I’m not sure just off-hand if anyone has written about this (Parfit comes close at one point), but it occurred to me that one way people argue for their favorite moral theory is to argue that a competing moral theory will make things go very badly. But aside from the merits of these arguments (whether the world really would be awful if everyone was a consequentialist or a Kantian), the strategy itself seems a little suspicious.

So here’s the general argument I hear from students a lot: if we’re, say utilitarians, things will turn out really badly, because people are really bad at calculating how much happiness their actions will produce. I usually try to tell them this is by no means the end of the line for utilitarians who can just tell people not to calculate how much happiness their actions will cause. Maybe they should obey moral rules instead, try to practice virtues, or be faux Kantians. If that’s going to produce more happiness, do that.

But this argument also gets deployed against Kantians and virtue ethics. (I’m pretty sure I’ve deployed it against Confucian virtue ethics over at A Ku Indeed! once or twice.) And it doesn’t seem terribly fair. Because the whole point of Kantian theories or virtue ethics is that consequences (how good or awful the world would be) aren’t the final word on the whether something is right or wrong. This strategy can be part of a general package of arguments against a non-consequentialist theory — when used in a reflective equilibrium kind of argument — but it certainly can’t be the final word.

It’s not terribly surprising that a moral theory shouldn’t be judged by people using it badly (just like a good recipe, I suppose). But it seems just a bit more interesting to see that these kinds of arguments assume morality has a consequentialist foundation. But now I’m wondering if “Bad” Kantians or “Bad” Virtue followers can count against Kantianism or Virtue Ethics at all.

Fulfilling your obligations may not always make your life go better. Here’s a good example: you have a co-worker who is a real jerk, but conducts herself ethically and is up for a promotion to be your boss where she will make your department’s life terrible. In the hiring process, it’s revealed to you that she’s going to get the job unless you can name something unethical she’s done in the past. What you say would never be revealed to her and she would never know you’re the source. There is no other way to keep her from getting the job.

I think this is a pretty clear case where one’s obligations and one’s pursuit of the good life diverge. Not that it’s hard to find these. If you’re skeptical of the eventual convergence like I am, you have to deal with responses to these examples. You can say, for instance, that while lying in this instance doesn’t make your life go better in the short-term, it may in the long term. (Say, because you will think of yourself as a more ethical person and that’s psychologically beneficial.) Here is another response: even if it doesn’t make your life better, it may still make everyone’s (or a lot of people’s) lives better in the long run. These responses aim to save the inherent connection between ethical duties and the good life. The first appeals to ethical egoism or one’s enlightened self-interest. The second appeals to utilitarian thinking about value. So both appeal to roughly consequentialist grounds.

I’ll guess I need to discuss this further in one of the next installments, but it seems like either I’ll have to give up the idea that ethics and the good life are separable, or say that egoism and utilitarianism are actually theories of the good life in disguise.

So without any real argument yet, my suggestion is going to be that we call theories of what-our-obligations-are and how-we-get-them ethical theories and theories of what-the-good-life-is and how-to-achieve-the good-life theories of the good life. (Agent-focused theories of virtue ethics being an exception that I’ll get around to eventually.) This is a bit selfish since I’ll be calling Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics a “theory of the good life” and he seems to win the prize for using the term “ethics” first, but hey, my blog.

And before anyone gets too excited, of course what I’m calling theories of the good life are sometimes going to say that living the good life involves meeting obligations. Ethical theories are also going to have to answer some tough questions about the good life. But while both of these are true, I’m going to be evaluating the ideas that ethics and the good life are fundamentally different enterprises and that it’s enlightening to distinguish them.

Cross-posted over at In Socrates’ Wake:

I just came across this website (via Everyday Philosophy at the Purple Bike Café) that is gradually releasing videos from what appears to be a comprehensive introductory ethics course by Michael Sandel at Harvard. I’ve read Sandel, but I had no idea he was such a gifted lecturer.

The aesthetic is a little weird — the production qualities suggest daytime talk show meets Sunday preaching meets professional comedy. But the intellectual content is excellent and it’s great to see a high profile philosophy professor grappling with highly motivated undergrads and using the discussion to help teach a course — and a very large course at that. Lots of great ideas for how to teach certain issues. It’s also a little eerie to get a peek inside someone else’s intro classroom and see how he interacts with his students. I highly recommend it.

(Also, how cool is WGBH public television to make this kind of thing possible?)

I was reading Josh Marshall’s site the other day when I saw the news item about Cass Sunstein being confirmed more or less along party lines and clicked through to see who had voted against him. With his free-market credentials, I was surprised to see that there was even a problem with cloture. So I googled around and found the particular craziness that Frum was talking about (which, while I am not a utilitarian, is reprehensibly wrong about Peter Singer and utilitarianism in general).

One of the things that made Rush Limbaugh so popular during the 1990s was his railing against “political correctness” that connected with an American public who felt alienated by the technocratic direction government was headed after the Cold War. Charitably, the idea was that a common man’s common sense was actually superior to tolerance and the political calculations of governing. Of course Limbaugh was really just interested in advancing conservative correctness and didn’t mind killing tolerance in the process, but the general idea caught on and he rode it to fame. Later Sean Hannity replicated Limbaugh’s views on TV to good success. Refined anti-political correctness became a dogma of the fledgling conservative “intellectual” movement.

But with Hannity and Limbaugh you could always sort of see the veneer of a lust for ratings on whatever crazy right wing meme they were touting (Limbaugh’s said as much in interviews). Beck is able to create a much better illusion of it not being there. Or maybe it’s not actually there. I can’t even tell sometimes. He doesn’t try to stay within the bounds of political discourse on the right and it could very well be because he doesn’t actually know them. He really is making it up as he goes along, with little to no concern even for consistency. (How else do you get by with railing against both the free-market healthcare system and reform?) This gives his persona a certain innocence that seems to have tapped some audience that no one could hold before. In a way, his ignorance allows him to embody the most authentic form of anti-political correctness. The very words “public”, “czar”, and “tax” are just politically correct doublespeak. All of the people who were left behind when conservativism had tried to become a principled movement found their place again. You don’t need to know that gender-neutral pronouns are a result of feminism or even common sense. You just need your fear (preferably of ACORN) and cable TV.

The new anti-political correctness is why Glenn Beck and the right can now stand against the likes of Cass Sunstein and David Frum. It’s why Sarah Palin had more hardcore supporters than John McCain. It works like raw meat to people who are uncritically hungry for validation of their fear and distrust of President Obama and Washington DC. It should scare the pants off of anyone who’s not thinking with their limbic system. And as far as I can see, no one knows what to do about it.

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.

Those of us in the U.S. who have spent time abroad or have friends from other countries know that there is something deeply dishonest about the criticisms of a public health insurance option. The critics claim it will be costly (which is true, but the alternative is more costly), that it will “ration” healthcare (which is also true, but the public plan is just an option and the idea that insurance companies do not ration services even more is absurd), but most importantly that government is bad at running things and it will be awful at running a healthcare plan. Stories populate the American media about how Canada’s system made someone wait for hip surgery or Britain’s problem with dental hygeine.

It’s also somewhat true that healthcare costs are rising in other countries and they are fighting to contain those costs. But the systems work. It is simply not true that government cannot run a healthcare system. They do so everyday all around the world. The critics have their facts wrong and the smarter ones know it. The best they can do is to claim that our government wouldn’t run a good healthcare system.

This is false as well, as the US government runs Medicare which is very popular and more efficient than any private plan. It also runs a healthcare system for veterans which is the most popular system in the country and an actual example of socialized medicine. Costs need to come down if these programs are to be sustainable, but private insurance doesn’t fare any better.

But the public option represents something even more than an effective solution to healthcare problems. The key part of the plan is that it is public. It is something we all come together to shape and support. It wouldn’t be an invention by a select group of wealthy Americans trying to make money, but something in which we all have a stake. It would be something we all did together. And rejecting a strong public option would be much more than opting for for a different, demonstrably worse way of paying for healthcare. It would be rejecting the idea that for something as important as the health of our fellow citizens, we are willing to work together.

If we decide that this isn’t a task that is worth doing together, it’s hard to imagine that we think it’s possible to do big things together any more (with the possible exception of war). It certainly doesn’t make sense to think that we might be incapable of providing quality, low-cost health insurance together, but capable of providing necessary, quality education for all of the nation’s children. Without the faith that we can work on big projects together, it’s hard to see the sense in which we are still a society.

Coming back to other countries who provide public healthcare options, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they take a great deal of pride in their systems. Sure, people have complaints but they also seem to realize that creating and supporting a system in which no one has to worry about receiving care is a tremendous accomplishment as a people. When open-heart surgery, paid for by the public plan, saves the life of a parent without wiping out a family’s college savings, we can all point and say, “I helped do that.” A private system doesn’t do that. Doing big things together makes societies stronger.

Passing a strong public plan would not single-handedly show that we can do things together again. The real test would start with maintaining the system. But given the current disconnectedness of American society, it’s a chance we can hardly afford to pass up.

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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:

A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships.

A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband’s family; a woman and her wife’s kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

The last two paragraphs (the second of which I quote below) are particularly special for the invocation of a pretty warped version of communitarianism and a self-congratulatory plea for gay people to take one for the team:

Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity–particularly the women and children among us–will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”–no doubt they will think again. If not, we’re about to see how well humanity will do without something as basic to our existence as gravity.

Wow.