Within Reason

When President Obama took office in January, many Americans (including, of course, myself) breathed a sigh of relief. One of the big thoughts behind this sigh was that we had someone in charge of the executive branch who understood that government could be part of the solution to some of our domestic problems, particularly the tragedy of the American healthcare system. As the administration’s work on healthcare came to center stage in recent months, the debate has largely centered on whether or not the solution should include a “public” health insurance option or “public plan” and if so, how strong that option should be. The function of the public plan would be to provide an affordable, comprehensive alternative to private health insurance plans if those plans became too costly, too limited, or inaccessible due to job loss or other factors.

All of these issues are incredibly important and following the details of what might emerge is even pretty exciting for those of us in the nerdy minor leagues of health policy. Will there be a strong public plan, a weak one, a national healthcare co-op, an insurance exchange of private plans, or some mixture of all of the above? But lately I’ve become concerned that the debate as a whole shows that something far greater is at stake: whether we as a country still have the ability to do big things together.

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via The New Republic

This piece by Sam Schulman at the Weekly Standard appears to be the newest case against gay marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with either Biblical or secular accusations about the immorality of homosexuality. It’s a variation on the “damaging the institution of marriage” argument in which—get this—homosexual marriage is so inherently romantic that it will irrevocably damage the kinship system by diminishing the proper role of heterosexual marriage as its centerpiece.

The kinship system has never, apparently, adapted to new kinds of relationships before and is hanging by a thread. It is also the only thing standing between children and prostitution.

To say that this argument trades on Byzantine views of female (and male) sexuality and marriage would be being rather unkind to Byzantium. Schulman has Jurassic views of female sexuality and marriage.

Some of the highlights after the jump: Continue Reading »

So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, all the taste and texture of real meat (and maybe fewer health problems) without any of the animal suffering. Chris MacDonald, over at the Bioetech Ethics Blog asked if anyone had any good ethical concerns about it. Just about three days ago, I thought the biggest problem with synthetic meat was that it might be disgusting. But I may have changed my mind.

It occurred to me that if someone could synthetically produce animal meat, there really isn’t a whole lot preventing anyone from synthetically producing human muscle tissue and human meat. And, of course, there would be no human suffering involved in harvesting this meat. (For the moment, ignore any problems with the ethics of the research you’d need to do to get this far.) Would there be anything wrong with eating synthetically produced human meat? Continue Reading »

I meet people all the time who a) have progressive views about public policy and b) fondly remember reading Ayn Rand’s books. I’ve always thought this tension could be explained by people forming preferences about books before they form preferences about political positions. But there is something interesting going on in the comments to this post over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog at Think Progress.

While Yglesias is a great, bafflingly prolific blogger and Think Progress is a useful site, the comments are kind of the Mos Eisley of the progressive blog world. So I tend to ignore them. But looking at the comments here and subtracting those that believe Rand is actually right, it looks like progressive people who read Rand have two very different reactions to the basic tenets of Rand’s thought:

1) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is an excellent ideal, but practically unachievable by human beings because of our imperfect human nature. Call this view Unattainable.

2) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is a bad ideal full stop because human dependency on others is an important and valuable feature of human nature. Call this view Undesirable.

Both reactions lead to progressive policy preferences, but for very different reasons. It’s hard to see that tension not coming home to roost in the long term.

I thought: something uncontroversial for my first post back in a while. With GOP Chairman Michael Steele’s “outrageous” remark that abortion might be a woman’s individual choice and Palin’s gladness during the campaign that her daughter had made a decision to keep her new baby, I’ve begun to wonder how many pro-life politicians really understand their position anymore. (Which is that women do not have decisions: they have babies or they commit crimes in seeking out illegal medical care.)

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