Stumbling and Mumbling

Rationality & preferences

Ben Saunders thinks the PFA player of the year awards - in which Ronaldo got player of the year whilst Cesc (pbuh) got young player of the year - show footballers to be irrational. How, he asks, "can Ronaldo be the best out of all players but not best out of the young ones?"
Quite easily. Players' weren't just expressing a preference for player of the year, but a wider preference. It would have been quite rational for a player to vote for Ronaldo as player of the year but Cesc (pbuh) as young player, even though Ronaldo was eligible in this category. He might have figured:

I have to acknowledge that Ronaldo has been the best player this year. But I don't want the oily little turd to become even more arrogant by giving him two prizes. And I want to recognize too the divinity of Cesc (proof). So I want him to get a prize too.

This, surely, is quite rational.
I make this point because it has a wider application. What looks like irrationality can sometimes (often?) be merely different preferences than we think.
Take a trivial example. Today, I prefer to have chicken than salmon for dinner. But yesterday, I preferred salmon to chicken. Isn't it inconsistent and irrational to prefer one thing one day and another the next? Not at all. My over-arching preference is for a varied diet.
If we re-assess preferences, then, what seems irrational can become rational, and vice versa.

Last man standing

Greetings from windy Rutland! And many thanks to all of you who wished me luck with the move.
Matthew asks me a tricky question: would I be complimented to be called a Nietzschean last man?
In some senses, the description fits, and not just because I’ve spent more time at Homebase than I should.
I certainly share the last man’s eschewal of great wealth and power:

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

And the last man’s interest in “merely” little things, far from being contemptible as Nietzsche claimed, is actually wholly admirable.
So far, I’m proud to be a last man.
However, I fear the Nietzschean dichotomy between the last man and the “overman” misdescribes today’s world.
Nietzsche thought that last men were an undifferentiated mass - “Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same” - whilst the overman strove to be different.
But this is the exact opposite of what we see today. It’s the men who seek power and great wealth who are all the same - with their utilitarian morality and managerialist ideology - but it’s the men who retreat from worldly acclaim who are all different in their tastes, moralities and interests.
And this is where Nietzsche is a lousy sociologist. He thought the overman could both create his own morality and achieve worldly power. But perhaps the two are incompatible. It‘s the men who seek power who are, in fact, slaves to contemporary mediocre morality. It’s the people who have renounced power and ambition who are free to pursue other, higher, moral goals.

* The picture is of Egleton church, taken on my afternoon constitutional.

Party funding, rationality and blood donations

In a comment here, Bob Piper says:

I asked in the pub yesterday lunchtime if anyone there would ever consider making a donation to a political party, and our crowd looked at me as if I was a lunatic. The most telling point made was from someone who asked, “Why would anyone make a donation… unless they were looking for something in return.”

This is an expression of instrumental rationality: why should I do anything unless there's something in it for me?
But there is, as Robert Nozick pointed out, another form of rationality - symbolic rationality. There are many things we do not because there's a material return, but rather to symbolize (to ourselves and others) who we are.
Countless activities fall at least partly into this category: giving Christmas presents; protesting;  religious observance; donating to charity; being a good parent; even dying for one's fellows.
Which raises the question. Why can political parties not rely upon symbolic utility as a motive for donations? After all, it's commonplace in other areas.
I suspect the parties have themselves to blame. In order to receive  symbolically-motivated donations,  parties have to embody some noble ideals - they have to be something we want to identify with.
But the parties have long ceased doing this. They have become mere (inefficient) offerers of consumer goods and services. People would no more  want to donate money to them than they would to Virgin Trains.
There's a parallel here with giving blood. Many freely give blood for nothing, believing this is what good people should do. However, when New Zealanders were offered payment for their blood, many stopped donating. The introduction of instrumental rationality weakened symbolic rationality.
In this sense, the parties are paying the price for abandoning ideals and becoming mere managerialists.

Fiction, sympathy & justice

Why do we care about fictional characters? Tom, Mick, Norm, Ophelia, George and Linda have all got interesting takes on this. I just want to deepen the puzzle: what’s the difference between fictional people and future ones?
Norm argues that future people don’t have rights. Nor then, should fictional people. After all, future people could exist but don’t, whereas fictional people never did and never will.
By this reckoning, we should not care if fictional characters’ rights are violated, if they are raped, murdered or unjustly imprisoned.
But we do care. What’s going on?
One possibility is that we don’t really care, in a true sense. A behaviourist would point out that we do not behave as if we cared: no-one has ever organized a whipround for Tom Joad; the campaigns to free George Jackson and Deirdre Rachid were ironic. In this sense, fictional people are unlike future ones. We can, as Norm says, have duties (without correlative rights) to future people, but we don't have duties to fictional ones. Perhaps our caring for them is just a solipsistic illusion, with fiction working in the way porn or drugs do, to arouse mere fantasies.
Another possibility is that reality is unimportant for arousing our sympathy. As George says, “the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined.” And Mick adds that it’s vividity that matters, not reality.
But this raises a disturbing political question. If our sympathies are aroused more by vividity than reality, isn’t there a potential conflict between sympathy and justice? The people who arouse our feelings might not necessarily be those who genuinely suffer most. If so, democracy and justice will conflict. Public preferences will lead to redistribution towards vivid cases of suffering, rather than more serious ones. Could this explain why there’s little support for global redistribution (pdf)?
Another thing. I’m not sure how much successful fiction requires us to sympathize with characters anyway. Three of my favourite 20th century authors - Wodehouse, Greene and Waugh - very rarely wrote characters we cared much about.

Causation vs responsibility

David Aaronovitch opens some awkward philosophical questions here:

The man who really caused the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was not the policeman who put the bullets in the poor Brazilian’s head but an Ethiopian called Hussein Osman. It was Osman who, one day earlier, had tried to blow up a train full of passengers at Shepherd’s Bush.... had Osman not existed, or else been content with allowing his fellow citizens to exist in peace, Jean Charles de Menezes would still be alive.

As a description of causality, this seems roughly tenable. The counterfactual theory says that if we want to know whether x causes y, one way to find out is to remove x and see whether y still happens. Remove Osman, and de Menezes would still be alive.
Equally, if the two officers who shot de Menezes were removed - say, they happened to be off duty that day - de Menezes would still be dead as some other officers would have shot him. In this sense, they did not cause his death.
So far, so good. But here's a problem. Consider a Palestinian suicide bomber in Israel. He could say:

If I weren't blowing up the bus, someone else would; as Alan Kreuger tells us, there is an excess supply of willing suicide bombers. In this sense, I don't cause the bus to blow up. The true cause of the explosion is the existence of the Israeli state. Remove Israel and there'd be no bomb.

This argument has the same logical structure as David's: the suicide bomber stands in for the policemen, and Israel for Osman.
And yet David, and his readers, would recoil from this.
One reason for this is that David omits something - responsibility. It would be stretching a point to say Osman was responsible for de Menezes' death. Sure, he meant to kill lots of people, but not in so circuitous a way as that. Equally, although the state of Israel might be a cause of Palestinian terrorism, it's not responsible for it - you can't be responsible for tenuous unforeseeable effects, can you?.
And both the suicide bomber and the officers who shot de Menezes are responsible, in the sense that they could have chosen not to detonate, not to fire.
Responsibility and causation are not the same.
For example, if I push you off the pavement into the road, you cause a cyclist to fall off his bike; had you not been there, he would have stayed on. But you're not responsible for his fall.
And it's possible, I suspect, for there to be responsibility  without causation. In traditional firing squads, only one member of the squad was given a live bullet, and the others given blanks, without them knowing who got what. We couldn't, then, say who caused the object of their firing to die. But we could, reasonably, hold a volunteer for firing squad duty responsible for the man's death.
My only inference here is that causality and responsibility are different ideas. But I suspect these are not issues where careful distinctions are made.

Heather Mills, image and virtue

It's insufficiently appreciated that the plight of Heather Mills is, to some extent, the plight of all of us.
She claims the media has driven her close to suicide. This isn't hyperbolic self-pity. Ms Mills lives in the media. It is the press that gives her identity and validation, and the press can take these away. She cannot do what many of us would do to bad publicity - ignore it as the drivel of imbeciles.
In this, she is a representative character of our time; the micro-celebrity, the X Factor contestant who wants to "be someone", companies with their bloated PR departments and brand management budgets all seek validation and identity through the image provided by others.
In one sense, 'twas ever thus. Every petit-bourgeois has for decades obsessed about others' opinion. But they cared what others thought because the others were people of good judgment and virtue. Being thought a bad person was terrible because it carried with it the possibility that one really was a bad person.
But this isn't the case for Ms Mills or for brand managers and other micro celebrities. To them, the opinion of journalists matters in itself, regardless of any underlying reality. When you live in a world of image, the signifier matters irrespective of its relationship with the signified.
And this is where Ms Mills' plight is a tragedy for us all. So many people live in a world of image, and seek verification and meaning through others' image of them because the alternatives are no longer so available.
These alternatives are craft and virtue. The opposite characters to Ms Mills are Gregory House and Diogenes of Sinope. House cares nothing about what others think of him because he is dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in his craft. Diogenes cared nothing about others' opinion because he knew that the good life consisted of self-control rather than pandering to the stupidity and hypocrisy of society.
But the tragedy of our age is that these alternative models are increasingly closed to us. We cannot pursue virtue independently of other' opinion because we no longer know what virtue is. And the decline of craft occupations means it's harder to pursue excellence through these. One thing that gave traditional craftsmen and professionals autonomy and self-respect was that they could say: "I don't care what the boss says - that's a good job." But increasingly, a "good job" is no more than what the boss says it is.
With lives of substance increasingly unavailable, many of us have little alternative but to live like Ms Mills, obsessing about what others think of us.
But this is not all. In losing virtue and excellence, we also lose liberty. When we can pursue good independent of others' opinion, we don't need law. But the space created by the loss of internal standards of excellence gets filled by the state.
Is it a coincidence that craft, virtue and liberty have all receded together?

Self-ownership vs utilitarianism

The terrible news that Kerry Katona plans to have her norks disembiggened raises a long-standing conflict in political philosophy - that between self-ownership and utilitarianism.
Self-ownership says Kerry should go ahead - it's her body to do as she wants with.
Utilitarianism says she should be stopped; the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires that her curves be kept. If they can slap preservation orders on trees, they should do the same for Kerry's norks.
There's a parallel here with policy towards obesity. Self-ownership says individuals have a right to become lard-buckets. Utilitarianism - the costs to the NHS and the ugliness of our streets - requires that they be constrained from doing so.
So, here's my question. How can government ministers, consistently, worry about obesity whilst staying silent on the issue of Kerry's norks? Surely, the same issue - the priority of utilitarianism over self-ownership - arises in both cases.
It's time for Alan Johnson to speak up, and speak for England.

Democracy vs equality

Democracy and economic equality are incompatible. That's the message we should take from reports (assuming them to be true) that Tory promises to cut inheritance tax have won them support.
There are two mechanisms at work here. One is adaptive preference formation. People from rich homes grow up with high expectations: they expect to afford nice country houses and high school fees. And if they can't, they infer not that they are too stupid to earn big money, but that something is wrong with the system.
By contrast, people from poor homes grow up with low expectations. As long as they can pay the leccy bill and aren't being harrassed too much by the dibble, they are content.
The upshot of this is that there's clamour to cut inheritance tax, but no comparable clamour to cut income tax on the pow-paid.
The problem here isn't just one for democracy. It's also one for utilitarianism. If we understand this as the fulfilment of subjective desires, utilitarianism can give too much to the unsatisfied rich and too little to the quiescent poor.
The second mechanism is that the rich have, partly perhaps inadvertently, some clever hegemonic strategies. People who expect to inherit a £500,000 house claim - with the help of the MSM - to represent "middle England", whilst those in relative poverty are stigmatized as chavs and the underclass. The fact is though that the latter are vastly more numerous  than the former.
The upshot is that politicians pander to active vocal minorities rather than the silent millions. So you can win votes by cutting inheritance tax and threatening to harass the unemployed.
This means the left has a problem. Democracy - at least in its current form - cannot promote equality.

Obscenity, morality and emotivism

Is the undoctored version of this picture (via) by Nan Goldin, taken from the Baltic Centre, obscene? For me, the question raises lots of awkward general philosophical questions.
One set was raised by Richard Cork on Radio 4’s Front Row. He said (around 5 min in):

If I found it on the internet, I’d go completely berserk…but context is all.

My immediate reaction was that this is unacceptable in two ways. First, it’s an anti-democratic and elitist attempt to claim a “benefit of clergy” of the sort Orwell deplored in supporters of Salvador Dali:

The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘art’ and everything is OK.

And secondly, “context is all“ is a slippery slope which leads to a moral relativism in which anything goes: stoning gays is acceptable in the context of a fundamentalist Islamic society.
But are these reactions legitimate? Many occupations need some form of “benefit of clergy.” We don’t judge soldiers in the way we would judge ordinary killers; context is all on the battlefield. And sexuality is often about context: there’s a difference between a woman going topless on a beach and on the street, a difference between a parent’s photo of their children and child porn.
So, perhaps context is all in some cases. In which case there is a space in which moral relativism is legitimate. But how do we mark the boundaries of this space?
I’ve got other questions.
1. How far are we responsible for the effects of our actions? Ms Goldin’s motives (and mine) in displaying this picture were wholly innocent. But it’s obvious that the picture can be used in ways almost all of us would find distasteful or immoral. Is Ms Goldin responsible for this wholly foreseeable effect of her work? If not why not?
2. Do our visceral reactions matter? My instinctive response to this picture is revulsion and discomfort. But is this a meaningful reaction? Why are my feelings important? Or is it that I just lack sophisticated aesthetic judgment? Or is it instead that supporters of this work are themselves just striking a posture of what Fabian calls pseudo-iconoclasm, an empty and phoney “challenging” and “transgressing” our sensibilities?
3. Might there be a genuine conflict between aesthetic and moral values - that something can be morally horrible and yet good art ? Might it be that our “want it all” mentality stops us seeing this trade-off, as Bryan Ferry discovered a few months ago?  Or should it be that aesthetics really should be subordinated to moral values? And if the answer’s “sometimes” how do we decide what those times are?
I’ve no idea what the answers are here. But I know that the picture raises them. And I suspect our culture, with its debased emotivist moral language, is incapable of answering them.

Moral hazard and social discount rates

Why was Mervyn King - along with other economists - more worried (pdf) than Alastair Darling (a successor to Nigella’s dad)  about the moral hazard problem associated with bailing out Northern Rock and giving support to longer-term money markets?
Put it this way. Bailing out a bank today encourages banks to lend recklessly in future, in the belief they’ll be bailed out too. This means there’s a greater danger in future of a financial collapse.
Why does (did?) this prospect loom larger to King than Darling? It’s not just that King is more puritanical than Darling and instinctively hostile to borrowing - not at all. Nor is it, probably, that King is more aware of the effects of bad incentives and so attaches a higher probability to future financial troubles. Instead,  I suspect one overlooked reason lies in their time discount rates.
As a product of Cambridge in the 1960s, King will have been heavily influenced by the views of Pigou and Ramsey, that policy-makers should have a zero time-discount rate, because future people have the same moral status as current ones.
This means that he attaches (attached?) a high weight to the future cost of a probable financial collapse.
Darling, by contrast, attaches less weight to it. He’ll be out of office then, but faces the political costs of depositors’ distress today. So, even if both men were equally aware of the moral hazard problem, Darling would discount it more heavily, thus causing a difference between the two.
Which raises questions. Even if we take the moral hazard problem seriously - as we should - is King right to not discount rate it much? There are arguments (pdf) for policy-makers to discount the future.
And, is the government’s time discount rate consistent across policies? When I look at the bail-out of Northern Rock, I see a high time discount rate. When I look at policy towards climate change, I see a lower time discount rate. Am I right to see this? Am I right to think it inconsistent?