does not equalize the ability to act -- in a completely open world, some people can do many more things than others. If freedom implies access to at least a certain bundle of resources and privileges necessary to pursue one's desired ends in the public sphere, then the state must be enlisted to guarantee at least these minimums so people have the basic ability to act freely. In response to this argument, Raymond Plant articulates the conservative objection:

[F]reedom and ability cannot be the same thing, since no one is able to do all that he or she is free to do. I am free to do everything that I am not currently prevented by others from doing. Thi will turn out to be an indefinitely large number of things. However, it does not matter how rich and powerful or how intelligent or resourceful I am, it still remains the case that I am able to do only a small number of things that I am free to do.... There is no way in which abilities, capacities and powers can be equalised, and therefore if freedom is understood at least in part in terms of ability then we can never attain the liberal ideal of equal freedom, an ideal which can be attained if by freedom we mean mutual non-coercion. [Raymond Plant, "Neo-liberalism and the Theory of the State: From Wohlfahrtsstaat to Rechtsstaat," The Political Quarterly Vol. 75, pp. 24-37 (2004), 26]

Similar arguments are made by conservatives against color-conscious policies designed to increase diversity, which Justice Scalia has protested could be justified indefinitely; and in favor of jurisprudential techniques like originalism, which are praised for supposedly being concrete, definite, and definitive. It's barely even acknowledged that justice might require a degree of uncertainty, fluidity, or flexibility. What if racial justice does require indefinite use of color-conscious selection processes? Should we care?

I won't say I don't understand the motivation behind the instinct. For understandable reasons, we want an attainable definition of justice, because to deny this forces us to run an exhausting and unending marathon chasing moral progress. We want to say we've "made it", and we can't, no matter how hard we try. Fine, and I'm sorry about that. Nonetheless, there is nothing implicit in the definition of justice that requires it to be concrete or attainable. Arguing that a particular mode of justice should be adapted simply because it's easier is intellectually facile and childish. Justice isn't a destination, it's a pursuit. That's the problem with ideals -- you'll find they're rather difficult to pin down in reality. If you're chasing an infinite like justice, you can never expect to get there. And if you construct your definitions with an end-point in time, you'll never realize those dimensions of justice which lie beyond the limit.

Because of that truth, I'd argue that restricting the discourse of justice to its realizable forms demonstrates not just a failure of moral fortitude and imagination, but a failure of morality itself. To return to the freedom-as-ability argument, I will freely concede that we will never reach a world in which everyone will be able to do everything. But it is ridiculous to use that observation as an argument in favor of not trying to expand the relative opportunities and abilities of individuals. The irony is that, as Plant puts it, the defense of the non-coercion model rests on the idea that we can claim -- definitively and concretely -- that the persons under it possess "equal freedom". Here is where radical communism intersects with radical capitalism -- being able to describe freedom as being held by all equally is more important than the actual material reality that people live in. But why should we care whether we can say that we've hit the ideal of equal freedom? Shouldn't we care more about actually being closer to it? The non-coercion theorists care more about being able to call the world just than trying to press for the maximum possible amount of justice. After all, if you're still pursuing justice, you're conceding that the current state of affairs contains injustice. And that's depressing!

The point, then, is twofold. First, attainability, by itself, is not an argument for a particular conception of justice. There is no reason for us to suppose we should be so lucky as to exist in a universe where justice is attainable. That might be a depressing thought, but past Elementary School "depressing" isn't a valid response to social reality. Second, adopting concrete models of justice is unnecessarily constraining -- it denies the reality of any dimensions of justice that lie beyond the limit, and thus consigns us to an inferior world so we can play make-believe that we live in a superior one. It can be scary to admit just how much there is left in front of us (an infinite amount, to be exact). But nobody denied that morality required courage.

Does Intention Matter?

Upon request, Kevin Drum receives a conservative argument as to why it's okay for America to torture in the war on terror. He reprints it without comment (I, as you will see, am not so generous):

I want our side to win. Or maybe more accurately, I don't want our side to lose....As with any other form of violence, motivation is everything. A cop shooting a murderer is not the same as a murderer shooting an innocent victim, although both use guns, and at the end, someone is bleeding and dying.

You'd be amazed at how many people find these things nearly equivalent. A leftist I know sees no difference between a Palestinian child dying from a stray Israeli bullet during a firefight, and an Israeli child dying when a Palestinian terrorist puts the barrel of a gun to the kid's forehead and blows his brains across the back wall of the child's bedroom. In his two-dimensional perception, the only important factor is that both resulted in a dead child. Avoiding true moral analysis and motivations allows him to skirt the concept of "evil," a term which makes many liberals intensely uncomfortable.

John Kiriakou said that waterboarding a terrorist stopped dozens of attacks. Dozens. Not attacks on military targets, but attacks on innocent non-combatants.

That was the motivation.

The terrorists who torture and kill our prisoners (never something as benign as waterboarding) don't do it because they need information to save innocent people. They do it because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone.

At some point you have to decide if a known terrorist having a very bad day (after which he goes back to a hot meal and a cot) is more of a moral problem than allowing a terrorist to blow up a building full of people.

Yes, it's good if we do it, when it's for the right reasons. So far, it's been for the right reasons. And no, it isn't good when it's done to us, for the reasons it has been done to us. Get back to me when some enemy tortures one of our soldiers in order to save innocent lives.

Got it?

There are two issues that spring to mind upon reading this argument.

1) The unidentified conservative draws a contrast between America, which tortures to save innocents, and the terrorists, who do it "because they like it, because they want to hurt or kill someone." This is a tempting argument. But ultimately, it is intellectually lazy. Certainly, there are brutes among men -- people who simply like to cause pain. But when it comes to vast, multi-national organizations, motivation is never that simple. The world is not made of cartoon villains. Ask anybody -- from the Klan to the Gestapo to Al Qaeda -- if their intentions are good, and they'll answer yes. They'll say they are building a better world. They are saying they are saving their people from damnation and imperial domination. They'll say they are purging society of the infidels and the undesirables. People don't cackle in corners about their plan to bring darkness and evil down upon the world. Everybody comes with good intentions.

A hypothetical I heard used was if Iran captured and water boarded a downed American airman to figure out if the U.S. was planning an invasion. Surely, innocent lives are at stake. They could claim good intentions. They wouldn't be lying. But neither would it be enough. Water boarding is not something civilized societies engage in.

2) Nonetheless, motive does matter. It is different; torturing someone to save innocent lives versus doing it for thrills. And we can evaluate different proffered motives dispassionately -- we don't have to simply agree with an assertion that a motive (establishing the caliphate, sending a message to the queers) is good.

But motive isn't all that matters. Nobody seriously disputes this, because nobody (I hope) disagrees that there is some outward limit to what we can do under the moniker of good intention. Can we water board suspected terrorists in order to save lives? This man says yes. But that isn't the only question at issue. Can we water board suspected terrorists without knowing whether it will save lives or not? Can we torture people who we're not sure are terrorists (and in some cases, we find out later are not)? All of these are moral questions raised by the current torture regime.

Or let's press the issue further. Can we dip their fingers in acid? What if they still won't talk? Can we dip their family members' fingers in acid? Can we sodomize their sons with spiked bats? If we do so, does it matter that we went in with pure souls?

Intention only gets you part of the way. There are still boundaries which an ethical society cannot cross, no matter how noble the heart and no matter how righteous the cause.

Motive and Consequence

Of importance to this post and this post is a great point by Scott Lemieux on the issue of "motives" in conduct with racially discriminatory effects:

As always when questions of motivations rather than actions come up, I think we have to return to George Wallace. Even politicians who make overtly racist appeals may be much more committed to winning elections than to racism. So I'm not sure it matters much what precise mixture of partisan advantage and racism motivates Republican efforts to suppress the African-American vote; the efforts are, in the end, racist even if wholly motivated by the former. Similarly, I don't know how much racism and how much partisan advantage led to, say, Reagan kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, MS to deliver coded appeals to southern racists (as well, of course, as the 3 Americans consistently committed to "states' rights" principles), but it's indefensible either way. Attempts to figure out whether the tunes played on Nixon's Piano are authentic expressions of subjective racist beliefs or mere self-interested cynicism are both impossible and beside the point.

As I've argued elsewhere, if the key goal of anti-racism politics is to find and punish the evil-doers who are racist, then motive becomes very important in terms of assigning culpability. But that isn't the primary agenda of anti-racism activists. We're interested in protecting those vulnerable to racist politics, and providing restitution and remedy to those who have been victimized already. In that quest, it doesn't really matter whether the motivating factor behind, say, ridiculous and unnecessary "anti-voter fraud" laws is "Black people are inferior, this will stop them from voting" (as they were originally justified in Mississippi) or "diluting turn-out among the poor and minorities helps my Party." Perhaps the adherent of the former view is a worse person than one who believes the latter; but in either case, the person for whom it is more difficult to vote is harmed in roughly the same fashion.

Most of us are willing to make the trade here. In comments to this post, I noted that I'm willing to accept higher barriers on labeling a possible perpetrator of racist activities "a racist", in recognition of the fact that intention matters for such culpability and that such charges, when false, can have serious negative repercussions. However, that concession is only a fair one when paired with a concurrent commitment to work vigorously to protect and compensate the victims of the racist activity itself. So, in the voting law cases, I'm far less interested in labeling their sponsors "racist" as I am getting the laws repealed and working so that all franchised Americans can vote unhindered and without undue delay. To a large extent, this has been the position of progressive anti-racism critics since the late 1970s, when Alan Freeman wrote his path-breaking article, "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law," [Minnesota Law Review, Vol. 62 pp. 1049-1119 (1978)]. The "perpetrator perspective" ("let's punish the evil-doers") and the "victim perspective" ("let's aid those who have been wronged") that Freeman discusses require fundamentally different outlooks. Punishing wrongdoers absolutely requires they we set up adequate procedural protection for the accused. But if the only we aid the wronged is through punishing the wrongdoers, then we're resigned to the fact that many victims won't gain redress at all. Sometimes, there isn't enough evidence to convict even when we know someone has been wronged. Other times, a procedural technicality lets the known guilty go free. In racism cases, especially, it can be difficult if not impossible to identify a discrete "perpetrator" whose "responsible" for the harm at issue (who is responsible for the "Blacks as bestial savages" meme which infects so much of the White psyche on crime issues today?). Organizing anti-racism politics in this fashion is wildly one-sided against the victims.

The better alternative is to offer redress to victims independent of punishing perpetrators. Victims of robbery should be compensated regardless of whether we can criminally convict the robber. It would be morally shocking if, in absence of such a conviction, we then denied that the victim had undergone any colorable moral wrong. Victims of racism should be accorded the same treatment, compensated regardless of whether we can convict "the racist" to blame for it.