No "General System Of Mendacity"?

For various reasons I've been thinking about what happens when people act, or judge, in ways that fail to fit a coherent or systematic pattern. It's tempting to say that there's something funny, or wrong, when someone who always acts or judges in accordance with a policy or system then acts or judges against that policy.

If someone goes around denouncing various behaviors, and gets all high and mighty about it, and then engages in the very same behavior herself, or approves of it in her friends, well, it's really annoying.

Sometimes such a person is judging, or acting, in a way that is hypocritical, or morally creepy. To judge according to one set of standards for person A and another for person B just because you like B better violates the demands of fairness. So there can be a moral condemnation.

But some people have the intuition that it's more than "unfair" to do this -- that it is somehow a violation of reason. It's "irrational" not to judge like cases alike. To which one always wants to say, "what on earth makes one case like another"?

I don't buy this irrationality move, myself. But in thinking about why it's wrong, I was struck by how hard it is to even say what is going on when someone judges in a way that seems "arbitrary," or non-systematic.

Because there are actually several things that can produce the effect, and they're all different.

Of course, a person may just be judging non-systematically and letting their emotions run away with them. That's the ordinary case.

But it could also be that a person has a kind of fucked-up policy in the first place. If someone's policy or system is to judge their friends according to one standard and strangers according to another policy, then they haven't violated their policy when they judge their friends differently. They just have an odd sense of priorities in the first place.

Then, too, a person might be in the process of changing his mind. If I have a policy of judging that something is bad, but then my friend gets involved, I may decide that I was dumb to judge so harshly in the first place, and I might change my policy.

The kicker with the last thing is that not only can I change my policy, I can change it back. How much of this can go on before you start to think the person doesn't really have a policy at all?

In the second and third case, what's irrational?

Imagine R is very harsh in judging drug use: he thinks it is immoral and that the people who use drugs are evil. Then R's nephew gets addicted to drugs and R becomes compassionate and says his nephew is a good kid.

On my three readings, R might be simply allowing his love to get in the way of his judgment, or he may have a set of priorities under which love for family members generally trumps judging them harshly, or he may find that interaction with his nephew changes his mind about drug use.

It's tempting to think we can distinguish the cases by looking at someone's future behavior, but it's not so clear. After all, if R judges a stranger harshly next time, we still don't know whether it's part of a policy or he's just changed his mind back.

While I've been pondering this, I've been rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust describes Odette as someone who acts and judges in a way that fails to be systematic: Odette lies, to her lover Swann, when she finds it useful to do so.

Swann appeals to her sense of coquettry: "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?"

But it doesn't work, because Odette has no policy of lying:

"In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she was simply content whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of it. So that lying for her was an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of a specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann's discovering that she had not told him the truth."

Even with all these details, I'm not totally sure. Is Odette someone with a policy of not lying, who gets carried away by self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of telling the truth, except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of self-interest only: she only tells the truth when it's in her own interest to do so?

I'm inclined to think it's the second one myself: she has a policy of telling the truth except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest. In that case, Odette's lying isn't really an exception, at all. It's just part of the program.

We can say that there's something morally fishy about such a life program. But irrational? Not so much.

Bad Behavior And Tolerance In Traffic And Beyond

"traffic jam" from nicpic's flickr stream. Used under Creative Commons license.

You may have missed the excellent piece in The Sunday Times on traffic behaviors: "The Urge to Merge," by Cynthia Gorney. I almost missed it; I just happened to click on it because, even though I don't have a car, I'm kind of obsessed with traffic.

Gorney talks about two kinds of traffic mentalities, which I'm sure are familiar to everyone.

The "lineuppers" quietly get in place at the end of the line in whatever lane they know they're going to end up in.

The "sidezoomers" zoom past all those patient lineuppers, using whatever lanes happen to be open, then edging their way into the proper lane when the time comes.

The lineuppers are all, "Those goddamn #$%& ing sidezoomers! No sense of fair play! No sense of respect! I'll NEVER let them edge their way in."

The sidezoomers are all, "Meh, all this kerfuffle about nothing! Obviously, the traffic moves fastest when all the available space is used. I'm just trying to, you know, move everyone along. So CHILL, lineuppers."

To my utter delight, Gorney decides to determine, once and for all, who is right, by talking to some actual traffic experts.

Various hilarity ensues, and you should really read the article. But what I can't stop thinking about is the conclusion, which is about as frustrating and annoying as a conclusion could possibly be.

Traffic, it turns out, moves fastest when most people are linuppers, but some are sidezoomers, and -- get this -- when the linuppers just patiently let the sidezoomers in.

I know it's wrong to extrapolate from traffic, to cooperation in general, to morality and free-riders, to the overall meaning of life, but I couldn't help myself.

Think what this means for human existence. Cooperation works best when most people behave, but a few people don't, and when the misbehavior is patiently tolerated?

I find this conclusion just beyond infuriating. I mean, it's one thing if it's best for everyone to be a lineupper. And it's one thing if it's best for most people to be lineuppers, and for the linuppers to punish the sidezoomers. Or at least get to feel really indignant about them.

But the idea that not only is it best when there are sidezoomers, but that the sidezoomers can't be punished? Really. Beyond infuriating.

The fucking icing on the cake, of course, is that not only does the sidezoomer get home earlier, he's probably having a great time, listening to music, chillin', talking on the phone . . . meanwhile the poor linupper not only gets home later, but he has to get all angry and upset along the way. At those goddamn sidezoomers.

Fast forward forty years, the sidezoomer is sipping cocktails at the lineuppers funeral, after the linupper dies of a heart attack from all that indignation he wasn't allowed to express.

I mean, I know "life isn't fair," and all that, but this is ridiculous!

The Devil's Advocate And The Devil Himself

Yesterday, like a lot of people, I read the Times story about the internet trolls with a kind of horrified fascination.

I knew there were people who would say things they didn't believe, or ask dumb questions, just to get other people riled up. And I knew anonymous comments boards could be horrifically nasty and stupid.

But I didn't know there was this kind of connection between internet cruelty and real-life cruelty and harassment, like when some kids call up and mock the family of a teenager who killed himself. And I didn't know the people who act this way consider it an important or meaningful thing, or that they act together or even that they talk to each other. But there is, and they do, and they do.

I hope all C and C readers will join me in saying, "ZOMG WTF is wrong with these people?"

Anyway, here are three quick thoughts on the whole trolling concept.

1) There's a whole "back up your arguments!" "you can't just say that!" "you have to logically prove your point!" thing you find from regular commenters and trolls alike on message boards, and there's a bit of it here on the Times blog-form discussion of the story. That aspect is hilarious if you happen to teach at a university, like I do. I mean, every day I'm in the classroom asking students to have opinions, to disagree with one another, and to freakin' back up their opinions using logic. Usually I can't get a peep out of them, and when I do, they're usually trying to reconcile some other disagreeing views to show how they really "fit together." Why does this kind of "arguing" and demand for logic come so naturally online to people who shun it so vigorously in real life?

2) The obvious answer is "anonymity." I know, I know, people want to argue when it's anonymous, and they don't want to argue when they're sitting in a room together. I don't really get why this is so, but people have told me it's true, and I believe them. I get why people want to say "*%#@ you, you %$#%ing ^@#$&(@!!!" when they're anonymous, not that it's a taste I share myself. But arguing and demanding reason and logic? That is what you do for fun when no one knows who you are?

3) There are people, some of whom also commented on the Times blog post discussion, who like to say, "Well, I wouldn't do anything really bad, but I do like to stir up trouble on internet discussions by saying stuff I don't really believe in order to get a rise out of people. In order to, you know, get them to back up their arguments. I'm playing Devil's advocate."

As a philosophy professor I suppose I should be thrilled that someone wants to have a debate, but you know what? I think this sort of behavior is actually not OK. I mean, it's fine to say, of something people actually believe but you don't, "I don't really believe X but some people do, and what do you say to that?"

But to pretend to believe something so someone will have to back up and prove to you the opposite is true? Beyond sophomoric, and entering the territory of evil. First, it creates in every reader's mind the possibility he is surrounded by morons or worse. Second, it uses up everyone's time and energy on stupid stuff. Finally, it just makes us all feel like we're surrounded by a bunch of disagreeing and disagreeable weirdos.

So: playing devil's advocate? OK if you're among friends, OK if you explain you're just playing devil's advocate, and if you have a reason. Otherwise? Knock it off!!

Don't Be Judgey!

Ironically, there seems to be this idea out there -- out there only in the girly blogosphere? I don't know -- that one shouldn't be judgmental.

"Don't judge! I got my thing going on that you don't know anything about and even if you did it's not your place to have opinions about my life 'cuz it's mine anyway and you're not my mom so just, like, don't get all judgey!"

I say "ironic" just because what are internet conversations except occasions to be judgey? OK, I'm exaggerating, but if you're posting on any sort of blog about celebrities, or gossip, or fashion, all it is is fucking judging.

But whatever. We can leave that irony aside. What makes it OK to complain about people being judgmental?

Surely it's OK to judge other people. We do it all the time. The person who beats his kids, the guy who rapes women, and the woman who commits identity theft? All properly judged as morally wanting. The guy who jumps onto the subway tracks to rescue someone? Properly judged a hero.

I figure the subtext of the demand not to be judgey is something like, "don't be judgmental about things that aren't moral wrongs, but are just, you know, things I'm doing."

And I think this is fair and reasonable. Often the demand arises in connection with something that is in the moral margins. You know, like judging whether someone may withhold certain information in relationships, or whether someone may lie in some circumstance, or whether it's OK to let your kids drink alcohol in your home.

These kinds of cases are on the moral margins in the sense that we think there's some moral aspect to the situation, but we know everyone isn't going to agree on whether it's a case of moral wrong -- "oh, no, you mustn't" -- or moral permissibility -- "I wouldn't, but hey, knock yourself out."

Knowing that it's a marginal case, the defensive person feels it's his right to judge for himself. Not to be judged. Or maybe the defensive person feels that in whatever context the conversation is happening, the demands of politeness or friendship or community are overriding, so that as long as its a marginal case, she shouldn't be judged.

I think this is a fair demand, and I just want to pause here to note that it rests on what I think of as a "traditional" model of morality.

On the traditional model, there are things that are morally charged, and things that aren't, and a few things in the vague area in between. As long as someone's doing OK with the morally charged things -- like not abusing kids -- they get to do what they want with the non-morally charged things. Morality only covers a small subsection of life.

There's been a kind of interest lately in overthrowing the traditional model, in favor of an even older, but also newer, "holistic" model. On the holistic model, life isn't divided into a kind of moral domain and non-moral domain; instead, a life as a whole can be well-lived, or not. So the philosophers talk of "virtue ethics," rather than "rights-and-duties." Live a life of virtue!

On the holistic model, the aim is to live a good life, and to worry less about moral rules and transgressions and more about how one's life works overall.

When you put it this way, the holistic model sounds nice: open-ended, flexible, accomodating.

But I just want to point out one thing. On the holistic model, there's no escape from "judgey."

Since there's no non-moral domain, everything you do is up for evaluation, by yourself, and by others. There's no defense of acting in the moral margins, because there are no moral margins -- there isn't even any non-moral domain of life, really.

To me it's a huge problem with the holistic model. Hey, you know, if I want to live a stupid life, what's the problem? As long as I'm not hurting anyone? The main good thing about the traditional model is that the answer is clear: "Nothing."

On the holistic model, the answer is, "Well, maybe lots, depending on how stupid your life is." The range for judgey is huge.

So just to say. Next time you're thinking it would be better to junk all those moralizing rules, or the inflexibility of the demands of rights and duties, think of what you're missing: the right to say, "Don't judge!"

"Women Are Irrational!"

When I learned as a young person that it used to be considered common sense to think that women were less rational than men, I was surprised.

I mean, aren't guys the ones known for getting into impulsive barroom fights, raping women, and buying expensive consumer electronics?

Aren't women known as the planners and the plodders of life? The ones who make grocery lists, nag people to eat their vegetables, and make "safe" but weak investment choices?

OK, I am overstating, but you know what I mean.

I got thinking about this recently when the Times did that series on love in Iraq, or whatever it was, and they quoted some man talking about how the reason one had to keep women indoors was that they were so irrational, they could be talked into anything. Let them out of the house, and some guy will sweet-talk them into having sex, and that'll be the end of it.

Leaving aside all the other questions this raises, I had to ask myself, Well, is this true? Are women are more swayed by emotions they haven't reflected on?

And I replied to myself, "Hmph! Swayed by emotions when it comes to sex? It's guys who are always saying they couldn't help themselves; it's guys who respond to the simplest visual cues; it's guys who actually make less rational decisions when there are pretty girls around (at least if this somewhat wacky study is true).

I explained my ruminations to a wise friend, who said something like, Well, maybe what it is is that women are more likely to change their minds about things in response to what is immediately in front of them, and men are more likely to say constant to abstractions despite conditions on the ground.

I think this may be right. But I don't think it shows women are more irrational. I mean, depending on your goals, sometimes it's means-end rational to change your strategy, or focus on the immediate, and sometimes it's not.

For example, people talk about moral "impartiality." The moral point of view should treat all persons the same.

But we also tend to think parents should take special care of their own children, and are right to lavish extra care on them.

It's easy to see how everyone might be best off when parents lavish extra care on their own children, which means these don't really conflict.

Focusing on the immediate, and not being impartial, can nonetheless be "rational" in the larger sense.

So: I don't think the difference in focus shows women to be less rational.

It is true that a kind of impulsivity can sometimes be irrational, and I think that's why I always thought it was more of a guy thing, especially in the sex and violence realm.

Then I thought, Aha! That's why people always thought of men as more rational: men are rational with particular exceptions. Exceptions they treat as irrationality. Whereas it's harder to carve out the parts of women's behavior that seem impulsive, calculating, emotive, etc. It's all kind of a mix.

And then I had a smaller kind of Aha when I thought, "Oh, and that's why sex was probably considered this strange dark force instead of just a normal part of life."

Maybe you already understood all of this. But it cleared up some things for me.

Speaking of non-impulsivity, here's a fun fact: according to Wikipedia, "a 'darcy' is a unit of permeability." OK it's not named after that Darcy but after another Darcy, but still, wouldn't it have been cuter and equally efficient if they'd made the darcy a unit of "impermeability" rather than permeability?

What If You Are Special?

OK, so there's this way of thinking that goes like this: if you don't know whether you're "typical" or special with respect to some unknown thing, then you should assume you're typical.

Since, you know, odds are that you are typical.

So, for instance, when people talk about crazy shit like the end of the world, they use this reasoning to predict "with 95% "confidence", that humanity will disappear within 9120 years." That's from the Wikipedia entry on Doomsday arguments. The idea is that you and I probably aren't among the very first people to live, and we're probably not among the very last people to live. Probably. So, probably, we're somewhere in the middle. Which if you add in a few
assumptions, leads to the 9120 number.

Then also there's that book I wrote about before on C and C, Stumbling on Happiness. There, Dan Gilbert says that since most people are really bad at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make you, you should inform yourself by asking how happy or unhappy that same thing made other people.

So, if you're not sure how upsetting it will be when your team loses, or how happy you'll be when you get a raise, you should just check with someone else whose team lost and who got a raise.

This assumes you're pretty typical, which, probabilistically is probably a pretty safe assumption. But what if you're not? If you're not typical, there's no way to reason yourself out of a clearly false conclusion.

So maybe you know that, statistically, almost everyone is happier being married. It seems to follow that in the absence of knowledge of your own specialness, you too should assume you will be happier married. But if you're in the minority of people who just isn't going to be happier being married, well, there's no way you could factor that in. There's no way not to come to the wrong conclusions.

It almost makes you think there's something fishy about the whole thing. I mean, if I don't know anything about how typical I am, how can I assign a probability to my own typicality? Maybe I'm so underinformed about my own typicality that I should just assume ignorance.

In that case, coming up against questions like whether to get married, you'd have to guess, you know, or punt. Kind of wing it. At least then there would be the off chance that if you're atypical, you'll make an atypical decision. And maybe live happily ever after, who knows?

Unless, of course, the world comes to an end.

Irrationality: What Is The Deal?

Today I did something that is a paradigm case of irrational behavior. I was in line at Starbucks, and although I wasn't exactly hungry, I wanted something. Along with my coffee I ordered a chocolate doughnut. I know from previous Starbucks adventures that those chocolate doughnuts are mm mm good.

I brought it back to my table, and I did some stuff on my computer, and I drank my coffee. The work I was doing was pretty absorbing, and I found myself sort of forgetting about my doughnut. After a little while had passed, I actually was hungry. I hate eating sugary sweets on an empty stomach; it always makes me feel kind of sick. What I really wanted then was a small, pre-workout, healthy snack. In the mall where my gym is there's a food court, and in the food court there's a sushi place that is super-convenient, and at the sushi place they sell these little snack-sized packs of nigiri. About $3.75 plus tax. They're kind of the perfect little snack.

I decided I'd wait, have a sushi snack, digest a bit, and then go to the gym. Now, the thing is, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking when I ordered the doughnut, because I'm trying to lose weight, and as I said, I wasn't even hungry.

So when I realized it was in my power to forgo the doughnut, the idea of giving it up grabbed me in a big way. So what did I do?

I threw it away. In the garbage.

If you were trying to come up with an example of someone who behaved irrationally, in the sense of being self-undermining, this is a textbook case.

So. What happened? Was it

1) I "changed my mind" twice: once when I went from "I'm watching my weight" to "I'll take that doughut" and once when I threw it away.

2) I suffered from "weakness of will" when I ordered the doughnut, and the will magically reappeared in time for me to throw the doughnut away.

3) I was never sufficiently committed to watching my weight, or to eating the doughnut.

I'm asking seriously. Socrates is famous for having thinking there is no such thing as 2) -- you always do as you just best at the moment, so the problem is with your judging not your asking.

Some other philosophers think 3) is right, but I've always had my doubts. I don't need full commitment to things to carry them out, do I? I mean, it wouldn't be better to be "wholehearted" about doughnut eating, would it?

I'm thinking maybe it's 1). And then, what I don't get is, how are you supposed to know when your changing your mind is going to lead you down the path of utter ridiculousness? Or isn't that something to worry about?

Consent To Bodily Harm: A Paradox?

The Toronto Star had an interesting story yesterday about a court case. I've tried and tried to find it on their website but I can't so it's lucky I saved the dead-tree-format version I was reading over my dinner.

The headline is, "People Can't Invite Violent Sex Acts, Judge Rules." The case involves a couple who routinely engaged in what's described as "raunchy" sex, over a period of years. Some of that was sado-masochistic. They had a safe word.

The guy is accused of sexual assault for having choked her to the point of unconsciousness and then, well, maybe you're reading this over lunch or something, so let's just say, he's accused of having followed this up with further sexual acts while she was "out."

The accuser called the cops one month after it happened, and then later tried to recant, explaining that since it was a consensual interaction, there was nothing he did wrong. The accuser says she "routinely" consented to being choked.

OK, let's pass quickly over the whole report-it-one-month-later-then-deny-there-was-anything business. About that we can just say, something is f***ed up between these two people.

What's more interesting to me are the comments of the prosecutor and judge. The article says that the prosecutor (or as we call it here in Canada, the "Crown counsel"), argued "successfully" that "an individual cannot consent to bodily harm, such as being choked to the point of unconsciousness." The prosecutor called it "paradoxical" that one who was unconscious could be "in a position to enjoy heightened or intensified sexual gratification."

Later it says quotes the judge saying, "Even if she had consented previously - or on that night - she cannot legally consent to sexual activity that takes place when she is unconscious."

This makes it sound like according to the judge, the accuser could have consented to being choked. And maybe she could have consented to being choked to the point of unconsciousness. But she couldn't consent to anything that happened when she was unconscious.

So, does this mean that to engage in any sex act legally, each party must be in a position to give consent at the moment of sex? Then if two longtime partners want to get really drunk and have sex, or if a guy has sex with his wife in the middle of the night and she falls asleep in the middle, or if one person wants to get really stoned and have their partner have sex with them, all those things would be sexual assault.

It also makes it sound like according to the judge, there's nothing paradoxical going on, and it's not a question of bodily harm. It's just a question of the possibility of consent, and when and how it's required.

On the other hand, the judge also said, "the reasonable man would conclude that choking someone to the point of unconsciousness does interfere with that person's 'health or comfort,' and can, in some cases, endanger life."

I don't know what the law is, but if there's a law against making other people uncomfortable, we're all in big trouble.

Autonomy And Lust

In my proto-post on Viagra I promised reflection on the whole Viagra-for-women controversy.

What controversy, you ask? Well, obviously Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies are dying to make and market a female equivalent to Viagra.

Turns out that's more complicated than they thought, because women's physiology, and women's sexuality, is more complicated than men's.

And some women are arguing that not only is a female desire pill elusive, it's also a step down a wrong and dangerous road: it improperly treats women's lack of desire as medical "problem" or disease, while in fact it is both natural and a proper response to certain life conditions, like age.

Leonore Tiefer, a psychiatry prof at NYU, has become a kind of spokesperson for this view, and has started The New View campaign to educate women and industry about the idea that "female sexual dysfunction" may not be dysfunction at all.

For Viagra's 10th anniversary, US News and World Report interviewed Tiefer; you can read it online here. While I agree that there are certain dangers associated with any drug that alters the way a person feels, it seems to me the push to not create such drugs at all is a dramatic overreaction to these dangers.

The most obvious point here is that some women do experience loss of desire in a way that does seem "dysfunctional" and in a way that makes them unhappy. Women who've had various diseases, women on anti-depressants and other drugs, women who have unusual hormonal distributions may experience loss of sexual desire as a physiological effect in a relatively simple sense. It's hard to see why they should be prevented from treatment they want.

Others have made this point effectively. But I want to defend the more radical point of view that desire-enhancing drugs are appropriate for pretty much any woman who wants them.

Sometimes the worry is that "medicalizing" women's desire is a way of manipulating and controlling women from the outside. In a sense this may be true -- I return to it below. But there is one important sense in which it isn't true.

Sometimes philosophers who work on identity distinguish between those desires we identify with and those desires we feel are imposed upon us "from the outside." For instance, if I think of myself as someone who is kind and gentle, and I have an urge to punch you in the face after I lose at checkers, I may feel the violence as alien to my sense of self, even if it comes literally from inside me.

It's hard to distinguish these conceptually, or to find a good criterion. But one popular attempt to do so tells us that the desires that are "ours" are the ones we want to have: if I want to want to be kind, that desire is my own; since I would much rather not want to punch you, that desire is not. (see, e. g., the work of Harry Frankfurt).

Theorists endorsing this line of thought sometimes say that the ability to have the desires you want to have makes you more free, more autonomous, more yourself. I If I punch you after checkers I am less free, less autonomous, less myself, because I am controlled by a force that is not me: my rage.

On this criterion, anyway, desire-enhancing drugs would make the person who takes them more free, more autonomous, and more herself -- assuming her longing to feel desire is genuine -- since she would then have the desires she wants to have. So such drugs would not at all be manipulative.

It is true that for this to be the case, a woman's preference must be genuine. And perhaps one may say that once there are drugs for female desire, the social pressures to take them, or the pressure from men to take them, would make such preferences social, and not autonomous -- not belonging to the woman herself.

I admit such dangers are real. But for these considerations to trump others, it seems to me we have to assume that they are overwhelming: that women's preferences in this area could seldom be genuine, could seldom be their own, will always be the result of pressure. Women, on this view, must be incapable of choosing for themselves.

It seems to me the dangers of such an assumption are worse than the dangers of medicalizing female desire. So, on this autonomy thing, I'm coming down on the side of the pharmaceutical companies: you want to make female Viagra, and market it to the world, and become rich? Fine. Knock yourselves out.

I will say that if Viagra continues to be covered by insurance and the female drugs are not I will be pissed off on principle!

Noko (n+1), I Feel Your Pain. But Why?

I wrote recently about the strange relationship a person might have with his future selves. What if Noko (n) eats salad for dinner today to try to lose five pounds, and Noko (n+1) sabotages her efforts by ordering the creme brulee tomorrow? What if Noko (n+12) doesn't appreciate our efforts?

But, of course, we worry about our future selves, too. Constantly. Will they have enough money to retire on? Will they be healthy? Will they be suffering at next Tuesday's dentist appointment?

So. Why do we worry about our future selves? And how much should we worry?

In last Sunday's Times, Jim Holt reflects on the analogy between worrying about future selves and worrying about actual other people. He says the reason we worry about our future selves is that our evolutionary ancestors worried about their future selves.

OK, sure. As philosophers say, that's an explanatory reason, of a sort. It explains why, in the course of things, we are a certain way. But it's not an justificatory reason. It's not even a satisfying explanatory reason, in a way. It leaves open the question: Are we right to care about our future selves? And if we are, what makes this make sense? An evolutionary answer isn't going to solve that problem.

The question is important, because without an explanation of why we ought to care about our future selves, how are we going to answer the question of how much we ought to care about our future selves?

I'm inclined to say that in a way the question of "why" has no satisfactory answer. You care about your future self because it's you: it's more like caring about your present self than caring about someone else. In that case, the question of "how much" has no satisfactory answer either.

Holt imagines a person who doesn't care about his future self as someone who is really improvident: never saving for the future, never preparing for what's going to happen.

But even a person who doesn't want to sacrifice for his future self might care about his future self; he just isn't motivated to give up what he has now. He might still dread the bad things that are going to happen. He just doesn't dread them enough.

So how much should you dread the bad things that may befall your future self? The background assumption seems to be something like this: you should dread them the same about you would dread similar suffering of your present self. Rationality, on this view, requires you to treat your future self and your present self the same.

This Freakonomics post by Daniel Hamermish uses the example of cheating on your spouse to illustrate the concept of "hyperbolic discounting": "people overemphasize current pleasure and pain in comparing actions at different points in time." This leads them to "irrational" behavior.

Hamermish allows that one might properly "discount" for something being in the future, but seems to suggest that cheating is discounting too much. Indeed, hyperbolically so.

So how much is the right amount?

When I was a kid, in like seventh grade, there was a poster on our classroom wall that had a quote from a poem -- something about how the author wanted to burn bright and short like a star rather than endure long and cold like a planet.

I remember I always thought it was the darndest thing to put up in a kids' classroom. After all, adults are always trying to get kids to do the exact opposite: Do your homework! Don't smoke! Care about your future selves, guys!

Inviting the classic teen response: Why should I?

Why indeed? Ya got me.

Take An Ungrateful Whiner To Work Day

Last week I read this really good novel called "Then We Came to the End" by a young guy, Joshua Ferris, who I'd never heard of. I just picked it up wandering around the bookstore.

I don't know for sure, but I think the "we" in the title may be meant to refer partly to the "we" we all were during the late 90's and early 00s. The best thing about the book, I think, is its feeling of immersion in that post dot-com, "downturn," time. Not an easy mood to capture, but definitely a funny one to contemplate.

The dumber blurbs on the book cover describe it as a book about "work," since it describes a bunch of co-workers at an ad agency. Naturally there are some reflections in the book about the nature of work, and about the strange absurdity of "creative" people who fancy themselves original working in an industry that is basically about getting people to become conformists.

Naturally, too, some of the characters decide to quit and do something else. I'm always interested to read about people quitting their careers to take up new ones because 1) I think about doing this all the time and 2) I have the kind of job people usually quit their careers for.

I mean, it's funny: I'm a philosophy professor. It's just the kind of job people fantasize about when they fantasize about quitting their meaningless jobs: I know, I'll quit this, go back to graduate school, and study philosophy! That'll be meaningful and interesting!

It's hard for me to compare since I've never had any other comparable job -- I just worked at stuff like "waitress" and "camp counselor" before I became an academic. So I don't know. But being a philosopher professor sure can be boring, and it sure can seem pointless.

Enough so that, as I said, I often day dream about changing jobs altogether. I know other philosophy professors who do too. So, what jobs do we daydream about?

Lawyer probably tops my own list. After a day of thinking hard and working on some paper that, like, no people will ever read, I crave the effectiveness of lawyering. I mean, lawyers get things done, actual things. Money moves around; custody assignments get made.

Then, too, restaurant and cafe worker are up there. When I am feeling anxiety about teaching, about being constantly evaluated and criticized, I sometimes gaze longingly behind the Starbucks counter. So, you make coffee! Chat with customers! Fun!! Maybe I could own a cafe?

It's not implausible to think there are lawyers and cafe owners daydreaming about becoming philosophy professors, too. There used to be a show on TV where people got to try out other jobs temporarily: I remember one where some finance guy wanted to become a cheese maker. Shocker! It was hard work!

But wouldn't this kind of show be improved if it were more like an actual swap? They could pair people up. You: make the espresso; and you: grade those papers. Like Wife Swap only better.

I realize switching work would be complicated, but you could have a kind of shadow concept. Sort of like "take your daughter to work" day, except it would be like "take an ungrateful whiner to work" day. Here's Joe: even though he has a nice comfy well-paying job, he fantasizes about doing lawn care! He's an ungrateful whiner. Watch as he learns the finer points of mowing, weed-whacking, and leaf blowing!

The Independence Fetish

I've never been in therapy, or in any kind of psychiatric treatment. OK, I was required to see a "guidance counselor" in sixth grade once, when I had just started in a new school, and was really really miserable, but I refused to say anything interesting to the person (was it a woman? I don't even remember) so I don't count that.

It's not because I've never felt in need of treatment. I have. It's more that the psychiatric establishment has always scared me a little. It's scared me enough that I figured, unless it was an emergency, unless I was in serious need, unless it was obvious that things really couldn't go on as before, I'd be better off staying away. And luckily, knock-on-wood, count-your-blessings, I've never been in a bad way like that.

So, why all the suspicion? In part, I've been wary of the methods. Why should we trust these people to know anything? For most of my life, it's been part of the orthodoxy of therapy that when something bad happens to you, it's really important to talk about it, revisit it, be open about it, reconsider it, and generally have it all right there.

This always seemed odd to me. I mean, I'm sure in some cases people bury things and are made better by opening up about them. But why should that true in general? If something is painful, maybe not thinking about it is good for you, right?

And lo! This past year, we find news that repression can be good for you, that some psychologically healthy people are healthy because they bury things, not because in spite of burying things.

This kind of thing tends to undermine a person's confidence in the whole enterprise.

But I've also long been bothered by the particular conception of health the mental health establishment values. There are lots of thing here, but one big one has to do with the nature and value of independence.

I'm no expert, 'cause like I said, I've never been in therapy. But from talking with friends who have been, and reading about therapy, I get the sense that there's a huge emphasis on independence: on being happy within yourself, on having a sense of self that doesn't depend on family, job, friends, home, and on asserting the rights of that self within relationships.

Those sound like reasonable things, sure. But it's also weird that they're directly at odds with basic beliefs most of us have about how close relationships work, and why they're so valuable. I mean, isn't caring about someone a kind of dependence on them? Isn't thinking of your own good as separate from, and maybe at odds with, the good of others a way of keeping them at arms length? Isn't being close with someone undermined by a kind of cost-benefit approach to what you're getting out of the relationship?

Two things in yesterday's Times reminded me of all this. First, there was a letter to the editor about that story about the increase in mid-life suicide that I liked. The writer was struck by the aptness of the phrase "inexplicable gloom," from the original story, as a description of what ails people, and he described Durkheim's theory that such gloom comes from a lack of connection to others. Our independence, the writer seemed to suggest, was making us miserable.

Then, there was that wacky Modern Love piece about April Fool's Day. Toward the end there, the narrator describes the break up of his brother with his long-time girlfriend, a break-up that was first prompted by her therapist's suggestion that the two had become co-dependent.

Maybe they were, maybe they *should* have broken up; I don't know. But it struck me as so funny that being too interdependent with another person is considered a kind of problem, or illness; something that needed to be cured. And cured, in part, by breaking up!

You know, dependence sucks: it's scary; it makes you vulnerable; you risk being used and abused.

But just because dependence sucks doesn't mean independence is any better.

Family Law And The Separation of Church and State

A few years ago in Canada there was big news when some government person proposed adding the Islamic "Sharia" law to the list of religious systems of law that can inform family court decisions.

At first I was, like, "Wait, what? Religious systems of law inform Canadian family court decisions? That wouldn't happen in the US; there we have separation of church and state."

Turns out the whole thing is really complicated, everywhere, as yesterday's Times story shows. And I'm wrong about the US. And I still don't really get what's going on.

From what I could understand in Canada, certain Jewish and Christian traditions govern some family court matters -- such as who gets divorced under what terms, and what happens to the children, and so on -- and it had long been the case that if the various participants in some conflict agree to have their case adjudicated in accordance with these traditions, then it is.

The proposal, then, was to allow Islam to join Judaism and Christianity in this. The emotional reaction this prompted was connected, not surprisingly, to the sense people had that adjudicating family court cases using Sharia law would be especially bad for women, who would end up worse off under that law than they would have under the regular, secular law.

I slowly grew to understand that in any case, the secular law "came first," in the sense that one had to give consent to have one's case considered this special way.

Having gotten this far, though, I got confused. I assume that any people who work out a plan for their arrangements to mutual satisfaction have the right, within various limits, to have that plan put into action. If a divorcing couple goes to a mediator, and agrees together on some division of goods, isn't the court willing to puts its seal of approval on their arrangement? How is it different that the arrangement to mutual satisfaction had a religious source?

The Times story quotes the Ontarian premier Dalton McGuinty saying in 2005, "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Canada ultimately decided that rather than add Islam to the list, they would take away all religious arbitration. But if secular law came first anyway, wasn't there already one law for Ontarians?

Like I said, I had assumed no-religious-arbitration was already the case in the US, but the Times explains that US courts use arbitration processes from all three of these religions. Indeed, a lawyer quoted in the Times says of one US case, “An agreement to arbitrate is an agreement to arbitrate," suggesting that there is little conceptual difference between religiously informed arbitration and non-religiously informed arbitration. If this is right, doesn't the single secular law still cover everyone the same way? How does the religion itself become relevant?

Of course, intuitively, the difficult issues concern the possibility of coercion. And while we might say that while there is the possibility of coercion in any case -- say, if a woman agrees to some arrangement because she's afraid of being beat up -- the possibility of coercion in the religious context does seem especially fraught.

This makes me see how the question of Sharia law in family court is an interesting and important one. But it still leaves me wondering, What exactly is the question? Because I don't know how "agreeing to religious arbitraration" is different from "presenting an mediated arrangement of mutual satisfaction."

Is the difference that in the first case one has to sign on before knowing the outcome? Is the difference that a person loses certain rights to appeal if they use religious arbitration that they don't lose if they present a mediated agreement? Is the difference that one must expliclity sign away certain rights -- and thus do so knowingly -- in the secular case, but may be misled in the religious case?

It seems to me that the crucial question lies in these technical details, but I don't know how the technical details work. More details please!

Disgust and Purity: Should We Care?

Disgust, repugnance, and fears of impurity have made three appearances in The New York Times over the last few weeks. OK, it's not Britney, but still. For an abstract concept, three is a lot.

First, as I wrote about before, we have Stephen Pinker's essay, The Moral Instinct. There, Pinker says early on that, psychologically speaking, there are (roughly) five distinct sources of moral sense: not harming others, being fair, being loyal to a community or group, respecting authority, and purity.

Later in the piece, Pinker says that the excessive pursuit of purity can be a source of moral illusions: those who are against cloning because it gives them "a moral shudder," he says, just aren't being thoughtful or reasonable enough. It's a kind of prejudice.

I was struck at the time: how can disgust be a source of moral judgment and also be a distorting factor on moral judgment?

Then there was this recent short item in the Arts section: "Economists Dissect the 'Yuck' Factor." Here, Patricia Cohen points out that disgust is a complex issue for conservatives: on the one hand, economic conservatives favor fewer limits on markets, so the fact that you feel grossed out by, say, kidney purchasing or baby buying is simply not relevant to whether these things are good or bad. On the other hand, social conservatives (as Pinker points out) frequently invoke the moral shudder in explanations of wrongness.

As she tells the story, economists say that everything should be open to markets unless you can prove otherwise, while skeptics say that the burden of proof is on the other side -- that if you want to open up a market, you must make a case for the morality of the proposed transactions.

Interestingly, she cites Pinker's essay as one source of the idea that disgust is an "early warning system" -- a feeling that alerts us that something needs moral scrutiny.

On this view, the answer to my question is that disgust is a not a source of moral judgment, but is merely an indicator, and when trusted, acts as a distorting factor.

This answer is supported by the third appearance of disgust, in the pyschologist Paul Bloom's review of a new book by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. There, Bloom summarizes some research as showing that disgust and other emotions cause us to make judgments we later find we cannot justify.

Interestingly, this approach almost seems to side with the economists, insofar as the suggestion is that if one cannot give a justification in terms of other factors -- such as harm -- then disgust is irrelevant.

I'm no fan of purity obsessions, believe me. But at the same time, I also think we humans are not always very good at figuring out what's good for us -- as I've said before, once we start doing cost-benefit analysis, we tend to start estimating wrong.

I'm left uncertain over whether, and when, and how, to care about disgust. If a poor man risks his life selling a kidney to a rich man and then gets sick and dies, I feel a kind of disgust. I'm inclined to take my reaction as morally significant whether or not I can back it up. But I know that some people feel a kind of moral disgust at sexual freedom, homosexuality, and so on, and there I feel, well, no, that's not morally significant.

I suppose ideally I would be able to articulate in other terms what is bad about free markets for organs donations. But in the meantime, what am I supposed to do? It's not like cost-benefit analysis has such a great track record, either.

2008, And You Still Can't Get An Ought From An Is

Since yesterday I'd been planning a post about girls, and boys, and The Power Rangers TV show, which I saw for the first time at the gym yesterday. I'd had no idea the show was for kids; I'd had no idea it was cute and a little hokey; and I'd had no idea two of the Rangers are girls. Wow!

The main thing I was going to write about was how funny it was that the girl Rangers have little skirts in addition to the standard, unisex, form-fitting outfits. I mean, the whole boy-pants, girl-skirt thing makes sense when there's a peeing issue, and the boys can just, you know, unzip, and the girls have to squat. Then maybe a girl wants a skirt.

But once you're both wearing tight-ass legging sort of things, what's the point? In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that, modesty-wise, once you're both wearing tight-ass legging sort of things, it's boys who need little skirts. I remember going to a ballet performance as a young child, and thinking, no, wait, that bulge is the outline of the man's penis that I can see under his tights? Shocking! Funny! Possibly obsene!

The boy Power-Rangers don't have any, uh, parts showing, of course. I checked it out. (But how do they manage that, exactly?) And I know, I realize, that the reason the girls have skirts is that it's cuter that way. Hey, if I were a Power Ranger, there is a 100 percent chance I'd have a little skirt, too. So I'm down with all that.

But instead of pursuing my theme further, with reflections on the movie Juno, which I just saw, and the irritating piece in today's Times that says that since birth and abortion are both major emotional traumas, sex for girls is basically doomed, I have to write instead about morality.

That's because Stephen Pinker had a thing in the Times, too, laying out the state of empirical findings about the psychology of morality, and drawing some conclusions.

The empirical findings were interesting, and fit with some things I already believed.

There are, he explained, several distinct moral themes that are roughly universal. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt's list includes: not harming others, being fair, being loyal to a community or group, respecting authority, and purity.

Then disagreement and cultural variation happen because some people care more about some of these things than about others, and some don't care much about some of them at all, and different people moralize different parts of life.

OK, interesting, and plausible. But you know, this is all just a description. Of some putative facts. What are we supposed to do with this information? Does it tell us anything about morality itself, or how to live?

The great 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume is famous for his idea that "you can't get an ought from an is." That is, nothing about what to do follows from simple facts about what the world is like. You have to make some assumptions about what to value, what to care about, what to want, before facts tell you what to do. (Hume also said "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the desctruction of the entire world to a scratch on my little finger," which I think is just a really stylish, cool, true thing to say).

The first time Pinker seems to maybe wander into the "ought" realm is when he compares conservatives to liberals in the US. Liberals, he says, put a "lopsided" moral weight on harm and fairness, and care less about the others. Conservatives place a moderate weight on all five things.

On this point I may be being oversensitive, but the idea of "lopsidedness" to me suggests that somehow those who value harm-prevention and fairness are missing something real. But, of course, the moral outlook he is describing is one on which people have come to believe that loyalty, respect for authority, and purity aren't so much simple goods in themselves as they are ways of living in a prosperous, fair society full of happy people.

They may be wrong about the means to happiness and fairness, but that doesn't make their view "lopsided"; it just makes it different.

But maybe "lopsided" wasn't meant to be a normative judgment. OK, fine. Things are more interesting when Pinker claims that the implications of these findings for moral theory are "profound."

Pinker is very impressed by two elements of morality that he thinks really are grounded in "reality." First, sometimes when agents cooperate, each does better. Life is a non-zero-sum game. Second, I can't treat myself as special in moral thinking, because whatever I ask you to do for me, you get to ask me to do for you, because otherwise you'll just shrug and walk away. (Unless I am Galactic Overlord, of course.)

One implication Pinker draws concerns moral "illusions," where you see what isn't there. Leon Kass, he says, was blinded in this way by his own sanctimony when he said that cloning was obviously wrong because it gives us a moral shudder. Pinker suggests thinking this way is confusing "morality" with "purity," and notes that lots of shudders were induced for bad reasons (as when people shuddered at seeing blacks drink from the "white" fountain).

I'm no fan of Leon Kass. But, as philosophers well know, if you take tit-for-tat as morally fundamental, and take unexplained moral feelings to be bunk, you end up with a very particular kind of moral culture: one on which you respect the strong because they can hurt you. In its most famous version, "contractarianism," such a moral theory leaves unexplained why one ought morally to care about the weak, the sick, the old, and the small.

A second implication Pinker draws has to do with global warming. No matter how much we moralize consumption, he says, we'll never get anywhere, because no matter how much we reduce our consumption, "two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness." So we're going to need things like nuclear power and maybe deliberate control of oceans and so on.

Hmm. This is the kind of case where I'd be apt to say we maybe should be getting our moral panties all in a twist. Not because the earth is, itself, valuable, but because other people are going to want to live on it, in the future, and don't we owe them something?

Well, not under the tit-for-tat thinking, anyway, since they can't do anything for us. They're not here yet.

Look, I'm with Pinker that extending the moral domain into new territories is sometimes a fruitless or dangerous enterprise. Sure. And he is onto something with his "practical" recommendations, that to reason with others, you should see your moral opponent as a certain kind of moral believer rather than a psychopath (unless, of course, you actually are dealing with a psychopath)

But no amount of empirical findings is going to help you figure out when moralizing is fruitless, when it's dangerous, and when it's laudable. Because no amount of empirical findings is going to determine for you what counts as valuable, and what is worth caring about. Only people who care about stuff can do that, and they can only do it by caring about things.

In both discussions, Pinker warns of the dangers of confusing "morality" with "purity." But I thought purity was on the moral list? It seems to me Pinker has his own ideas about which of the categories to care about most. It's OK, we all do. And I'm not big into "purity" either, believe me. But let's be honest: this is a belief with moral content, not one that just follows from the facts.

You still can't get an ought from an is.

What Not To Say

Since I write philosophy, I often come across paradoxes. You know, like Zeno's paradox: before the arrow can get where it's going, it has to get halfway there, and before it can get the rest of the way, it has to make it half of the rest of the way, and so on. So: the arrow never gets where it's going. But of course, it does.

Philosophers tend to talk about paradoxes in a sort of stripped down way, and I don't blame them, really -- that's what philosophers do. But I'm always on the lookout for actual real life manifestations of paradoxes. Messy, real-life, stuff.

One kind of sort of paradoxical thing is self-reference. In its simplest form, "This sentence is false." If it's true, it's false, and vice versa.

Self-reference seems to me to come up a lot in real life problems. Consider the things you cannot say, and mean, because of self-reference.

Like, "Don't take this the wrong way." When someone says that in preface of some criticism, you're always more likely, rather than less, to take it "the wrong way." What the speaker wants to say is something like, "I don't want you to feel criticized." But in signaling that a criticism is coming, doesn't it sort of do the opposite?

I also get into a puzzle when I think about opinions I have about stuff that's being discussed too much. How can you express your opinion that all the discussion about poor Britney and her meltdown is sad and wrong, without adding yourself to all the discussion about poor Britney and her meltdown? There, now, I've just added to the Google hits for "Britney meltdown."

Speaking of Britney, by the way, I was just remembering this evening that crazy marriage she had with her old boyfriend before K-Fed. Remember? The teen sweetheart or something? And her family was like "No way, unh unh, girl, you are not marrying this guy." I remember saying at the time, "They should have let her stay married to him; it'd probably work out better than anything else." Well. Shouldn't they have?

We've had a request for some C and C political discussion (in comments to this post). Speaking for myself, I am going to vote democratic, and I will vote for whoever gets nominated eventually. I am no fan of Hillary, for many of the same reasons lots of other people aren't. Like her support for the war, etc. etc.

But the recent kerfuffle about her tears has me completely dumbfounded. I saw the tape at the gym, and I thought, "Oh, there must have been some other occasion when she was crying." But no, that was it. A catch in the voice. A catch in the voice while describing the fact that she had a lot of ideas on how to run the country.

Oooh, was it calculated? Was it honest?

All I can say is, wow, man, if that counts as crying, I am going to be carted off tomorrow for bi-polar disorder or something. Jeez-louise. Talk about something not worth discussing!

But, you know, you can't really blog about how dumb it is to discuss something. 'Cause, yeah, there you are discussing. Self-reference in action!

It was good old Bertie Russell and Kurt Goedel who really took the self-reference problem and made serious fucking hay with it. Russell used it to dismantle and disprove Frege's entire life's work of showing how to reduce mathematics to logic. Goedel used it to show that no list of axioms could determine as true or false every mathematical sentence.

Pretty lofty. But I always wonder. Did they encounter the everyday self-reference problems? Would they care about Britney and her troubles? Did they ever try to tell a loved-one, "Don't take this the wrong way, but. . ."

Probably they did. Russell went to jail for his pacifism, and Goedel died of starvation when his wife died, because he thought he was being poisoned.

It's a tough life out there, no matter how smart you are.

It's The Other People, Stupid

In this previous post, I said that there is a limit to the right a person has to decide their own future. In particular, I pointed out, when it comes to health care, your right of self-determination runs smack into, and is overridden by, my right not to be surrounded by sick people dying of preventable diseases whose treatment they can't afford.

Especially when you just know, like the mortgage lenders, they'll come crying to the rest of us: Hey! It's not my fault! I didn't know! Help me!

In this post I've got something else to say about health care and human psychology. Or, uh, American psychology, I should say.

In this editorial from the early part of November, Paul Krugman sums up what he takes to be the core argument for health care reform in the US. He writes,

"The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured."

Krugman suggests that to any reasonable person these would be knock-down arguments for reform, and he goes on to offer some replies to counter-arguments in defense of this basic position.

These counter-arguments seem right to me; I haven't got anything to add there. But what I'm interested in is the reason there is reluctance to change the US healthcare system. I'm sure there are lots of reasons.

But one reason no one talks much about is this: most people having an opinion are actually getting very good health care. The Krugman argument talks about averages, totals, and the uninsured. Most people, I think, actually don't care much about averages, totals, and the uninsured.

Most middle-class and wealthy people probably think that if the health-care system changes in the direction of socialization that their care will become worse. In fact, I'm betting that for lots of people, the idea of socialized health care brings immediately to mind an image like the following: There they are, sick, sitting in a racially diverse room, with lots of poor people around, being told by some bureaucrat that there are 100 welfare queens ahead of them in line for the one MRI machine.

No one, I think, feels comfortable discussing this fear, so they find other things to say.

This fear is what we should discuss, for one reason: the fear is only relevant to the kind of socialized health care system no-one in the US is proposing anyway: a single-tier, no-private-doctors system.

In lots of European systems, there is socialized health care with nothing like this, because anyone has the choice to pay themselves, or get private insurance, and lots of people do, and they don't have to sit in any dark depressing rooms with people who don't play golf. They can do whatever they want.

Clearly any system anyone adopts in the US will have these options. The argument then is partly "this isn't such a change" -- in addition to the familiar "we have to change." And the argument should include an explicit injunction to take the cares of others into consideration.

Along a slightly different line of thought:
I'm an American living in Canada. Here in Canada we actually have a single-tier, no-private doctors system. It's interesting, because, you know, some of the things people say about it are true: there aren't enough machines, there are waiting times, places are understaffed and sometimes depressing and chaotic. And they're that way no matter who you are.

I've been here for a few years and so far the care I've gotten has been great. But more interestingly, I'd say, there are benefits to this system that you can't really imagine until you're here, but they're extraordinary.

Everyone gets the same health care. Duh. It's so simple, but it kind of transforms the way you interact with and feel about your fellow citizens. It gives everyone dignity. No one has to plead for help, and no one feels like a second-class citizen. If the system sucks, it sucks for everyone, so something gets done about it.

You're at the gym chatting with the cleaning lady. You're at McDonald's ordering a Big Mac. You're buying the papers at the weird convenience store.

All the people you see, you talk to, you're all in it together. You can look people in the eye, and not feel like shit. It's kind of awesome.

But this awesomeness isn't going to translate to the US. Whatever. Focus on getting it together for the people who need it, and let the people who can afford it do whatever they want. Don't tell people, "This will make it work for you." Tell them, "If you don't care about anyone else you're being overly selfish." Or fill in your own adjective.

Sometimes You Can't Decide For Yourself

When I was a kid, my father had a really funny thing he used to do at Christmastime. Starting a few days before the 25th, he would start lobbying to get to open his gifts early. Like real begging and pleading and fussing -- the kind you associate with children.

On certain occasions with certain gifts, he would get his way, and he'd open those presents early. Certainly any gift that came from outside our immediate family -- that is, not from me or my mom -- he considered fair game to open whenever he wanted. So there was a fair amount of opening on Christmas Eve, even though really we were a "Christmas morning orgy of opening" kind of family.

On Christmas morning, my father would complain bitterly, but, you know, jokingly too, about not having any surprises, about not having as many things to open as me and my mom. Poor me! Nothing to open! On Christmas morning!

I remember finding this awesome and hilarious. I thought it was awesome that an adult would care so much about presents that he'd actually be upset about not having enough at the right time. Even if he was sort of hamming it up, I thought was awesome that an adult would carry on like that. About Christmas presents! Most adults I knew were focused on planning family events, buying stuff for kids, cooking, you know.

And I thought it was hilarious that he would fail to learn, or would pretend to fail to learn, year after year, that opening on Christmas Eve meant fewer presents Christmas morning, and that fewer presents Christmas morning was less fun than more presents Christmas morning.

Eventually my mom and I found a way to take this game to the next level: we would hide certain key presents and pretend they didn't exist so that no matter what happened Christmas Eve, my father would always have as much Christmas morning excitement as me and my mom.

This was just one of a range of very funny things my father used to do. Like telling me that airplanes only went up in the air because everyone prayed at the same time (he was an engineering professor), or telling my little friends that if they wanted their parents to get them a pony they should throw a temper tantrum the next time they were in the grocery store.

But I got thinking about the Christmas thing recently because I was reflecting on the ways we do and do not allow people the freedom to choose their own futures.

In a previous post, I mentioned as a kind of off-handed joke the idea that some people felt it was their right not to have health insurance -- that if they wanted to spend the money on other things they should be allowed to.

The prospect of lots of people not having health insurance upsets me a lot. And I can tell you why. Health is one of those things that it's easy to undervalue while you have it. Planning for illness is one of those things no one likes to do. Once you're sick, though, you'd have to be a figure of towering rationality and self-control not to say to those around you, "Help me. I'm sick. I'm dying. There's treatment, and I need it, and I can't pay. Please help me!"

And, you know, if someone says those things to me, I'm going to want to help them. I will find the early deaths of such people incredibly painful.

In that sense, the commitment to shared medical care isn't something you sign on for just because it's in your own self interest, it's something you sign on for because of the people around you, who care about you -- whether they're intimates, friends, or just fellow-citizens.

I consider it my right to infringe your freedoms in this way, at least to some extent. The alternative infringes on my freedom not to be surrounded by sick, dying people who -- oops! -- changed their minds about the whole dying thing once it came into close view.

Sorry, we're going to have to hide your presents sometimes. Hope you don't mind too much. Maybe you'll be happy later.

Moral Anti-Minimalism: The Case of Dr. Phil and Dan Savage

Two guys you might think didn't have a lot in common: Dr. Phil and Dan Savage.

Dr. Phil is the Oprah protégé who has that annoying afternoon TV show. He's full of family-values opinions and over-reactions that drive me crazy. "You were smoking pot and having sex? You're a drug addict! You're going to ruin your entire life!"

Dan Savage is the writer of the advice column Savage Love. His main thing is, sex is important; it matters a lot to people. Take it seriously; be open-minded, and be nice to each other, but if you're still not satisfied you may have to break up and find someone new.

OK, so pretty different. But Dr. Phil and Dan Savage have one big thing they share: a belief that the moral minimum is not enough.

Dr. Phil frequently tells people in conflict that it's not enough to think about what's fair: for the relationship to work, or move forward at all, one or both of them is going to have to "be a hero" -- to forgive or forget, or reach out, or something. To do more than would be strictly required.

Dan Savage frequently tells people whose sexual desires are an uneasy fit that they must be "GGG" with one another: Good, Giving, and Game. "Game" here means being open to another person's fantasies, no matter how strange or unsettling they strike you. If your boyfriend is dying for you to dress up in a wetsuit, well, you owe it to him to try it out. Even if, you know, it's not really your thing. Do it anyway.

These both strike me as expressions of the same basic idea: that when you live interconnectedly with other people, sometimes "fair" or "within my rights" just aren't the relevant things to consider. It's not fair that you have to forgive before the other person changes; it's my right not to dress up in a wetsuit if I don't want to. But the moral minimum is not enough: these are still, nonetheless, the things one must do.

One reason I think these guys find they have to give this advice so often that they've got handy phrases for it ("be a hero," "GGG") is that we've sort of become moral minimalists.

We're very good at signing on for moral requirements specific things you must do, rules you must obey, things in which a transgression is obviously blameworthy. You can't kill people, cheat on your taxes, rob a bank. You can't cheat on your spouse.

But a world of moral minimalists is a shitty world. It's a world in which everyone is calculating how little they can do, and what they can get away with. Everyone's a defensive little island. It's no way to live.

In a world of moral minimalists, the least misunderstanding, the least unforeseen bit of trouble, the least disruption in the agreed on order throws everything into chaos.

In a world of moral minimalists, you do things for other people, but always with a silent calculation that changes the very interaction. Maybe you can get your partner to dress up in a wetsuit. But the very elements of exchange ruins the feeling: you can't help but be reminded, "Oh, I know, it's a favor. I know."

It's funny that the actual word for going beyond the moral minimum is "supererogatory," a word that no one even knows.

You Scratch My Back, I'll Just Sit Here, KTHX!

I was infuriated by two things in last Sunday's New York Times. Yesterday my internet connection was fucked, leaving me extra time to ponder which of these things most deserved the sustained attention of Commonwealth and Commonwealth.

I decided on this opinion piece about Radiohead's "pay as much as you want" download scheme.

Here's an extremely brief outine:

1) Economists tell us paying nothing is the only rational choice.
2) Those who pay more than nothing -- as many people do -- are behaving in a way that is mystfying and cries out for explanation.
3) The best explanation for their behavior is altruism, and the reason they act altruistically is that they get a warm glow from doing something "good."

The author boasts he paid nothing. Ha ha, suckas!

There are at least two things infuriating about this.

First, it's a good guess that a lot of people are thinking something like, it's fair all around if I pay more when I have more and pay less when I have less, and if I'm honest about it this scheme will work out for the best all around.

I know they're thinking other things too, but this is a commonsense starting point. And it's supported by what the Times author describes in an analogous case of a book: the people who paid nothing often wrote to justify it on grounds of being poor.

The thing is, this commonsense idea is not only familiar, ordinary, and known to everyone, it's one of the fundamentals of economic game theory. If I cooperate when it's not in my immediate interest to do so, and you do too, we all do better. It's just like the old Prisoner's Dilemma.

In this sense fairness and honesty in cooperative dealings seem rational and unsurprising.

How do people decide to be fair and honest in such cases? I don't know much about it, but it's not hard to imagine that humans evolved to have impulses toward fairness and honesty partly because these were successful strategies -- successful in this basic, game-theoretic sense.

So it's hardly mystifying or strange if people employ these basic attitudes of respect for fairness and honesty when they're participating in a process with other like-minded people -- that is, other fans of Radiohead.

The Times author kind of comes around to something like this in his piece, but he continues to sound amazed, and he denigrates the impulse to pay as based in "touchy-feely" reasons. Good lord. Since when did acting honestly and fairly in a cooperative enterprise become "touchy-feely"?

The second infuriating thing about this is what the opinion piece doesn't say: they never mention that the fact that some people are paying basically supports what teenagers have been saying for years: that free downloading of music can co-exist with paying to download music, in such a way that the former doesn't undermine the latter.

I'm not saying this will work in the long run, just that this one fact about Radiohead fans would seem to support this long-held belief. How come this doesn't even get mentioned? Evidently, no one listens to teenagers. It's kind of infuriating.

OK, that's it for the opinion piece. The other thing I got all mad about in the Sunday Times was this Modern Love column in which a guy wrote slightly sheepishly but mostly comfortably with the following narrative: I was 24; she was 41; we were in a class together; we dated; she got upset and drunk one day and I had to help her home; I was disgusted and knew then that it was over; I ignored her to her face after that in class; I then dated another classmate right in front of her. Now, were friends. Yay for me!

Good heavens!!

But the truth is, if you were going to write about all the things in Modern Love that drive you crazy, you'd need a whole blog just for that.