So I was paging through The New Republic’s archives late last night and I came across this review for The Idea of Justice, a book I had previously heard much praise for without a lot of context (like, say, what it was about). And to be sure, Moshe Halbertal’s review convinced me it’s worth checking out. But being a scholar of note himself, he threw out some interesting ideas of his own I want to address, specifically in the following passage:

The best way of making comparative judgments is by considering multiple points of view as they are refined by different theories, and weighing the diverse claims that they make. By rejecting an ultimate theory of justice, we do not paralyze ourselves, or surrender our intention to improve the world. Quite the contrary. We liberate ourselves for the full complexity of the challenge before us, and equip ourselves with all the elements of comparative reasoning that the evaluation of an injustice requires. Only when philosophy is deployed in this patient and pluralistic way can we apply it usefully to real people and real conditions.

A couple things strike me here. The first is that this is supposed to be one of the reasons for a multi-party system. In a world where we had stumbled across one perfect, ideal theory of justice, I couldn’t give you any good reason why we should only have one party to carry out the business of the state in accordance with that theory. But because political philosophy is still a wide open field, it’s hard to imagine a state based around enacting a sole ideal theory with no competition that wouldn’t end in disaster.

Sadly, we’re on the opposite end of the disaster spectrum these days; say what you will about Communism, but it’s more ideologically coherent than the mish-mash of slogans, postures, panders and clever evasions that both of our major parties have adopted as platforms. Partially, that’s just a concession to reality, the result of the sort of compromises you need to make in order to form broad coalitions. But it’s also representative of how little practically anyone in the political mainstream cares about basic philosophical principles. And that’s a problem, because the result is a tendency to address problems from the position of that reflexive sloganeering, when some kind of theory of justice on both sides would suit us far better.

But there’s something else in this passage I want to note. It’s only implied, although he expresses it far more bluntly a couple paragraphs prior when he says:

The problem with grand theories of justice, we might say, is not that each of them is, in its own way, right, but that by aspiring to grandness and exclusivity they are, all of them, wrong. The very attempt to produce a total and ultimate theory for a perfectly just society will inevitably generate injustice.

That’s certainly true of any prominent existing theory of justice. And even were some enterprising philosopher to stumble upon the ideal theory of justice tomorrow, I would never be content with a system of governance in which it could forever go unchallenged. But that being said, I’m not willing to give up on the hunt for the ideal theory just yet. For one thing, the competing ideal theories that are so useful when played off one another were birthed from that hunt for the one perfect theory. Even if we grant that the existence of a grand, unifying theory of justice (so to speak) is a fiction, it’s a useful fiction insofar as it keeps us searching.

Besides, while I’ll admit that the odds of that we’ll ever perfect a theory of justice are extremely slim, but at the same time I’m highly skeptical of any claim of the form, “We’ll never discover X.” It reminds me far too much of the (admittedly apocryphal) 19th century patent officer who claimed that everything of significance that could be invented already had been. Unless Halbertal can expose the exact mechanism blocking such a discovery–sort of a philosophical Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle–then I think we assume too much in firmly concluding that it’s forever beyond humanity’s grasp.

Leave it to Fucked Up to get this curmudgeonly Jew in the Christmas spirit.

(Via Attackerman)

From the checkout lady at Hollywood Video:

DUNE is awesome! So much better than David Lynch’s later stuff, when he entered that sexy-creepy phase. It’s even better than the book. I tried reading it, but it’s like this thick and has way too much information.

Merry Christmas, guys. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift for the discerning weird tales consumer, do the exact opposite of what’s suggested above. Get Blue Velvet, or Mullholland Drive, or Dune (the book). But, for the love of god, don’t get the film that both Lynch and Sting disowned. I mean, the guy won’t even disown the song S.O.S., but he’ll disown this. That’s how bad it is.

Incidentally, the reason why I bring this up is because last night my good friend Peter and I had a theme movie night where the theme was “Films that Ruin Our Favorite Childhood Sci-Fi Authors.” The other movie we watched was this:

Which is worth watching just for the third act, which includes a heart-rending soliloquy by Keanu Reeves about the joys of room service and an unexpected cameo by Dolph Lundgren as some kind of crazy Moses impersonator/luddite Tea Partier.

Speaking of Mike Potemra (subject of my last post), Matthew Yglesias has a great rejoinder:

But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South. At times in different countries, authority and tradition has meant backing absolute monarchy or vicious dictatorships. Or maybe conservatism means women can’t vote. Eventually, you wind up defending the United Federation of Planets just like Captain Picard.

This is the problem with basing a political movement around a disposition, instead of a guiding philosophy. If conservatives don’t much care for “peace, tolerance, due process, [and] progress,” what do they stand for? “Skepticism about human perfectibility” doesn’t cut it–skepticism is all well and good, but it’s no foundation for anything more.

Mike Potemra, a writer at that intellectual hotbed known as the National Review, wrote a pretty amazing paragraph that’s been getting some play on liberal blogs:

Coincidentally, I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility).

Wow. In addition to surrendering peace, tolerance, due process and even progress over to liberal hegemony, Potemra sets up a pretty lazy dichotomy. It’s not just that “human perfectibility” does not, as far as I can tell, play any significant role in modern liberal political thought–it’s that I see no reason why skepticism about it should be at all contradictory to the “unabashedly liberal” ideals he mentions. “Skepticism about human perfectibility,” when placed in direct contradiction with progress, is little more than a quick and dirty evasion of moral responsibility by way of the Nirvana fallacy. It’s a way of saying: “Well, things will never be perfect, so why try to even make them better? Why not just stay in this perfectly acceptable holding pattern until the Rapture?”

Problem is, unless you’re advocating some kind of Rosseau-style return to nature (which is its own breed of starry-eyed utopianism), then staying where we are means accepting all of the progress we’ve already made. Something tells me that Potemra, were he given a time machine, would not spend most of his time running around telling his ancestors to forsake geometry, running water, and Christianity* because of “skepticism about human perfectibility.”

With that in mind, why should things be different now? It’s supremely arrogant to just assume that we’ve already reached our peak along the long arc of history, and any attempt to meddle with it will result in failure. And, for that matter, it’s significantly more naïve than the “human perfectibility” straw man, because it presumes that we’ve already gotten as close to the ideal society as we ever will. The result isn’t cold, hard realism; it’s a pathological aversion to change, even when we absolutely must.

*This is not to call the rise of Christianity “progress,” which is an entirely different and extremely complicated debate, but for now it should suffice to say that most National Review writers probably see it as such.

Long-time friend of the blog Matt Zeitlin having recently resumed blogging at his old place again, has been doing some interesting work on the left’s internal debate over the Senate health care bill (which will likely be, more or less, the conference bill). Characterizing the argument of bill opponent Glenn Greenwald writes:

What matters is not that the bill “will also do some genuine good, as it will help many people who can’t get coverage now to get it.” The immediate policy implications are not as important as the affirmative says they are.

The “genuine good” is really insignificant when it comes to the fight that truly matters, the fight against corporatism: “But if one finds this creeping corporatism to be a truly disturbing and nefarious trend, then the bill will seem far less benign.” We should bed discussing corporatism and strategies to defeat instead of wasting our time thinking up and passing policies in the corporatist system.

We shouldn’t just consider the immediate consequences, but instead consider how this bill upholds and strengthens a corrupt mode of governance and policy making: “Even if one grants the arguments made by proponents of the health care bill about increased coverage, what the bill does is reinforces and bolsters a radically corrupt and flawed insurance model and an even more corrupt and destructive model of “governing.” It is a major step forward for the corporatist model, even a new innovation in propping it up.”

This entire debate comes down to a weighing of alternatives. If we accept Greenwald’s own terms and his description of the debate, we must ask what is more important, expanding health care coverage and regulating the insurance industry, or drawing a line in the sand and saying that this “corrupt and destructive model of governing” is wrong and should be fought and rejected at every turn?

Which is to say he’s making a process argument. Greenwald is an attorney, and so he’s concerned with matters of precedent.

Clearly, the factions in this dispute can’t be easily categorized as “corporatist” and “anti-corporatist.” Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein all support the bill–none of them could be accurately described as content with the level of influence large corporations wield over American politics. So if we grant, for just a little while, Greenwald’s premise that this bill is somehow advancing the cause of corporatism, it’s fair to say that most of its supporters on the left aren’t supporting it out of an ideological commitment to corporate hegemony.

Instead, they marshal arguments like this one, this one, and this one. All arguments about the immediate impact of the policy as viewed in a political vacuum; in other words, arguing that the bill is good independent of both the process through which it was written and the precedent it sets for future legislation.

Now, for the record, I think this is a good bill. I think that you do the best with the tools that you are given, and that it’s a remarkable victory that the left was able to wring a reform bill out of Congress in the first place. I also think that, despite what Greenwald says, the passage of this bill will set a fantastic precedent; it will break a long drought during which nobody ever dreamed of Congress passing sweeping expansions of the welfare state.

But that being said, I think that left-leaning supporters of the bill need to eventually confront the broader worldview that Greenwald represents here. He’s asking us if spending political capital and time to reach policy goals we see as achievable right now is worth it if it means working through a corrupt system that will go unreformed in the meantime. If I can extrapolate from his position a little bit, it seems to suggest that the more we work through that system, the more we become bonded to it, and the more difficult actual reform becomes.

So there’s an interesting tension there. And progressives pretty much across the spectrum are frustrated with the process, broadly speaking–Yglesias, one of the more prominent bloggers supporting the bill, is particularly concerned with reforming the Senate rules. The question is how much we’re willing to sacrifice immediate policy goals to work on process goals that will (hopefully) make achieving those policy goals easier in the future.

That’s a conversation I think the left needs to start having. It probably won’t be an easy one.

It’s kind of funny how willing I’ve been to mouth off on this blog on a number of very important, complex issues when the most direct experience I have with those issues is through spending a lot of time on the Internet, while the one topic on which I actually do have some degree of (undergraduate) formal training–philosophy–has gone pretty well neglected.

Part of that probably has to do with the fact that I’ve gotten pretty sick of it at various points during this past semester, most notably during the finals week from which I was just ejected, naked and sobbing. In order to expedite the whole graduation thing, I took four (!) philosophy classes this semester, which I figured would result in either a miserable, three-month grind or a bracing dose of challenging, thought-provoking academic rigor. Sadly, this was a semester high on the first-order logic and metaphysical esoterica (which are both of value, but not exactly why I picked the major) and low on political philosophy, so things tilted towards the “grind” end of the spectrum.

But somewhere in between having an email debate with some other members of the International Youthful Bloggers With no Real Political Influence Conspiracy (IYBWRPIC) over the merits of political philosophy and writing a paper on Hume, liberty and necessity, I remembered something: I enjoy the shit out of philosophy. And more importantly, it’s a discipline that does matter, however marginal a role it plays in modern political debates.

So starting with this break, I’m going to be trying a new angle with the blog. Basically, I want to do as much as I can to bring political philosophy to the non-philosopher, demonstrate its continued relevance, and, if possible, start some philosophy-minded conversation about contemporary political issues.

But then again, I also plan to use this break to finish Crime and Punishment, watch all of Justice with Michael Sandel (which you can bet I’ll be discussing here) and amass a better-than-perfunctory collection of, and knowledge regarding, prog rock. So we’ll see which of those goals actually get fulfilled.

So I was going to write a whole big thing about my conspiracy theory regarding Iran’s seizure of an oil field in southern Iraq, but then Michael Crowley wrote a post about how this isn’t really news and I breathed a sigh of relief, but THEN I thought, well, hell, why not put the idea out there anyway and play a little armchair strategist?

So imagine, hypothetically, that this was actually an unprecedented grab at valuable property by Iran. My theory was that the broader strategic goal was to drag the United States into an even more prolonged occupation of Iraq. I’m admittedly fuzzy on the strength of the Iraqi military, but something tells me that it probably couldn’t handle a conflict with Iran on its own, and Maliki would have incentive to ask Obama for a longer troop commitment. Of course, this comes right after we’ve already committed more troops to Afghanistan, so the American military would be overextended. And because Obama’s more measured than his predecessor, Tehran might feel more comfortable pushing his buttons like this.

What this would do for the Iranian regime, besides being a test of its status as a regional power, is help with the situation at home. What better pretense for cracking down on dissent and further militarizing the country?

Of course, this is all sort of moot now. But if I ever decide I want a career writing crappy political thrillers, I think I’ve got my first premise.

Via Dylan’s twitter feed, James Poulos remarks that Ezra Klein’s characterization of Lieberman’s moral failure on health care was “reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating.” Here’s the offending sentence in the offending post:

That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

Strong words! But not so irresponsible, I think. The objection Poulos raises is that the more accurate construction would be to argue that Lieberman is letting hundreds of thousands of people die. He argues:

In truth, of course, to kill a bill that would prevent people from dying is not to kill those people — just as refraining from saving a person in mortal peril is not causing them to die.

But that’s not a proper analogy. To refrain from rescuing someone only requires passivity; it’s about what you’re not doing. For Lieberman, that would mean not voting at all. What he did instead was to threaten to filibuster the bill, thereby killing it. That isn’t inaction, but action–extraordinary action, in fact, although threats of filibustering have become so prevalent that we tend to forget just how extraordinary a measure it is.

The proper analogy, then, would not be refraining from rescuing someone, but instead actively obstructing a rescue attempted by someone else. Imagine that in more concrete terms: say a United States Senator was physically restraining a paramedic who was on her way to administer a necessary, life-saving procedure. If we are reasonably certain that the individual the paramedic is intent on saving would recover were the procedure administered, and if we’re also reasonably certain that the procedure would be administered were the paramedic not physically restrained, then it’s hardly “irresponsible” to claim that the person doing the restraining is causing a death.

So yes, Ezra Klein’s description of what Lieberman did was accurate. His post on the topic wasn’t an out of line assault, but a public service; if only more pundits articulated the actual consequences of all this parliamentary maneuvering as clearly as he did.

And Boehner knows it. He has reason to be excited about the fracturing of the Democratic Party, although if we’re very lucky, his celebrating is premature. It’s not too late to reverse this trend.

Reversing it, of course, requires conceding something on both the right- and left-most flanks of the party.

On the left: Sanders, Dean, Moulitsas and others should accept an improvement over the status quo as what it is and not vocally oppose the status quo legislation (me can’t form sentences good).

On the right: It’s time for Reid to summon up just a little of his inner Tom DeLay. Yglesias is correct that the White House can’t apply much pressure to Nelson and Lieberman. And Nelson, at least, is responding to real political pressure as a red state Senator.

Reid, though, has some leverage, albeit leverage that he never seems to use. I wouldn’t recommend targeting Nelson, because it’s unlikely someone more liberal could ever make it in Nebraska. But he could, at the very least, provide an instructive example for Nelson and others about what happens when you stray too far off the reservation by finally doing something about the Lieberman problem. I’m not necessarily saying he should move on trying to strip Lieberman of his committee assignments and seniority immediately; only that he put that tactic back on the table and make it clear that he’s not going to ignore bad faith attempts to sabotage major legislation any more.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for the Senate vote. If the Democrats manage to cobble together something close to a unified front and pass the bill, maybe things will start looking better on this front too.