Speaking Honestly About The Ryan Budget
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor
Ryan Budget May 13, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Republicans are still deeply bitter at President Obama's counter-attack against the House Republican budget, which almost immediately transformed the party mood from triumphalism to suing for peace. Charles Krauthammer today expresses some of that anger:
Constructive and civil debate — like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of autistic and Down syndrome kids?
This reflects an inability to recognize of acknowledge the brutal effects of the Republican plan to slash Medicaid. Medicaid is a bare-bones program that provides very basic levels of medical services for people in nursing homes, poor children with special needs, and people facing extreme poverty. Jonathan Cohn provides some reporting insight as to what is at stake here:
I'll never forget the first time I visited the St. John's Well Child and Family Center about seven years ago, because it's the first time I heard about a grisly intruder pediatricians sometimes find in young children's ears: Cockroaches.It's a problem endemic to poorly maintained, low-income housing, of which there is quite a lot in the South Central neighborhood surrounding St. John's. And it's one reason the staff there are so aggressive about confronting the health hazards of their patient population. Instead of merely treating problems like asthma, lead poisoning and, yes, insects crawling into the ear canals of sleeping children, St. John's also offers home environmental assessments—complete with instructions for tenants on how to clean up hazards and, where possible, to pressure slumlords into fixing dilapidated properties.
St. John's was a more modest enterprise back then: just a handful of clinics operating on a shoestring budget. When I returned last week, I could see it had grown. Thanks to a combination of philanthropy and increased federal funding, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, it has expanded to 10 clinics with an annual budget of $25 million, serving a predominantly Latino and African-American population in what remains one of the nation's most medically under-served communities.
And the future seems more promising still. The Affordable Care Act will pump more money into these clinics, both directly by giving them subsidies and indirectly by giving more of their patients insurance.
That's what the Republicans are doing away with. I'm usually not a huge fan of emotional appeals, and Jonathan's column admirably steers clear of bleeding-heart-ism. But it's just analytically true that the Republican budget imposes severe hardship on poor and vulnerable people. And there's a deep backlash against even relatively anodyne attempts to point this out -- as if Obama is obliged to collaborate with Republican attempts to cover up the vicious results of their program. Ryan's budget really is at odds with what most Americans would consider to be basic decency. Virtually every House Republican voted for it, and they deserve to face the consequences of it.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Medical Doctors
In recent years I've had negative opinions of doctors. Perhaps my opinion is slowly changing.
Since having a malignant melinoma removed from the back of my neck on December 21, I've been following up appropriately. I had a second surgery on March 21 and have had tests and seen doctors as directed ever since.
Today I saw Dr. Ferguson, the main cancer doctor for Shelby County, for the third time. I like her doctoring. All seems well. All indications are that the melinoma has not spread and that there is no cancer in my body.
I am lucky that it was caught in time. Early detection is the key like they say. All of the doctors I have seen in this situation have been good. Perhaps medical doctors are OK after all!
Since having a malignant melinoma removed from the back of my neck on December 21, I've been following up appropriately. I had a second surgery on March 21 and have had tests and seen doctors as directed ever since.
Today I saw Dr. Ferguson, the main cancer doctor for Shelby County, for the third time. I like her doctoring. All seems well. All indications are that the melinoma has not spread and that there is no cancer in my body.
I am lucky that it was caught in time. Early detection is the key like they say. All of the doctors I have seen in this situation have been good. Perhaps medical doctors are OK after all!
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
The Health Care Mandate
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate
Jonathan Chait
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate &c May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am 9 comments
Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman has an excellent essay making the case that the Affordable Care Act is not just Constitutional but obviously so, and arguments to the contrary not merely unpersuasive but absurd. His conclusion:
What will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objectionsmay not be enough to stop these Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.
I reached a similar conclusion, not nearly as thoroughly or as well, in my TRB column a few months ago on Roger Vinson's ruling. I strongly urge everybody to read Koppelman. There are many thorny issues in law, but this simply is not one of them.
One takeaway I had from reading Vinson's ruling, as well as Koppelman's evisceration of it, is that it's really easy to produce a plausible-sounding argument to overturn any legal argument you'd like to overturn. As an interpretation of the law, Vinson's ruling makes no sense. There's simply no way a judge could begin from a standpoint of disinterest about the merits of the law and, working through an understanding of the Constitution, arrive at the conclusion he chose.
But if you instead try to figure out the most plausible-sounding way to construct a Constitutional argument against a law you don't like, then coming up with an argument as good as Vinson's is relatively easy. Again, "as good as Vinson's" is a low bar.
Jonathan Chait
The Obviously Constitutional Individual Mandate &c May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am 9 comments
Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman has an excellent essay making the case that the Affordable Care Act is not just Constitutional but obviously so, and arguments to the contrary not merely unpersuasive but absurd. His conclusion:
What will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objectionsmay not be enough to stop these Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.
I reached a similar conclusion, not nearly as thoroughly or as well, in my TRB column a few months ago on Roger Vinson's ruling. I strongly urge everybody to read Koppelman. There are many thorny issues in law, but this simply is not one of them.
One takeaway I had from reading Vinson's ruling, as well as Koppelman's evisceration of it, is that it's really easy to produce a plausible-sounding argument to overturn any legal argument you'd like to overturn. As an interpretation of the law, Vinson's ruling makes no sense. There's simply no way a judge could begin from a standpoint of disinterest about the merits of the law and, working through an understanding of the Constitution, arrive at the conclusion he chose.
But if you instead try to figure out the most plausible-sounding way to construct a Constitutional argument against a law you don't like, then coming up with an argument as good as Vinson's is relatively easy. Again, "as good as Vinson's" is a low bar.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Republican Gibberish
Jonathan Chait
John Boehner's Tax Gibberish The Kochs And The Marketplace Of Ideas May 10, 2011
Did Republicans Drink the Ryan Kool-Aid? Debate Settled. John Boehner appeared on the Today Show this morning, and his explanation of why he won't agree to any revenue increase is a perfect encapsulation of the vacuity of conservative movement thought on this subject.
Here's the best part of the exchange:
LAUER: Why not use an increase in revenues? Tax hikes to help with that debt problem? What is the evidence that you can present that the tax cuts of the Bush era have actually accomplished their goals?
BOEHNER: Well, what you're – what some are suggesting is that we take this money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and we give it to the government. The fact is you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs. Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem.
LAUER: But when you look at – you talk about creating jobs, when the Bush era tax cuts were passed in 2001, unemployment in this country was 4.5%. Today it's at 9%, just down from 10%. So why are the Bush-era tax cuts creating jobs?
BOEHNER: They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession. But you can't raise taxes. We can take all of the money from the wealthy and guess what? We'd hardly make a dent in the annual deficit and do nothing about the $14.3 trillion worth of debt.
Lauer begins with a good question. What is the evidence that the Bush tax cut accomplished its goal? Boehner refuses to present any. Indeed, answering this question would lead him into an inescapable minefield. The Bush tax cuts are currently in effect, so any benefits of continuing them must have been felt from 2001 until the present date. That would imply those effects are less than impressive. So instead, Boehner simply restates his position. We can't take money away from job creators. Why not? You just can't. "The fact is," he continues, mistaking opinion for fact, "you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs." You can't tax them at all? Obviously we have to tax them some, right? So then the question is what is the optimal level. I believe recent history suggests that Clinton-era tax levels create no significant harmful incentive effect. Boehner can't even come near this question, because he simply insists that tax the rich is wrong is an absolute sense.
Boehner proceeds from there to trot out the familiar "Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem." line. Here's the reality:
Obviously revenue declined following the Bush tax cuts and stayed well below the Clinton-era trend, even aside from cyclical factors. It's worth noting here that both parties may emphasize the factors in the rise of the debt that favor solutions most amenable to their policy preferences. The difference is that you don't see Democrats categorically deny that spending levels bear any relate to deficits, whereas the opposite belief is an article of faith among Republicans.
Lauer, to his credit, tries again, asking for any evidence the Bush tax cuts created jobs. Boehner replies, "They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession." Right. That's a net of 3 million jobs over eight years. That's horrible! 3 million new jobs is, as the Wall Street Journal news staff put it, "the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records." Now, Boehner wants to keep track of new jobs under Bush at their highest level. If you want to assign Bush zero responsibility for the economic crisis and measure it from trough to peak, Boehner gets a total of 8 million new jobs. But during the Clinton administration we saw the creation of 23 million new jobs. Doesn't that again suggest that Clinton-era tax rates on the rich might not cripple job creation? Boehner, of course does not say.
For his final talking point, Boehner claims that even if we took all the money the rich had, it wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. Here he's recycling a point made originally by Paul Ryan and then, in much stronger, by the Wall Street Journal's comically inept editorial page. The Journal's claim has been widely cited since, including by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. It is utterly false, and seems to be based on a simple inability to correctly perform basic arithmetic.
And there we have the conservative movement's explanation of its position on taxes, which also happens to be its central policy goal.
I should note here that I don't have any reason to believe that any of this reflects Boehner's personal dishonesty. The problem is that the conservative movement holds as its highest principle the belief that it's unfair to charge higher tax rates to the rich. But since that principle is highly unpopular, they need to devise other rationales to sell this policy -- rationales that bear no relationship to their actual reasons, and which are usually nonsensical or simply false. Dishonesty of some form or another is common in politics, but Republican economic policymaking is characterized by massive, systematic dishonesty or rank ignorance that permeates every element of the process, from intellectual entrepreneurs to elected officials. The good news is that it keeps me in business.
John Boehner's Tax Gibberish The Kochs And The Marketplace Of Ideas May 10, 2011
Did Republicans Drink the Ryan Kool-Aid? Debate Settled. John Boehner appeared on the Today Show this morning, and his explanation of why he won't agree to any revenue increase is a perfect encapsulation of the vacuity of conservative movement thought on this subject.
Here's the best part of the exchange:
LAUER: Why not use an increase in revenues? Tax hikes to help with that debt problem? What is the evidence that you can present that the tax cuts of the Bush era have actually accomplished their goals?
BOEHNER: Well, what you're – what some are suggesting is that we take this money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and we give it to the government. The fact is you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs. Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem.
LAUER: But when you look at – you talk about creating jobs, when the Bush era tax cuts were passed in 2001, unemployment in this country was 4.5%. Today it's at 9%, just down from 10%. So why are the Bush-era tax cuts creating jobs?
BOEHNER: They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession. But you can't raise taxes. We can take all of the money from the wealthy and guess what? We'd hardly make a dent in the annual deficit and do nothing about the $14.3 trillion worth of debt.
Lauer begins with a good question. What is the evidence that the Bush tax cut accomplished its goal? Boehner refuses to present any. Indeed, answering this question would lead him into an inescapable minefield. The Bush tax cuts are currently in effect, so any benefits of continuing them must have been felt from 2001 until the present date. That would imply those effects are less than impressive. So instead, Boehner simply restates his position. We can't take money away from job creators. Why not? You just can't. "The fact is," he continues, mistaking opinion for fact, "you can't tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs." You can't tax them at all? Obviously we have to tax them some, right? So then the question is what is the optimal level. I believe recent history suggests that Clinton-era tax levels create no significant harmful incentive effect. Boehner can't even come near this question, because he simply insists that tax the rich is wrong is an absolute sense.
Boehner proceeds from there to trot out the familiar "Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem." line. Here's the reality:
Obviously revenue declined following the Bush tax cuts and stayed well below the Clinton-era trend, even aside from cyclical factors. It's worth noting here that both parties may emphasize the factors in the rise of the debt that favor solutions most amenable to their policy preferences. The difference is that you don't see Democrats categorically deny that spending levels bear any relate to deficits, whereas the opposite belief is an article of faith among Republicans.
Lauer, to his credit, tries again, asking for any evidence the Bush tax cuts created jobs. Boehner replies, "They created about 8 million jobs over the first ten years that they were in existence. We've lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession." Right. That's a net of 3 million jobs over eight years. That's horrible! 3 million new jobs is, as the Wall Street Journal news staff put it, "the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records." Now, Boehner wants to keep track of new jobs under Bush at their highest level. If you want to assign Bush zero responsibility for the economic crisis and measure it from trough to peak, Boehner gets a total of 8 million new jobs. But during the Clinton administration we saw the creation of 23 million new jobs. Doesn't that again suggest that Clinton-era tax rates on the rich might not cripple job creation? Boehner, of course does not say.
For his final talking point, Boehner claims that even if we took all the money the rich had, it wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. Here he's recycling a point made originally by Paul Ryan and then, in much stronger, by the Wall Street Journal's comically inept editorial page. The Journal's claim has been widely cited since, including by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. It is utterly false, and seems to be based on a simple inability to correctly perform basic arithmetic.
And there we have the conservative movement's explanation of its position on taxes, which also happens to be its central policy goal.
I should note here that I don't have any reason to believe that any of this reflects Boehner's personal dishonesty. The problem is that the conservative movement holds as its highest principle the belief that it's unfair to charge higher tax rates to the rich. But since that principle is highly unpopular, they need to devise other rationales to sell this policy -- rationales that bear no relationship to their actual reasons, and which are usually nonsensical or simply false. Dishonesty of some form or another is common in politics, but Republican economic policymaking is characterized by massive, systematic dishonesty or rank ignorance that permeates every element of the process, from intellectual entrepreneurs to elected officials. The good news is that it keeps me in business.
Poker is Skill, Not Luck
BIG NEWS: Unemployment | The Fed | Financial Crisis | Goldman Sachs | Royal Wedding| More...
University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt, famous for the best-selling Freakonomics series, has published a working paper alongside fellow University of Chicago professor Thomas Miles entitled "The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker: Evidence From the World Series of Poker." In it, they attempt to answer the central question surrounding the legality of the online poker industry: is it a game of skill or luck?
The hugely popular industry of online poker has been controversial for some time now. Despite efforts to curb the industry, most notably the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, still upwards of 10 million Americans play poker online for money. Just last month, three popular online poker sites -- Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker -- were shutdown by the FBI, and the federal government announced plans to recover $3 billion from them, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The central question surrounding the legality of the industry, on which Americans consumers spend $6 billion annually, has been whether poker is a game or skill or luck. Despite this, the paper says, "[s]tate courts that have ruled on whether poker is a game of skill-versus-luck generally have done so in the absence of any statistical evidence[.]"
To answer the question, Levitt and Miles looked at information made available by the 2010 World Series of Poker. The annual event, held in Las Vegas, includes 57 tournaments, 32,000 participants and $185 million prize money, including the "Main Event," in which the grand winner earns almost $9 million.
The duo found significant evidence that poker requires skill. Players assumed to be skilled earned 30 percent on their investment, compared to all other players, who lost 15 percent. In dollar terms, and even excluding the highly-skilled "Main Event," high skill players earned an average of $350 per tournament, while other players lost $400 on average.
To put that in perspective, Levitt and Miles compare the return on a poker investment with that common from the financial markets. "The observed differences in ROIs [return on investments] are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets," the paper says, "where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns."
In human speak, that means the money of skilled players is better invested in a poker tournament than Wall Street, despite conventional wisdom that would indicate the opposite. In fact, the paper finds, "the high skilled player wins 54.9 percent of the match ups." That compares more closely to what is witnessed in Major League Baseball than anything on Wall Street:
"Since the year 2007, [baseball] teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data."
University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt, famous for the best-selling Freakonomics series, has published a working paper alongside fellow University of Chicago professor Thomas Miles entitled "The Role of Skill Versus Luck in Poker: Evidence From the World Series of Poker." In it, they attempt to answer the central question surrounding the legality of the online poker industry: is it a game of skill or luck?
The hugely popular industry of online poker has been controversial for some time now. Despite efforts to curb the industry, most notably the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, still upwards of 10 million Americans play poker online for money. Just last month, three popular online poker sites -- Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker -- were shutdown by the FBI, and the federal government announced plans to recover $3 billion from them, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The central question surrounding the legality of the industry, on which Americans consumers spend $6 billion annually, has been whether poker is a game or skill or luck. Despite this, the paper says, "[s]tate courts that have ruled on whether poker is a game of skill-versus-luck generally have done so in the absence of any statistical evidence[.]"
To answer the question, Levitt and Miles looked at information made available by the 2010 World Series of Poker. The annual event, held in Las Vegas, includes 57 tournaments, 32,000 participants and $185 million prize money, including the "Main Event," in which the grand winner earns almost $9 million.
The duo found significant evidence that poker requires skill. Players assumed to be skilled earned 30 percent on their investment, compared to all other players, who lost 15 percent. In dollar terms, and even excluding the highly-skilled "Main Event," high skill players earned an average of $350 per tournament, while other players lost $400 on average.
To put that in perspective, Levitt and Miles compare the return on a poker investment with that common from the financial markets. "The observed differences in ROIs [return on investments] are highly statistically significant and far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets," the paper says, "where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as three percent of assets under management and thirty percent of annual returns."
In human speak, that means the money of skilled players is better invested in a poker tournament than Wall Street, despite conventional wisdom that would indicate the opposite. In fact, the paper finds, "the high skilled player wins 54.9 percent of the match ups." That compares more closely to what is witnessed in Major League Baseball than anything on Wall Street:
"Since the year 2007, [baseball] teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data."
Monday, May 9, 2011
Virtue Ethics
Virtue Ethics
Mark Vernon The Return of Virtue Ethics
What is the good life? How can we know?
The Enlightenment was a revolution in the way we think about morality. Two ethical models, in particular, have come to dominate ever since. One can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, and is based upon the notion of duty (and hence is called deontological, from the Greek deon, meaning duty.) The second is hedonist and can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, and his principle of utility: an action can be called good if it increases pleasure or decreases pain.
Put them together and you have the liberal approach to asking what’s the right thing to do. It’s liberal not in the sense of being pro-gay or pro-abortion. Rather, it’s liberal in the deeper sense of focusing on the individual and the choices an individual makes. It's ethics conceived of in terms of rights and responsibilities, or in terms of what makes you happy or sad. The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed it up when he wrote: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.”
You can understand why Mill wrote what he did. He lived in a period of history in which many people were not free to do as they chose. They were ruled by monarchs and chastised by prelates. The result was the subjugation of women and the owning of slaves. But we don’t live in such a world now. Most enjoy a degree of freedom that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, in the West at least. As a result, the liberal approaches to ethics are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life?
The problem is that we’ve lost touch with the bigger picture: what is it that makes life good for us humans? The Enlightenment left us with few resources for thinking about that larger question, because it was so focused on winning individuals their freedom. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe described our dilemma this way. Our talk of having “moral duties,” or our description of actions as “morally right,” has become vacuous because we are now free of the law-giving God who fixes those duties and obligations. And Anscombe, as a Catholic, was a firm believer in God — only not a law-giving God but a loving one.
In any case, now that we are relatively free, we need to ask again what life is for. There is another ethical tradition that can help. It’s known as virtue ethics. Virtue ethics begins by asking what it is to be human, and proceeds by asking what virtues — or characteristics, habits and skills — we need in order to become all that we might be as humans. It’s much associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who discussed the meaning of friendship as a way to illustrate his approach to ethics.
Science tells us we are social animals, Aristotle observed. But in order to live well as social animals, we also need a vision of what our sociality can be. He had a word for that vision: friendship. The good friend is someone who knows themselves, who is honest and courageous, who has time for others, who is engaged not only in their self-interest but has a concern for others. These are some of the virtues we should nurture in order to be fulfilled as friends.
However, there’s a further dimension to the good life, which virtue ethics also highlights — and which is problematic for us, given the hyper-individualism of contemporary societies.
The virtue ethics approach is not individualistic. It tells us that to become all we might be as humans we need others. And we need others in a number of ways. One is highlighted by Aristotle’s focus on friendship. Social animals, like ourselves, are fulfilled by being with others: we discover who we are by discovering who others are — those to whom we are connected by way of family, affection, community, and society. They shape us, and we shape them, and so we need to have a concern for them all. If we live in an unhappy family, or in an oppressive society, that is going to have a major impact upon our own lives, even compromising our full flourishing as human beings.
That’s one reason we need others. But we also need them because the communities to which we belong are also the repositories for the skills that we need to live well. The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has draw attention to this in his book After Virtue. He points out that community life is the context within which we learn the characteristics and habits that make for the good life. Consider how one learns to play chess. It’s only by belonging to a community of chess players, and learning from past masters, that you too might become good at chess. You can learn the basics on your own, but the art of chess only by practicing with others. Alternatively, think of baseball. “If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not,” MacIntyre writes, “I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.”
There’s a third reason we need communities too. They are not only the context within which we learn life’s virtues, they are also the context within which we hear the stories that can inspire us about who we might become. These are the stories held, most commonly, in religious communities — the stories that convey how life is a gift, how life is for love, and how even in the midst of suffering there is hope. Stories are so important because they inform our vision of the good life — and that, in turn, informs us, and shapes our conduct.
Of course, the Enlightenment tells stories about who we are too. Only, they are individualistic, having to do with our rights and happiness. Much modern science tells us stories about who we are as well. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, frequently tell us we are basically the same as our primate cousins, struggling to survive, and driven by our selfish genes. This last story has been particularly powerful over recent decades.
When Alasdair MacIntyre asked how we might use virtue ethics to inspire us to live well today, he concluded pessimistically. He thought that our common life had become too thin, as a result of individualism, and so is unable to teach us the virtues. Hence he called his book After Virtue. He thought we are at a moment in history that needs some striking individual to stir up the desire in us to flourish again. It's happened before. In 5th century BCE Athens, figures like Socrates emerged. In the early Christian period, there was the person of Jesus. Or again, in the period around the collapse of the Roman empire, Benedict of Nursia emerged, and essentially became the founder of Western monasticism. Who will it be today?
Mark Vernon The Return of Virtue Ethics
What is the good life? How can we know?
The Enlightenment was a revolution in the way we think about morality. Two ethical models, in particular, have come to dominate ever since. One can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, and is based upon the notion of duty (and hence is called deontological, from the Greek deon, meaning duty.) The second is hedonist and can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, and his principle of utility: an action can be called good if it increases pleasure or decreases pain.
Put them together and you have the liberal approach to asking what’s the right thing to do. It’s liberal not in the sense of being pro-gay or pro-abortion. Rather, it’s liberal in the deeper sense of focusing on the individual and the choices an individual makes. It's ethics conceived of in terms of rights and responsibilities, or in terms of what makes you happy or sad. The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed it up when he wrote: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.”
You can understand why Mill wrote what he did. He lived in a period of history in which many people were not free to do as they chose. They were ruled by monarchs and chastised by prelates. The result was the subjugation of women and the owning of slaves. But we don’t live in such a world now. Most enjoy a degree of freedom that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, in the West at least. As a result, the liberal approaches to ethics are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life?
The problem is that we’ve lost touch with the bigger picture: what is it that makes life good for us humans? The Enlightenment left us with few resources for thinking about that larger question, because it was so focused on winning individuals their freedom. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe described our dilemma this way. Our talk of having “moral duties,” or our description of actions as “morally right,” has become vacuous because we are now free of the law-giving God who fixes those duties and obligations. And Anscombe, as a Catholic, was a firm believer in God — only not a law-giving God but a loving one.
In any case, now that we are relatively free, we need to ask again what life is for. There is another ethical tradition that can help. It’s known as virtue ethics. Virtue ethics begins by asking what it is to be human, and proceeds by asking what virtues — or characteristics, habits and skills — we need in order to become all that we might be as humans. It’s much associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who discussed the meaning of friendship as a way to illustrate his approach to ethics.
Science tells us we are social animals, Aristotle observed. But in order to live well as social animals, we also need a vision of what our sociality can be. He had a word for that vision: friendship. The good friend is someone who knows themselves, who is honest and courageous, who has time for others, who is engaged not only in their self-interest but has a concern for others. These are some of the virtues we should nurture in order to be fulfilled as friends.
However, there’s a further dimension to the good life, which virtue ethics also highlights — and which is problematic for us, given the hyper-individualism of contemporary societies.
The virtue ethics approach is not individualistic. It tells us that to become all we might be as humans we need others. And we need others in a number of ways. One is highlighted by Aristotle’s focus on friendship. Social animals, like ourselves, are fulfilled by being with others: we discover who we are by discovering who others are — those to whom we are connected by way of family, affection, community, and society. They shape us, and we shape them, and so we need to have a concern for them all. If we live in an unhappy family, or in an oppressive society, that is going to have a major impact upon our own lives, even compromising our full flourishing as human beings.
That’s one reason we need others. But we also need them because the communities to which we belong are also the repositories for the skills that we need to live well. The contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has draw attention to this in his book After Virtue. He points out that community life is the context within which we learn the characteristics and habits that make for the good life. Consider how one learns to play chess. It’s only by belonging to a community of chess players, and learning from past masters, that you too might become good at chess. You can learn the basics on your own, but the art of chess only by practicing with others. Alternatively, think of baseball. “If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not,” MacIntyre writes, “I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch.”
There’s a third reason we need communities too. They are not only the context within which we learn life’s virtues, they are also the context within which we hear the stories that can inspire us about who we might become. These are the stories held, most commonly, in religious communities — the stories that convey how life is a gift, how life is for love, and how even in the midst of suffering there is hope. Stories are so important because they inform our vision of the good life — and that, in turn, informs us, and shapes our conduct.
Of course, the Enlightenment tells stories about who we are too. Only, they are individualistic, having to do with our rights and happiness. Much modern science tells us stories about who we are as well. Evolutionary psychologists, for example, frequently tell us we are basically the same as our primate cousins, struggling to survive, and driven by our selfish genes. This last story has been particularly powerful over recent decades.
When Alasdair MacIntyre asked how we might use virtue ethics to inspire us to live well today, he concluded pessimistically. He thought that our common life had become too thin, as a result of individualism, and so is unable to teach us the virtues. Hence he called his book After Virtue. He thought we are at a moment in history that needs some striking individual to stir up the desire in us to flourish again. It's happened before. In 5th century BCE Athens, figures like Socrates emerged. In the early Christian period, there was the person of Jesus. Or again, in the period around the collapse of the Roman empire, Benedict of Nursia emerged, and essentially became the founder of Western monasticism. Who will it be today?
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Concerning the Foolishness of Civil War Reenactments
BY HISTORIAN GUY LANFANTASIE
Yet none of these silent tributes really get to the heart of the Civil War. Some historians talk about the Civil War’s "unfinished business," as if the conflict involved a checklist that no one got around to completing. Actually the war changed everything in the United States: how Americans thought about themselves and their country; how work and industry could be organized, just like the huge armies that tramped from battle to battle; how the nation would henceforth define citizenship and civil rights; how equality would be heralded and, sadly, curtailed (both at the same time); how the federal government steadily grew in size and scope but adopted laissez-faire policies, especially when if came to regulating business or neglecting the downtrodden; how people would relate to one another -- more circumspect, less innocently than in the old days before the war; and even how people would speak to one another using new, crisp, declarative slang words and a rugged American language, captured so perfectly in the writings of Mark Twain, that resembled soldier talk and the realism of war. What the war did not change -- not permanently, anyway -- were white attitudes toward African-Americans and other minorities. Nor have those attitudes changed all that much in our own time, despite some of the very real advances that have marked race relations since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other tangible victories of the civil rights movement.
In 1961, at the start of the Civil War Centennial, Walker Percy, the talented Mississippi novelist, observed that "the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro." Fifty years later, while a black man occupies the Oval Office, we still haven’t made up our mind as to what we should do about African-Americans and every other minority that inhabits this nation. White racial fears are hidden behind "birther" accusations, draconian immigration proposals and political attacks on federal entitlement programs; some white Americans even cry out that they want to take their country back.
The Civil War sesquicentennial can give them only one answer: You may try to get it back by pretending to fire on Fort Sumter, as the Civil War reenactors did in Charleston two weeks ago. Or you may try to get it back by joining the Tea Party and working to turn back the hands of time to the glory days you imagine as having once existed. But you can’t get your country back. You lost it 150 years ago. Ever since then, whether you like it or not, the steady march of the United States has been toward the higher ground, the greater purpose, of democracy and equality. And while that march has sometimes been stalled or even derailed, while it has been barricaded, hosed down and even sold out, nothing, nothing, has ever succeeded in keeping it permanently from moving forward. Perhaps, in the end, that’s the real legacy and the true significance of the Civil War.
Yet none of these silent tributes really get to the heart of the Civil War. Some historians talk about the Civil War’s "unfinished business," as if the conflict involved a checklist that no one got around to completing. Actually the war changed everything in the United States: how Americans thought about themselves and their country; how work and industry could be organized, just like the huge armies that tramped from battle to battle; how the nation would henceforth define citizenship and civil rights; how equality would be heralded and, sadly, curtailed (both at the same time); how the federal government steadily grew in size and scope but adopted laissez-faire policies, especially when if came to regulating business or neglecting the downtrodden; how people would relate to one another -- more circumspect, less innocently than in the old days before the war; and even how people would speak to one another using new, crisp, declarative slang words and a rugged American language, captured so perfectly in the writings of Mark Twain, that resembled soldier talk and the realism of war. What the war did not change -- not permanently, anyway -- were white attitudes toward African-Americans and other minorities. Nor have those attitudes changed all that much in our own time, despite some of the very real advances that have marked race relations since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other tangible victories of the civil rights movement.
In 1961, at the start of the Civil War Centennial, Walker Percy, the talented Mississippi novelist, observed that "the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro." Fifty years later, while a black man occupies the Oval Office, we still haven’t made up our mind as to what we should do about African-Americans and every other minority that inhabits this nation. White racial fears are hidden behind "birther" accusations, draconian immigration proposals and political attacks on federal entitlement programs; some white Americans even cry out that they want to take their country back.
The Civil War sesquicentennial can give them only one answer: You may try to get it back by pretending to fire on Fort Sumter, as the Civil War reenactors did in Charleston two weeks ago. Or you may try to get it back by joining the Tea Party and working to turn back the hands of time to the glory days you imagine as having once existed. But you can’t get your country back. You lost it 150 years ago. Ever since then, whether you like it or not, the steady march of the United States has been toward the higher ground, the greater purpose, of democracy and equality. And while that march has sometimes been stalled or even derailed, while it has been barricaded, hosed down and even sold out, nothing, nothing, has ever succeeded in keeping it permanently from moving forward. Perhaps, in the end, that’s the real legacy and the true significance of the Civil War.
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