Two posts at Half Sigma, John McCain’s daughter & Rawls & human biodiversity
Two posts to check out over at Half Sigma. First, he suggests that John McCain’s daughter is hot. I don’t have a huge N, but that looks like a good picture, and it certainly benefits from any contrast effect, if you know what I mean. But you can’t discount the photo, and her mother seems relatively well preserved. If you check out the video on this page you also note Meghan McCain has a feminine voice (apparently she thinks Barack Obama is cute). Second, in John Rawls, human biodiversity, and redistribution of wealth, Half Sigma is surprisingly sympathetic to a “liberal” position (I say surprisingly because anyone who reads the blog knows of his almost visceral dislike of liberals, though it is not without foundation from where he stands). I’ve been making the argument that liberals could make the case that Half Sigma suggests they should be making for a while now. Of course, my own values are not the same as John Rawls’, so I can’t deliver the redistributionist line with any sincerity. Because of my innate empathy deficit the “original position” thought experiment has always been a stretch cognitively, and I also don’t accept the max-min rule as necesarily optimal (i.e., you accept lower total summed utility to maximize the minimum value across the distribution). But I do know that some readers of this blog of Leftish inclination have always held to this position implicitly, if not fully elucidated in a formal sense….
Labels: Blog
I guess if I posted more photos of hot babes, I’d pick up more free links.
I’ve been a Rawlsian since Herrnstein and Murray laid out the case so completely in The Bell Curve. Can’t find the quote right now, but they point this obvious connection themselves at some point.
Here’s a more recent quote along those lines:
Rushton and Jensen (2005) make no recommendations for specific policies and correctly argue that the hereditarian hypothesis implies none in particular. For example, proof that the Black?White IQ gap is partly genetic could, depending on one?s goals, be used to justify banning all racial preferences in employment and college admissions or, from a Rawlsian perspective (that genetic advantages are undeserved and unfair), require substantial and permanent racial preferences.
source
However, I’m not convinced that maximizing the minimum is the optimal solution in the original position. Instead you’d maximize your expected utility – whatever the hell that really implies.
Yeah, it isn’t fair that some poor dodos have lots of kids who are born not only poor, but dim-witted too. Since we want to increase the preferences we give them, we must prefer them in our society.
What also bugs me are all those countires that happen to have oil underneath them. It’s unfair and undeserved. From a moral point of view it needs to be re-distributed. ;-)
I think we (including Half Sigma) need to be careful to understand Rawls correctly. First, Half Sigma’s reading of how ‘liberals’ might react to Rawls’ acknowledgment of the natural lottery is a bit of a strawman. One shouldn’t confuse philosophical liberalism (which has many intelligent proponents and turns on minimal empirical assumptions) with a strong thesis of empirical equalitarianism. The latter position is taken seriously only by fools. Second, the Original Position, as a heuristic device for justifying the basic institutions and arrangements of society doesn’t turn on an empathetic identification with anyone. Rawls is a Kantian after all, and hence no strong appeal to empathy (either to understand the argument or in its appraisal) is required. In fact, it’s self concern, understood correctly, that is the main psychological assumption of Rawls. His basic insight is to see that the social contractarian idea of justice as the result of a fair bargaining procedure requires a Maximin decision procedure if the bargaining procedure is to do the justificatory work. Of course he never asserts that Maximin is a rational procedure in all cases, just in the case of the Original Position.
You don’t need to ascribe variation in talents to genetic factors in order to sustain Rawls’ assumption about the distribution of talents. Rather, what gets you there is fact that people’s talents are largely outside of their control (or anyone else’s control). Variance in talent could be entirely attributable to stochastic processes and the same argument would hold.
The blank slate / SSSM hypothesis is that people’s talents (and life outcomes) are controllable by environmental manipulation.
Stephan wrote:
>His [Rawls?] basic insight is to see that the social contractarian idea of justice as the result of a fair bargaining procedure requires a Maximin decision procedure if the bargaining procedure is to do the justificatory work.
Well.. Rawls certainly seems to think that, but I see no reason to accept his belief. Prima facie, it seems to make more sense not to accept the maximin criterion but rather to accept some sort of expected value criterion. After all, in real life, that is what everyone does ? otherwise, we would spend our entire lives frantically trying to avoid quite unlikely catastrophes and would make ourselves utterly miserable (better live a few hundred feet underground, just in case a meteorite hits your humble abode!).
In some sense, everyone who thinks about justice ? from rabid Communists to rabid libertarian anarchists (I?m a bit beyond the rabid libertarians anarchists myself!) ? agrees with starting from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. But our different criteria of valuing, and, more importantly, our different views on human nature, history, human society, etc. lead us to radically different conclusions.
For example, I myself hold to a Paretian/Michelsian/Moscan view of predatory elites, and think that the primary tool of predatory elites is (usually) the state. Therefore, I think that minimizing the power of the state (to zero, if possible) best serves the expected utility of everyone (assuming the veil of ignorance, of course ? it does not serve the best interests of the predatory elite if you know you will be one of them!). In a way, I suppose I have ?leftist? views of elite predation and arrive at ?rightist? conclusions (one more example that ?left vs. right? is not an adequate conceptual framework).
In short, as has oft been pointed out, Rawls conclusions do not necessarily follow from his premises.
Dave
Well.. Rawls certainly seems to think that, but I see no reason to accept his belief. Prima facie, it seems to make more sense not to accept the maximin criterion but rather to accept some sort of expected value criterion. After all, in real life, that is what everyone does ? otherwise, we would spend our entire lives frantically trying to avoid quite unlikely catastrophes and would make ourselves utterly miserable (better live a few hundred feet underground, just in case a meteorite hits your humble abode!).
Actually, I am not sure that everyone uses an expected value criterion.
Rather, I think that we have evolved dispositions to pay extraordinary attention to risks that have been salient in our recent evolutionary past.
For example, conspiracy theories and paranoia would seem to be common and entirely justified ways of looking at the world if the social lives of P. trog were ratcheted up among early hominids and our recent ancestors.
Meteorites killing people were such uncommon events that we don’t have ways of evaluating their probability, however, being attuned to the probability that others are planning bad outcomes for us had such benefits that we can be manipulated to take action at the suggestion that this might be so. Blame some readily identifiable group for some current situation and lots of people are all too ready to believe.
predatory elites
This seems to ascribe evilness to elites that is not necessary.
It should be unremarkable that elites might have divergent interests to the rest of the population they are members of.
yo said:
Instead you’d maximize your expected utility
The maximin rule does allow people to maximize their expected utility so long as any increase in theoir utility is justified by an increase in the utility of the least well-off.
I don’t think Rawls would ever say that “genetic advantages are undeserved and unfair.” That seems to be a strawman. Only political and economic institutions can be “fair” and “unfair” in the Rawlsian sense. The distribution of genetic endowments are not related to political or moral justice(the kind of justice Rawls is speaking about) and are therefor not even capable of being considered either fair or unfair.
This quote from half sigma is a very bizare interpretation of Rawls (and probably way off the mark):
Yet this is exactly what Rawls is saying, that poor people are poor because of their genes.
To elaborate a little more, I meant that only political or economic institutions can be even considered fair or unfair for Rawls. He is not being a metaphysician when he is talking about fairness, he is speaking as a member of the contract tradition of political philosophy (and Kantian rationalism) that seeks to justify political and social institutions. Living in a society with differences in genetic endowments can be fair (in a political sense) to all those involved because those who are gifted can contribute to all of society, especially to those least well-off. So it doesn’t make rawlsian sense to say that having different genetic endowments are fair or unfair simpliciter.
Richard,
I agree with your point on expected value. I was merely trying to point out that no one would really accept the maximin criterion as an over-riding basis for decisions in his own life.
You also wrote on my ?predatory elites? remark:
>This seems to ascribe evilness to elites that is not necessary
Well, as it happens, I do think that some elites are deeply and profoundly evil? so? By the way, everyone who thinks about this will surely agree in some cases: the Khmer Rouge were a predatory elite, Mussolini?s fascists were a predatory elite, etc.
But that is irrelevant to the analytical point. After all, to refer to wolves as ?predatory? does not imply a value judgment.
Incidentally, I did not state (and did not mean to imply) that all elites are predatory. In a sense, readers of gnxp are an elite, and most of those readers do not seem too predatory.
But I do think it is fairly easy to see how an elite that is predatory could find the powers of government very useful, just as it is clear how wolves find their fangs to be very useful. That is an analytical point, not a value judgment.
Indeed, I think it is rare for governments to be controlled by anyone except predatory elites ? that of course is an empirical issue, but some poli scientists seem to agree with me on this (see, e.g., the well-known college poli sci textbook, ?The Irony of Democracy?).
Dave
JuJuby wrote: The maximin rule does allow people to maximize their expected utility so long as any increase in theoir utility is justified by an increase in the utility of the least well-off.
In my mind, I was making the same point as PhysicistDave when he wrote: Prima facie, it seems to make more sense not to accept the maximin criterion but rather to accept some sort of expected value criterion. After all, in real life, that is what everyone does ? otherwise, we would spend our entire lives frantically trying to avoid quite unlikely catastrophes and would make ourselves utterly miserable (better live a few hundred feet underground, just in case a meteorite hits your humble abode!).
Imagine that the distribution of life outcomes has a long thin left tail. In the Original Position, you’d only be willing to dedicate so much of societies resources to insuring a floor of life outcomes, which practically means allowing for more of a left tail than maximin would allow. The reasoning is analogous to the way we don’t all drive around in $250k tank-like cars (to avoid traffic fatalities). We don’t concentrate on the worst possible (but improbable) outcomes, but rather the integrated risk. Consider two alternative outcomes from the Original Position: (1) a distribution of utility with a floor at -2SD or (2) a nearly identical distribution of utility shifted far to the right but a few people have really terrible lives. The expected value is higher in situation #2 whereas the maximin criteria calls for #1.
yo,
Perhaps a concrete example, in Rawlsian terms, will make clearer the point you and I are making:
Suppose you have to choose behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance between two institutional structures that you expect to have the following results (I use purely monetary measures to make it easier to understand ? in principle, one should use some measure of utility):
Social structure A: 999,999 out of every million people will have an income of $1,000,000 a year; the one remaining person out of a million will have an income of $75,000 a year.
Social structure B: Every single person will have an income of $100,000 a year.
It is important to note that these are taken to be the results *after* any redistributive processes allowed in the two different social structures. Rawls was of course smart enough to know that redistributive processes have costs and can change the size of the overall pie to be redistributed (through incentives, etc.), so you cannot just naively suppose that you can costlessly transfer income from one person to another (this is one reason you should really use utility instead of money, since that makes this point even clearer — if these relate, say, to health or life expectancy instead of mere monetary income, full compensation could easily be physically impossible).
I?m an exceptionally cautious, risk-averse person: when I was a grad student at Stanford, I participated in a study of risk aversion in which I turned out to be the most risk-averse person they had studied.
But, in real life, faced with a gamble like this, even I would have no trouble at all choosing gamble A over gamble B.
Of course, the Rawlsian maximin principle, remembering that these are post-redistribution values, requires us to choose choice A.
This is not how any human being actually makes choices in real life and seems to be a devastating failure with Rawls? analysis. Needless to say, you and I are far from being the first people to notice this problem
Dave
Physicist Dave:
I don’t think your example is quite apt. Rawls is also explicit that what is on the table in the Original Position are not things like insitutions whose differences generate small differences in income, or even incomes per se. Rather, what is at stake are institutions that determine one’s life chances, and, most importantly, the bases for one’s self respect. He pays quite a bit of attention to self respect, and that, I think, is ultimately what his argument hinges on. Now one might have trouble figuring self respect into a decision theory matrix, but insofar as one can, would one gamble with such an important outcome when the Difference Principle is available? Would one take a chance that one could end up with less prospects for self respect because one chose institutions that allowed for disparities in the bases for that so long as averages were maximized? I don’t know. I’m actually no Rawlsian, though, as I think (along with lots of others) that he games the argument with his theory of goods But still, I think his theory has it all over average utility.
Stephan,
That’s why I emphasized that I was only using dollar amounts for simplicity and that it should really be done with utility in some sense. That would fold in the self-respect issue.
It would not, though, change the result. Everyone is willing to take a tiny risk of a substantial reduction of self-respect in order to get a significant chance at some positive benefit. (You don’t believe me? Think about the first time you asked a girl on a date and risked being rejected!)
That fact simply destroys Rawls’ entire system. Taken in its entirety, the Rawlsian system is as dead as Ptolemaic astronomy.
Of course, some parts of it ? such as the veil of ignorance ? may still be worthwhile.
I agree with you that average utility does not work either ? the Grand Inquisitor issue (one little girl brutally tortured in order that millions may be happy) kills utilitarianism, at least for most people (certainly for most people you?d want to have as next-door neighbors!).
I think Rawls? system was designed partly as a means to overcome that issue. It fails, catastrophically ? i.e., it is based on assumptions about human decision-making that are obviously and grotesquely false.
I myself do not think that the sort of decision-theoretic basis for morality and politics embodied in both classical utilitarianism and in Rawlsianism can ever be made to work. A lot of people have tried now for a very long time, and they have all failed quite dramatically.
It is, I think, rather like trying to use number theory as the sole basis for building bridges (without materials science, physics, etc.) ? you don?t have enough information to solve the problem. I think any adequate system of morality or politics needs to be ?thicker?: it needs more input from ev psych (hence my reference to government as generally controlled by predatory elites ? think alpha males and their allies), from history, and from, to use an old phrase, the ?common experience of mankind.?
But perhaps that is a different subject. My main point, with which I take it you agree, is that Rawls theory fails in its own terms. It?s interesting, but it does not work.
Dave
Stephan,
I seem to have mixed up incidents in ?The Brothers Karamazov? (thought the Grand Inquisitor parable would also make my point). Here?s the quote from Dostoyevsky I was referring to:
>Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance — in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?
Dave
I saw this McCain daughter shot a few days ago and also thinking that she ”was hot” I checked out other photos on Google’s ”images”
Sadly, in a frontal angle she strongly resembles her father. This is unfortunate as her mother is – or at least was – very attractive.
Why is it obviously “affirmative” if an incompetent of a privileged race is trained as a surgeon, irrespective of the racial identity of his patients/victims?
people only approve of rawlsian ideas in the abstract. In the concrete, there is an enormous moral and suasive difference between:
1) it’s your fault I’m poor
2) it’s not my fault that I’m dumb (OR lazy, or disorganized, or violent, or impulsive)
The former lays down guilt and hence provides justification for forcible redistribution. The latter is a charitable entreaty. It is folly to imagine that society would respond with ever more largesse if h-bd became mainstream, if the cameras reported the reality of underclass behavior…violence and ignorance and depravity beyond middle class society’s wildest imagination. That would look like “The Wire”, except blame for the situation would be directed at DNA, not cops or capitalism or the majority.Also — calling it “redistribution” is like calling racial quotas “affirmative action”. After all, we are talking about the use of force to take from the competent and give to the indolent…to take money from organized families with picket fences and nice lawns and give to homeless alcoholics. Only the h-bd taboo keeps frank and factual characterizations of recipients off the table.
gc, i think you have a tendency generalize from your own mode of thinking (and the inferences you generate from your axioms) to others too much. we’ve gone over this of course…. (and the fact that it’s more complex than either 1 or 2 matters a lot) the short of it is that it seems empirically clear to me that people can start from the same axioms and come to radically different conclusions when it comes to politics. and it isn’t just a matter of fallacious reasoning (in large part, normative political discourse is outside of reason, which makes extrapolating from premises pretty sketchy).
Zeeb, i’m not saying everyone would see it my way — but we are talking about a scenario where the taboo is no longer extant, so it’s useful to think through the possibility that society may indeed change nontrivially.
A third possibility is that belief in PC becomes something ceremonial — like belief in JC. A situation in which lip service to transubstantiation persists but no one REALLY thinks that inner city wafer will become the (student) body of Harvard.
the most likely scenario, however, is one in which hbd denial remains ascendant in the west and increasingly takes on (even more) trappings of organized religion. Taking solace in your own self imagined virtue as a shield against your real world failings is an all too human thing, seen on evry scale from the Dar-al-Islam to the petty resentment of the nouveau riche. As China rockets ahead and pushes into Africa, the West will console itself with thefact that they have remained morally pure, unlike those godless racists (note here the huckabeeish fusion of both major religious varieties in the us).
no, not really. i think your argument is kind of like pascal’s wager, just limit the options (i.e., “here are the options i can think to enumerate….”) and make them very simple formulations (i.e., “either A or !A”), and the inferences are obvious. the analogy to transubstantiation is good though; i think we atheists have very bad intuitions about how religious people think, in part because by the very nature of who we are we’re not able to conceptualize their “logic.”* i happen to think that you have the same problem with other people’s politics. as it happens, i tend to share your general political outlook, but i don’t assume that everyone will come to the same conclusions as i do from common axioms.
* the same applies to conservatives and liberals when they try to talk about the “other side.”
and to be clear, in internet discourse i’m not sure you can get beyond pascal’s wager-style expositions of political positions and arguments for them. that’s why non-polemical political blogging is probably useless. i happen to think it’s really, really, hard to quick & dirty model the psychological processes of other people, and the sorts of public policy inferences you’re pointing to from axioms always have to run that gauntlet of processes. i do though know empirically that there is a distribution of reactions (e.g., i’ve gotten considerably more economically liberal & socially conservative [basically, more centrist] concomitantly with my progressively stronger assumption that HBD is real).
In the concrete, there is an enormous moral and suasive difference between:
Re: gee ceez ‘own mode of thinking’. But wasn’t there some behavioral economics research that did point to something like this? I mean suggesting a real human cognitive bias like this.
If so, it could help explain why so many US liberals choose to irrationally base their moral assumptions on such unnecessarily tenuous foundations. Perhaps Rawlsian logic is not intuitively or emotionally persuasive to the human brain.
Does anyone know the political rhetoric in typical socialistic countries like Sweden? Are any of them cavalier about natural inequality or do they all lean disproportionately on victimization (i.e. human/social fault) narrative?
Anyway cognitive bias or not, US liberals have already clearly expressed their rabidly anti-Rawlsian beliefs about the “logical” political consequences of genes, so if genetic differences are found socialistic policies will most likely be disfavored through this well established moral precedent.
so if genetic differences are found socialistic policies will most likely be disfavored through this well established moral precedent.
i really doubt it. i don’t believe that a lot of these systems are even based on the axiomatic presuppositions that people claim they are (most of it is probably social conformism combined with some behavior genetic predispositions). analogy: it’s like muslims getting enraged at the idea that the koran might have changed over time. sure, some of the extremists will threaten to kill scholars; someone might even be killed like the japanese translator of the satanic verses, but in the end islam will just be reinterpreted to be saved from falsification. an extreme case are the prayer intervention studies. ministers basically said the fact that prayer doesn’t do jack confirmed their religion. right.
i think you guys give people way too much credit for actually being strongly shaped by the systems of thought they claim to be influenced by. also, do you actually talk to your friends who are liberal about HBD? so does that really shift them to a non-redistributionist position? i’m relatively open with people i know in my real life and convinced a fair number of the likelihood of between group differences and it hasn’t changed their politics that much if at all, though it modifies the practicalities of specific policies in terms of how people perceive them (also, i’ve pretty directly asked older biologists about their views on these issues when i’ve known them well and a substantial number, possibly a majority, are pretty much realists. almost all are also political liberals from what i know).
Perhaps Rawlsian logic is not intuitively or emotionally persuasive to the human brain.
rawlsian ‘logic’ is for smart people. it’s a way for philosophically oriented people to convince others in formalistic language. i do think it clarifies things, but if you read rawls’ original work i think if you disagree with his moderate liberal politics you just modulate his assessment of self-evident sorts of truths to suit your own political orientation. e.g., will wilkinson is a rawlsian libertarian. a conservative might have a different set of basic rights outside of utility calculations than rawls. in the end you can’t get away from norms informed by a large number of variables which differ from person to person (social conformism in academy probably dampens this to the extent that some people delude themselves into thinking that political philosophy is really convincing them all the things they already believe).
I dont find her hot. BLonde yes, but hot? Just another unappealing bland blonde.
Someone told me before that blondes are the biggest consumer of make up in the market because of their bland face.
A trifle too Asiatic in her features for my taste. I tend to prefer the looks of a Grace Kelly or Catherine Deneuve.