Justification for facilitating torture

The case of the APA and its members who participated in coercive interrogations.

When I read about psychologists who participated in the Bush administration approved interrogation/torture sessions, I recoil in contempt. The contempt is heightened when I read that, since 2002, the American Psychological Association (APA) has effectively condoned and offered justifications for its members’ participation. Is my attitude justified?

Some say no. They do so on the basis of a counterfactual claim: interrogations would have been worse for detainees had it not been for psychologists’ participation. This argument uses the following standard for ethical action: doing something is justified if doing it leads to better outcomes than not doing it. Applied to our psychologists’ participation in torturous interrogation, we can respond, Really? Their participation led to torture and the claim is that without them matters would have been worse. Really, worse than being tortured?

Even if we grant that there are degrees of torture and that psychologists’ participation mitigated the degree of torture, the counterfactual claim is specious because it uses the wrong baseline for comparison. If I torture you less than someone else would have, then that results in a better state of affairs; but, it obviously can’t be used to justify what I am doing. As an aside, compare a similarly specious argument often made for paying the minimum conceivable wage to third-world workers: if I didn’t bring my business over there, they would be unemployed; therefore, since $1/day is better than the nothing they would have gotten, that’s what I’m justified in paying.

At the very least, then, a comparative claim used to justify action must use as a baseline not how things are or would have been without the action, but rather how things would have been if I had acted in all the ways I could have acted. In the case of the torturer, assuming she can stop torturing, that would represent the best outcome (in the case of the entrepreneur, a better outcome would be to pay the just amount which is certainly more than $1/day), and what she does in fact do can be justified only if it is better than that. So, a better standard of justification would be this: my action is justified if doing it is better than anything else that I could have done. I’m not saying that this is the correct standard, but we can use it for our present purposes of evaluating justification for facilitating torture.

We can begin by looking at a brief history of the APA’s ethics code that is relevant to conflict between law and professional ethics. We can note that prior to 2001, the APA’s ethics policy suggested that conflicts be ‘responsibly resolved’ by the psychologist. This open-endedness left it open to the psychologist to follow her conscience in potentially violating positive law. Post 9/11, the policy was revised to read that obeying the law, irrespective of its content, would be sufficient for its members ethical standing. [For a more detailed discussion of the APA’s ethical standards, see Kenneth S. Pope’s, Ph.D., ABPP and Thomas G. Gutheil’s, M.D. article, here.]

Let’s now think of the culpability of individual psychologists and their role in torturous interrogations. If their participation is to be justified, they must claim that their participation leads to better outcomes than anything else they could have done. Is this plausible? The director of the APA’s ethics office, Stephen Behnke, argues for the presence of psychologists as follows:

APA frames a role that psychologists have unique training to fill: the role of observing interrogations in order to guard against ‘behavioral drift’ on the part of interrogators. Behavioral drift, which may arise in high stress situations where there is insufficient ethical guidance or oversight, involves a deviation from professionally and ethically acceptable behavior and so may lead to coercive interrogation techniques. Psychologists, as experts in human behavior, are trained to observe and intervene to prevent behavioral drift.

On this view, the chief benefit of psychologists’ participation lies in their ethical and professional competencies, which competencies can be used to thwart coercion by morally drifting interrogators. I don’t know why Behnke believes psychologists possess particular ethical dispositions and/or competencies, but even if they were uniquely trained in that regard, by the APA’s own ethical standards discussed above, if CIA interrogators ‘legally’ coerced information, no psychologist would have authority to intervene into or report such coercion. The official policy belies the individual justification. Now, if even if we are to imagine a heroic psychologist who bucked the law, this doesn’t absolve the other psychologists who not only ‘monitored’ interrogations but devised, shaped, and directed an entire interrogation regime. This describes the roles of Bruce Jessen and Col. Morgan Banks who are both believed to have deployed their expertise in evading interrogation to develop the C.I.A’s and military’s S.E.R.E interrogation program (survival, evasion, resistance and escape). Can we say of such a psychologist that his participation is better than anything else he could have done?

Suppose neither had participated at all, as surely was open to them, then an entire regimen of coercive interrogations would have been eliminated from existence. And surely that outweighs any conceivable benefit, if such there be, of their actual participation. Behnke might retort that the way the two devised their interrogation regime led to safer methods than would have been available without them. Even if this is true (I’m highly skeptical), it uses the specious comparative benchmark discussed above. Given that their methodology has been established to be torturous, then the correct standard of comparison is not whether without them the CIA would have invented more torturous methods, but rather whether they could have devised effective interrogation methods that shunned any hint of coercion. By the many accounts of experienced FBI interrogators, the most effective method does not involve coercion, and we can surmise that both Jessen and Banks could have built a program around that truth.

Let’s leave aside the case of individuals and turn to the topic of institutional responsibility for facilitating torture. We can note firstly that, in the context of political policy and as compared to individuals, institutions have a far broader range of counterfactual actions available to them. This is partially because they are responsible for many of the rules under which individuals must act and partially because of the great causal powers institutions have in the modern world. This is an often neglected fact and, in my opinion, it implicates institutions in a broader range of responsibilities than is normally acknowledged. We need to keep this in mind when we assess the APA’s actions and omissions.

We know that around 2006 after reporting made clear the coercive nature of U.S. interrogations, the Amercian Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association both issued prohibitions on its members from even being present at interrogations. Against this background, how should we assess the APA’s insistence on the benefits of psychologists’ participation. Given the existing ban by the AMA and the Am Psychiatric Assoc., the APA arguably could have put a stop to the whole sordid mess by following suit. Here’s why: as mentioned above, it is continually argued, both by the heads of the APA and military brass, that participation by psychologists is essential to keeping interrogations safe. Their absence, then, would entail unsafe interrogations. Therefore, at the very least, the APA’s prohibiting member participation would have put considerable political pressure on the administration to discontinue these, by their own lights, unsafe interrogations. So, this is a conceivable, even probable, counterfactual outcome, one which we can use to assess the goodness of the actual outcome. What was the actual outcome? Detainee deaths and psychologically broken human beings. By the standard set out above, the APA’s actions were unjustified, and it should be found culpable for torture.

The issue of individual and institutional culpability for the torture that took place under U.S. control is a complex problem. Nevertheless, the only argument I’ve seen defending the participation by APA members is specious, and the blame goes to the individual psychologists who participated in coercive interrogations but also, and perhaps to an even greater degree, the professional association which endorsed such participation.

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Competing conceptions of human rights by MT Nguyen, The Empire, CA

What counts as a human rights violation? Or, alternatively, What counts as a fundamentally illegitimate government action?

These are very important questions. Answering them is a condition of our capacity to understand and critique political authority.

I think there are two basic and distinct approaches to these questions, one moral and the other political. While the moral approach has its inherent appeal, I am no longer convinced that it can be sustained. Its answers and the methods by which it arrives at them are, so to speak, too facile. As applied to the current controversy over America’s interrogation regime, for example, its argument is too short: torture is morally impermissible; therefore, it is politically illegitimate. On the other hand, the political approach, though it arrives at the same negative conclusion, avoids this problem by correctly bringing more considerations into the fold while at the same time, in a way I’ll describe, integrating the moral point of view--but in a subordinate role to which morality is not accustomed. I'm not entirely convinced by the political approach, and neither am I entirely clear what it involves, but it strikes me as more relevant and applicable to our heterogeneous political world.

The most common approach to human rights is expressly moralistic. It rests on a moral picture of human beings, and sets to answer our questions by reference to violations which would undermine or constrain human beings (as painted by that picture). This approach is moralistic partly because it places moral characteristics front and center, particularly dignity and autonomy. Additionally, the approach wants to understand the concept of human rights as a moral concept. The study of human rights is fundamentally the study of a part of morality; and, the application of a human right requires only a recognition of the relevant moral principles in conjunction with a perception of the salient moral reasons.

On this approach, all one needs to evaluate the legitimacy of a political decision is to know its moral standing.

For some time now, I’ve found this moralistic approach laudatory. The connection between morality and a human rights violation, crudely put, is this: a political activity constitutes a human rights violation whenever it expresses a morally illegitimate exercise of political authority. This formula allows us to arrive at an assessment of political activities in a ‘pure’ manner, expressly setting aside all irrelevant considerations, i.e. all non-moral considerations. Moreover, since morality takes itself to apply everywhere rational activity exists, the approach’s scope is basically total and unconstrained. That is, anyone can transport the moral viewpoint, correctly construed, and use it to judge political activity wherever and whenever it exists.

As operating on political institutions and its activities, the moralistic approach has the great and heavily advertised advantage of being outside of what it judges. Often and clearly so, this is the correct standpoint. For example, this external view constrains the human tendency to exaggerate the weight and importance of self-serving considerations, e.g. nationalistic ones. Another advantage is morality’s integrity or holism. The univocal nature of its pronouncements and its refusal to countenance compromise are what make morality so beautiful and appealing.

This is nicely exemplified, for example, in the character of Socrates. Unlike all true statesmen, Socrates cares little that a political decision is necessary to save the state if that decision is, judged from the standpoint of the moral virtues, wrong. He couldn’t make any such decision because, being the virtuous man he was, he couldn’t see the reasons in favor of it. Most of us understand Socrates’ moral incapacities as virtues, and we have a strong tendency to judge political life from this perspective. We recoil, for example, when we witness President Obama’s evident betrayal of Senator Obama’s promises on government transparency. We applaud, on the other hand, the alacrity with which he announced the closure of Guantanamo (but, let us not forget, not Bagram). Here the expressions of blame and praise spring from the same moral source. Just as lying for political gain warrants moral repugnance, curbing torture deserves moral praise.

Our admiration for Socrates’ integrity should not blind us, however, to what it sacrifices. In particular, Socrates understood that he could never be a politician. He predicted that his inability to compromise, operating within the political, would have meant an even quicker death than he actually suffered. We can learn something here. I believe Socrates rightly sensed the deep incompatibility between moralism and the political. His a(nti-) political stance isn’t just a peculiar fact about himself, it belies the thought that the political can be adequately evaluated by just the moral standpoint. If so, then the moral incapacities which are so valuable to correct individual behavior become vices in political decision-making.

Is there another approach?

The philosopher, Bernard Williams, constructed a concise, expressly political, formulation of what constitutes a fundamentally illegitimate policy: (roughly) any governmental policy the effect of which makes the existence of government worse than its absence. Government exists to solve and resolve certain basic social problems; but, when its policies make government appreciably worse than the problem, that amounts to a paradigm case of a human rights violation. In short, when political authority approximates unmediated coercive power, we have an illegitimate exercise of state power; we have a human rights violation.

It is a weakness of our current human rights regime that, philosophically, it is grounded in moral concepts like human dignity and autonomy. Although morally powerful, these concepts are politically stunted (especially in America which has made no explicit use of them). Williams’s political formulation avoids this problem because, like his ethical approach in general, it embraces minimalism and avoids moralism. It does this by working only with concepts like power, coercion and authority. These are taken to be non-moral concepts which nevertheless any conceivable political construction must employ. Even if it is true that criminals or terrorists have no dignity, and that no accommodation is made for an individual's moral autonomy, we can still hold that, in its ambitions, a government can overreach and, in taking action, make itself more monstrous than the problem its ambitions attempt to resolve. Anyone can make this comparative judgment, irrespective of their substantive moral standpoint.

Even an amoral fanatic like Dick Cheney recognizes this. You can see it in how he defends the interrogation regime no doubt he had a hand in shaping and making into policy. In numerous interviews, Cheney virtually contemns moral considerations emphasizing instead the mantra that his methods directly helped thwart untold (literally, since the details of the supposed upside were, and continue to be, conveniently classified) number of attacks. If he's telling the truth, it would at least render intelligible how Bush’s government did not make itself worse than the problem. This is true even if it does not make the regime any more morally acceptable, for his is not an attempt at moral justification. Cheney’s defense is expressly political and offers a story (Williams calls this type of story a legitimation story) for how an interrogation regime can take the shape his did and yet maintain its legitimacy. In particular, this story places great stress on the necessary connection between these policies and the basic responsibility of government to protect its citizens.

As I suggested, the moral approach to assessing a Cheney-style legitimation story is too quick. Since no decent human being could help but arrive at the conclusion that torture is morally repugnant and hence wrong to do no matter the context, adopting this viewpoint leaves us with the puzzle of how a regime taking this shape could sustain itself over so many years and even after the facts about the nature of the interrogations have been known for nearly 5 years. Since ignorance of the morally relevant facts is not at issue, the only way out of the puzzle is to point to a virulent moral weakness induced by fear. For reasons I cannot get into, I find this utterly implausible.

The political approach’s evaluation goes beyond a narrow moral assessment of the interrogations themselves. It takes in all the political conditions required to make interrogations of this type possible. In the case of our torture regime, here are some of them. At the highest levels of government (not to mention the lower levels), generally there existed a pervasive and mendacious secrecy; unendingly imaginative forms of obfuscation and, when these failed, outright lies were told to Congress, to the courts, to foreign governments, to domestic and international organizations, and to the American public; powerful and influential members of Congress colluded with the executive to maintain the regime as well as pass laws designed to offer legal cover for its criminal acts; international covenants the US ratified were repeatedly violated and, in general, our moral and legal obligations were repeatedly and maliciously ignored, thereby making a mockery of international law; when they weren’t kept completely in the dark, institutions like the press, the OLC and the DOJ were subverted and/or used to propagandize; and, in sum, the domestic law and, really, our entire legal tradition was turned on its head and perverted.

All this is interconnected and interlocked to support the government’s project to manufacture the authority needed for its interrogation regime. When we have all of this before us, it is difficult to see how the Bush/Cheney government did not make itself worse than the problem it attempted to solve. The secrecy with which it carried out its policies points to the explanation for its illegitimacy. In particular, it rests to a large extent on how we understand ourselves here and now: no modern legitimation story can depend on the belief that political good and the means to it are the sole provenance of political authority. So, even if we are charitable and entertain the notion that the principal architects of this government aimed at the benefit of the citizenry, to protect us—if necessary, from ourselves—that alone wouldn’t serve to legitimize anything (this remains true even if, more fantastically, the regime served to actually protect us). This is a political and not a moral explanation, but through it we can see how the political can acknowledge the moral. It does so not necessarily as an independent constraint (that would be moralism all over again), but rather because its field of operation can, and in our case does, involve beings whose self-understanding includes morality. Lastly, this helps explain why Machiavellianism, although it can make a temporary appearance, can’t really work for us. Only a fanatic can suggest that we should just discard the moral understanding of ourselves and return to a ‘simpler’ time (if it ever existed) during which statesmen, with their good intentions, could run things without running them by citizens. This is fanaticism, not because it is immoral (although that’s a conceivable reason), but rather because any such suggestion is now beyond the political pale. If it is to exist at all, it must hide and remain underground, just as the interrogation regime and its instigators have been doing. And as with all forms of fanaticism, killing it doesn’t require moral arguments, but rather a spotlight.

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A Culture of Injustice by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The prevalent principle in politics nowadays is that letting the financial sector fail is, all things considered, the worst scenario for everybody, including the worst off. This was the principle president Obama availed himself of in his speech to congress when announcing he was going to bailout Wall Street in spite of his own fury. If in the sinking of a ship you want to save children and women first because they are the most vulnerable, in the sinking of the country the principle prescribes the exact opposite: let the strongest (same ones who caused the ship to sink) take the emergency boats; the rest of us can swim and hope they’ll manage to come back to rescue us.

The case of AIG executive bonuses is a particular application of the principle. While most of the country is drowning, we find ourselves having to stretch our air supply even more so AIG executives (same ones who caused us to be drowning) can have enough peace and piña coladas in Cancun to figure out how to get us afloat. It turns out, according to the principle, that unless we collect our last pennies and give them away to the same gang that drove us bankrupt, they might decide to move to other industries leaving us helpless.

It is almost impossible not to find the principle funny. If only because it implies incentives that go beyond perverse: “twisted” seems a better word for them. In the hypothetical case that saving Wall Street first will in turn get the country afloat, it will be in the best interest of Wall Street executives to be as ruthless as they have been in making money next time round. The principle guarantees their capacity to extort the country if things don’t go well again. “We take the risk, they take the losses” could well be their motto.

Still, the principle might turn out to be true. Pundits seem to be pretty sure it’s true, including pundit in chief, Ben Bernanke, who is said to be an authority on the subject. For him or president Obama to even contemplate presenting a principle like this to the public he needs to pair it up with a promise of reform guaranteeing that the conditions that allowed the financial sector to drive us down will not repeat. Only this can placate the perversity of the incentives thus engendered.

On pain of exposing my ignorance I shall not challenge the pundits. Instead I want to ask a question that grants their backward principle: Is it possible that our social organization is set up to safeguard the interest of an elite? If the principle is true, could it be true in virtue of a type of social organization whose ultimate goal is to protect a few?

The hypothesis suggested is admittedly speculative but, if true, it would depict our society in a guise bleaker than commonly assumed. It would entail not that social injustice is an unfortunate byproduct of Capitalism but that the collective well-being is a fortunate byproduct of the American brand of Capitalism. In simpler words, if correct, this would imply that the system allows for the collective well-being to increase only insofar as it does not interfere with the well-being of the elite. This would reverse the order of priorities usually thought to represent our social organization.

In fact, this order of priorities is invariably assumed in political rhetoric as well as academic debate. Our standard, if somewhat chauvinistic, historical account says that the modern democratic society is the result of centuries of social struggle leading to the vindication of the powerless masses. We all tacitly take pride in living in the age of reason when finally humanity has arrived at a social organization whose ultimate goal is the collective well-being and where the enrichment of a few is only accepted when conducive to this goal. We are heirs of the French Revolution—we like to believe.

By questioning this historical account, however, I do not intend to suggest that the economic elites somehow conspired to cheat us all into believing that the system works for us while it really works for them. On the contrary, I take the hypothesis to be compatible with this system being more or less inevitable: the spontaneous result of the flaws of alternative systems. In sum, it is possible, if perhaps implausible, that the system has been tweaked to protect the elite in a corruption-free manner.

Evidence for the hypothesis that our social organization is set up to safeguard the economic elite can be found in diverse considerations. If indeed the principle that the future well-being of the country depends on the well-being of the financial sector is true, as most experts believe, it will seem to entail the impossibility of pursuing the interest of the country without at the same time pursuing the interest of the “big banks.” This would appear to be prima facie evidence for the hypothesis.

Moreover, the fact that it is only the “big banks” that need to be protected at any cost adds support to the hypothesis. If it were Wall Street as a whole that needed to be protected to salvage the economy one could argue that there is enough flow of people to and from Wall Street to represent a stable elite. But while this line of argument seems empirically dubious when predicated of Wall Street as a whole, it would seem plainly false when predicated of the “big banks.” The admission barriers for this elite seem insurmountable by the regular citizen regardless of her talents: e.g. having family connections, having attended Harvard Business School, having a certain golf handicap, etc.

Another obstacle my hypothesis needs to hurdle is the steep taxation rates of modern democracies. The redistribution of wealth resulting from such taxation rates seems to support the view that it is the collective well-being that has priority over the well-being of the economic elite in the inner workings of our social organization. While this argument may well carry some weight applied to countries with moderate inequalities (e.g. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, etc.) it seems entirely insufficient applied to the US. Not only does the US exhibit record inequalities but also its social mobility (i.e. the likelihood of moving up or down in the social structure) is remarkably low. In fact, the social mobility within the higher classes of American society is even lower than within middle and lower classes. This, on the contrary, further supports the hypothesis.

I realize that the evidence presented in this article may not suffice to prove the hypothesis under consideration. Still, I believe it is important to countenance such a bleak possibility in the light of the allegedly necessary injustices the country has reluctantly funded. What does seem clear from the discussion, however, is the demise of the American Dream: the US resembles less a land of opportunities than a land of well-paid servants. Perhaps we fail to see this in times of economic prosperity because we are absorbed in a culture of injustice.

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The Pretense of Knowledge by MT Nguyen, The Empire, CA

The title comes from the Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek’s, Nobel Prize winning address. I like the title and the sentiment it expresses. Hayek applied it specifically to economists of his era, and I would like to apply it, although in a different context, to economists as well, including to Hayek himself.

For those who are not familiar with Hayek (I wasn’t until about a month ago), the one interesting thing to know is that he is something of a hero to the right wing. His attack on socialism, The Road to Serfdom, is a classic; his work on economics forms one cornerstone in what is known as the Austrian School (roughly, anti-Keynesian economic theory). In trying to learn something about the large clash of ideas that is occurring now because of our economic crisis, one could do far worse than spend some time studying his writings.

Much can be gleaned from what Hayek concludes in his Nobel address:

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

This should be understood as a call for skepticism, a wariness of human arrogance in matters of knowledge. In Hayek’s case, he applied this skepticism to economic knowledge, asserting that we cannot have the kind of knowledge that many economists claim. This epistemic hole implies, Hayek claims, that governmental economic market manipulation is (more or less) always unjustified. Grounding this skepticism is his assertion that the market-place possesses its own kind of ‘wisdom’. Specifically, markets can sum up the totality of human economic intentions and communicate them to all economic players in the form of prices. This is the coordinating function at which it is uniquely master. According to Hayek, the only way acquire the ‘wisdom’ of the marketplace would be to know the intentions of each individual market player, and since that is possible only for God, if such there be, it would be overreaching (to say the least) to insinuate oneself, as the government does, when it fixes prices, attempts to manipulate wages, prevents capital flight, or performs any number of other interventionist actions.

Many have used Hayek to draw the conclusion that government should never interfere with the marketplace. This is highly misleading. First, Hayek himself was quite clear that exceptions existed, e.g. when the costs of a business venture cannot be summed up by price (pollution is a classic example because a polluting business does not solely bear the costs of its pollution, but gains all the profit); and, when the enjoyment of a good cannot be efficiently charged to its recipient (e.g. signposts and roads). In such cases markets fail to do their job, and government has a role to play. Second, and rather surprisingly, he believed a strong case could be made that government should provide a safety net against catastrophic loss, i.e. a kind of insurance against shortfalls in basic material necessities. I take it some of his followers will take him to task for his alleged inconsistency on this matter. It is unclear to me how far he is willing to go, but it makes his position interesting and far from the dyed-in-the-wool anti-interventionist his followers want and paint him out to be. On both counts, therefore, he was not, as he repeatedly says, a proponent of laissez-faire economics.

Aside from the exceptions just noted, generally he thought that there was a positive role for government: it should be like a gardener tending to his garden, cultivating the conditions necessary for (economic) growth. Nevertheless, the exceptions and cultivating activities are, for Hayek, necessarily protracted and limited.

Leaving those not insignificant nuances aside, we can ask the question whether it follows from this type of economic theory that governmental intervention is generally wrong. On the face of it, it is easy to say no. Governmental intervention is wrong only if we make the striking conclusion, one which I have argued before there is no reason to accept, that a true economic theory implies economic justice. That is, that allowing true economic theory to dictate policy necessarily benefits everyone. This is a Platonic fantasy to which we shouldn’t be beholden.

When the mechanisms of the marketplace lead to unjust economic distributions, there is good reason why government should interfere. The reason is simple: government should be in the business of achieving justice. It is important to digest the truth that economists for all their pretensions of knowledge, all their mind-numbing econometric models, really, I mean really, have no special competence and hence no authority to say anything about how economic goods should be distributed.

I just said that governments are in the business of justice and concluded that economists are not and so should shut up (or at least make clear that when they are dispensing ethical advice, they don’t pass it off as grounded in some mathematical model or, worse, some a priori truth born out of reflection on the nature of rationality). But here’s the rub. Many of the most influential 20th-century economists from von Mises to Murray Rothbard, to Hayek, to Milton Friedman have philosophical pretensions. Look at the titles of their influential works and there can be no doubt: “Socialism” by von Mises, in which he purports to establish the irrationality and immorality of all forms of socialism; “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard in which he purports to establish libertarianism as a philosophical doctrine; “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek, as I said earlier an attack on socialism; “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman, in which he defends the idea that economic freedom is a necessary condition of political freedom.

This whole cast of ‘liberal’ economists suffer a pretense to knowledge, namely, that they can make true claims about social justice. Turning again to Hayek, when he asserts that government interference may make it a ‘destroyer of civilization,’ he does not mean just a destroyer of economies. He means that governmental interference unjustly restricts individual liberty, and thus casts an inextricable totalitarian shadow over the whole of political life. In the end, Hayek proposed fairly moderate policies. This cannot be said of his heirs. This is why there now exists a more severe strand of conservatism (or libertarianism, nee classical liberalism) a la Grover Norquist which aims, in Norquist’s famous quip, to “drag [government] into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”. On this radical view, the business of economics cannot be separated from that of justice; for government to intervene in economic transactions just is for it to destroy liberty and send us all on the short road to serfdom.

Whatever is to be said on either side of this debate, and much ink has been spilled, my point is to note the movement to an entirely different habitat than the one in which the academic economist lives. What we have here is an ethical/political theory, one which posits a conception of happiness and the necessary steps to achieve it. We are in the domain of philosophy in the grand Platonic/Nietzschean sense (as opposed to the narrow academic sense). To his credit, in the original preface to ‘The Road to Serfdom’ Hayek explicitly acknowledges that its content stands outside the ken of his specialty, academic economics. That however didn’t stop him from writing the rest of the book, nor did he repeat that qualification in the subsequent editions—after it had enjoyed its successes. These philosophical ambitions, perhaps, explain the longevity of their ideas, and why they persist even though the economic basis of the ideas have fallen out of favor.

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman quipped that no special license is required to identify oneself as an economist. This truth applies to an even greater extent to identifying oneself as a philosopher. Our 'liberal' economists, not content with the small deliverances of their own discipline, seem to want to ‘play the master’ (to use Nietzsche’s phrase) and fancy themselves philosophers. This is ironic since for all their railing against government planning out and directing individual lives, these people have taken on the ultimate synoptic perspective: that of the philosopher who knows the good for man and aims in their activities to make that vision real. Plato would be proud.

Hayek rightly chided economists for their ‘scientism’, that is, their pretending that economics can deliver knowledge on a par with physics. I think he should have chided them, and himself, additionally for pretending to have the wisdom of philosophers. Assuming such a wisdom exists, there is no special reason to think that economists have it, and thus no special reason to listen to them when they make philosophical claims. Of course, we need not deny that as individuals these economists can have philosophical insight; but, since there can be no sound inference from true economic theory to a sound ethical theory, any philosophical claims must be diligently distinguished and judged on their own merits. I intend on tackling some of their more interesting philosophical claims in my next essay.

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A Very Partisan Stimulus Bill by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The exhausting negotiation over the Stimulus Plan in Congress made one thing clear: Obama didn’t get his honey moon with Congress. In his first big initiative, less than a month after he arrived in the White House, Republicans decided to play tug of war with the Democratic majority in Congress. The Bill still passed but the resistance it found is striking in the light of Obama’s call for bipartisanship in Washington. Did Republicans not buy his call? Or did Obama abuse his credit line with such a “liberal” plan? Or, perhaps, there has never been such a thing as bipartisanship and Obama’s call for it (as McCain’s boast of his bipartisan record) was yet another political move to get an edge in the game.

Before attempting to decide among these possibilities let’s get clear as to what bipartisanship is. We say that a legislative motion is bipartisan simply when it is meant to appeal to both Democrats and Republicans. But if we are to factor in the usual implications of the word in political rhetoric, it also involves the assumption that bipartisan are those who put the interest of the country first, over and above the interest of their parties. To a large measure, the word has become etiquette to set apart the open-minded, transparent politicians from the narrow, egoistic ones.

Notice that being bipartisan is a matter of having the right intentions, not of actually voting with or against ones’ party (though the voting record is probably telling). Someone can frequently walk across the aisle to bridge gaps between opposing parties but do so in order to pursue a longer-term partisan goal--or even one of his own (e.g. becoming president). In the light of this the question whether politicians are ever bipartisan, that is, if bipartisanship is at all possible, is pertinent.

A political realist would give a negative answer to this question. According to political realism, politics is just a struggle for power and, as such, there is no room in it for higher ideals such as the country, world, the people, etc. (though the interest of the country is expected to follow from such egoistic wrestles). But many find political realism unnecessarily bleak or, in any case, implausible. Should they believe in the “bipartisan” talk?

During his campaign, Obama stressed the need to change the culture of attributing impure intentions to political opponents. Consistent with Obama’s optimism, one could explain the Republican resistance to his Bill as due not to their partisanship but to a genuine disagreement over what the interest of the country is. After all, no doubt Republicans and Democrats roughly represent distinct political ideologies which differ over what the good is. While Democrats tend to see the interest of the country as involving social justice, Republicans tend to omit this item in their conception of the nation’s good.

But even so, it is hard to fully explain the hysteria Obama’s plan sparked among Republicans as a legitimate bipartisan disagreement. Republicans were at fault for at least misinterpreting the context in which the debate was taking place. Bipartisanship is putting the country’s interest even above one’s ideology: it requires the ability to recognize that the country is in a state of emergency, curb one’s ideological impulses, unite with the opponents and get the country afloat. Republicans clearly failed on this score. This perhaps explains the feeling of disgust toward them many of us have been experiencing.

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Plato's return by MT Nguyen, The Empire CA

Many who debate the merits of various stimulus proposals argue on the basis that their proposal rests on sound, that is true, economic principles. This is the basis for claiming that one proposal, as against any other, would work. Thus, conservatives cry out that the Obama proposal cannot work because it doesn’t contain enough tax cuts and includes too many irrelevant spending measures, while Democrats insist that Government spending on public works projects is key. Both policy proposals, tax cuts/decreased spending and ‘shock and awe’ Government spending, are firmly entrenched in each side’s economic principles, very crudely and respectively, free market principles which decry intervention and Keynesian principles which make room for it.

I will say nothing here on the merits of either claim (although this doesn’t mean that I believe that the proposals are on a par). Rather I want to note and focus on one thing that both sides share, namely, the assumption that what is economically true is also what is good for Americans. This may appear harmless and perhaps even a necessary truth. After all, shouldn’t economic policy be based on what’s true? Yes, it would be crazy to base social policy on what’s known or believed to be false. However, this is besides the point, because the assumption I want to note asserts much more than that truism. It is a striking assumption because it implies that the correct, i.e., true economic principles, are also, in the end, the just ones. For the efficacy of a proposal or the dimension along which a policy is judged to have ‘worked’ is always whether good has been achieved, at the limit, the good of economic justice. The assumption is comprised of two implications: if an economic principle is true, it must be good for the country; and, if an economic policy is good for the country, it must rest on true economic principles.

Here, the True and the Good (as I will say in shorthand) coincide in truly spectacular fashion. It should seem incredible to anyone who’s not Plato that this alignment should always take place.

Let’s be more concrete. When someone claims that any economic recovery would require that wealth be redistributed away from the wealthy and towards the working class, isn’t it curious that that person almost certainly believes, quite independently of economic principles, in some form of economic egalitarianism? Or, on the other side, when someone argues that government intervention into market forces makes for inefficient distributions, isn’t it curious that that person almost certainly believes that government intervention illegitimately transgresses a person’s right to property. An observant skeptic would suggest that these moral principles, egalitarianism and the sanctity of property rights, motivate and support the belief in certain economic principles. If so, it is no wonder then that the outcomes of the various policy proposals should yield (what’s believed to be) economic justice: moral outcomes are predetermined by moral inputs.

Now, it would certainly be objectionable to support an economic principle, a principle which purports to be scientific and objective, by reference to a moral belief. As a basis for supporting Say’s Law, “The all benevolent God told it’s true” is a howler. If economics purports to be anything like physics (or more likely, biology), human preferences cannot be a condition on the truth of its principles. Objective scientific principles shouldn’t be bent to the will of morality.

You might say, as I’ve read people say, that economics is not a science at all, but more like history, an attempt to reconstruct phenomenon after they’ve already occurred (this is more often claimed about macroeconomics than microeconomics). That is, a discipline with little if any predictive power. Whatever merits this claim has, it is certainly not the prevailing political opinion. This is evidenced by the fact that we turn to economists for expert advice. When we want to know, for example, what effects raising the Fed’s interest rate will have on demand for houses, economists are paid handsomely to give an answer. We certainly don’t knowingly turn to them for moral advice; if that were the case, moral philosophers would reap the windfall economists have enjoyed for years. Where do I sign up!

We might clarify things by thinking about one of the possible relationships between the two domains, the Good and True, as applied specifically to our subject, economics. One possibility is that the principles of economic efficiency are a non-moral matter, but they become objects of moral concern when we judge the appropriateness of various possible distributive outcomes. Given the importance of what is distributed by economic institutions, however, it becomes a moral question how such things should be distributed and hence, in the moral sense, what the correct distribution is. In this way, we can discover and support the correct principles of efficient distribution without recourse to any moral language; the latter shows up at a later stage.

This appears to be the philosopher, John Rawls’s, understanding of the relationship. He believed that morally neutral economic principles supported the possibility of distinct Pareto Optimal (roughly, maximally efficient) outcomes. A morally sustainable, i.e. just, distributive outcome would be chosen amongst those outcomesha. In this way, Rawls had his cake and ate it too. He demonstrated, he thought, that justice (the Good in our story) aligns with economic efficiency (the True in our story). On this picture morality is subsequent to and doesn’t seem to infuse economic theory in any objectionable way.

We might wonder though whether this is the same Platonic fantasy in a different guise. In particular, why should we believe that a just distribution so nicely coincides with one of the Pareto Optimal distributions? Rawls could only engineer this intersection by assuming that justice is compatible with, indeed requires, wide (possibly very, very wide) differences in wealth. Many have duly attacked him for this position, arguing (for example) that justice musn’t be held hostage by economic incentives that are allegedly born out of the differences in expected wealth. For our purposes, the problem is that Rawls went too far in the other direction: instead of grounding an economic principle on morality, he bent morality to the will of an economic principle.

In the end, the lesson is the following. If economics purports to be a scientific endeavor, then the application of its principles shouldn’t automatically be believed to be good for our country, even when true. Going the other way, if we are trying to assess the moral goodness of an economic policy (that is, its justice), we shouldn’t automatically conclude that there is some true economic theory which supports it. Either way, the important practical implication is that politicians who are responsible for making policy conform to justice shouldn’t rely solely on economic advice, even when the subject matter is economics and even if the advice is sound.

To believe otherwise is to believe that the True and the Good always intersect, and this is to believe in a notion that’s too good to be true.

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Is Palestine a Counterexample to Pacifism? by Matias Bulnes, NYC

While the US celebrates an unprecedented historical event, in a remote point on the globe UN officials witness a discouragingly familiar scene of destruction and desolation. The first black president of the US brings joy and hope for a better future. But we should not forget the irony that at the same time Obama became US president Israelis and Palestinians were sinking even more deeply into a nightmare that seems to outlast generation after generation. Conscientious Americans will hope that the change Obama has forecasted will spill onto Palestine. But let’s not hold our breaths: the conflict has seen politicians fail one after another, many notable.

The international community has reacted to Israel’s military excursion into the Gaza Strip as usual: repudiating bloodshed yet hesitant to condemn either side. What will likely happen is what has been happening for the last century. This outburst of violence will ease up. There will be months, years, hopefully decades, of tamped hostilities between Zionists and Arabs; then another outburst. International alarm and UN resolutions will follow suit. The sad truth is we are out of ideas. All one sees around is variations of old schemes of solution that have already been rejected by either Israelis or Palestinians.

But let’s not point our fingers at the international actors; too many have been pointed in this endless conflict. Perhaps it is nobody’s fault. I see people heatedly debating who is on the right, whether Israelis or Palestinians. But at this point their historical arguments, correct or incorrect, sound to me like futile abstractions. Whether or not it has a right to be, Israel is not going anywhere—nor are Palestinians. To the extent that both parties are unable to accept these facts there will be no solution. What’s worse, even if both parties accept these facts there might be no solution. Perhaps it is time to contemplate this possibility. Perhaps the idea that all conflicts have a peaceful solution is untenable after all.

The pacifist hopes for nonviolent understanding between conflicting parties. But this is more a prescription than a practical solution. It prescribes that peace should be put before any other ideal. The reality is that many people don’t and getting them to change their minds may turn out impossible (at least by nonviolent means). The case of some religious people is instructive. While they regard earthly life as secondary, their religion may dictate goals that trump the value of their own lives as well as that of others. Oftentimes these goals can only be achieved at the expense of some other groups, violence to follow. Arguably there is an element of this in the Palestine conflict.

But inevitable violence does not necessitate religious intolerance. A sufficiently Kantian outlook can produce similar outcomes. Nationalisms typically trade on abstractions such as the nation’s special dignity or worth. These, the Kantian line goes, also trump any practical goals: they are matters of principle and should never be up for negotiation—as politicians say. The result is analogous: if two groups perceive the recognition of their dignity as incompatible with the existence of the other, violence is in the offing. Arguably there is an element of this too in the Palestine conflict.

In his first day as president of the US, Obama hinted at an active role of his government in the Palestine conflict. Does he expect to solve it? Perhaps. But even if there is no solution to the conflict and bloodshed will be forthcoming no matter what we do, it would still seem immoral to remain indifferent before such devastating human suffering. If unable to solve the conflict, we should not renounce palliative measures intended to minimize the destruction and casualties it will claim.

In fact, it would not be surprising that Obama sees the future role of the US in Palestine as primarily palliative. After all, he does realize that the hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East has been earning the US more troubles than benefits lately. His plan to restructure the energy supply of the country has been insistently framed in the broader context of the war against Islamic terrorism. However, it would be myopic not to acknowledge that anti-American sentiments have been abetted by the US’s interventionist policy in Palestine. Obama, as any other politician, cannot publicly use this as an argument to withdraw influence from the area, for this would amount to admitting a military defeat according to Bush’s rhetoric of the “war” on terror. But terminological issues aside, this seems to be the course of action that gives the US the most bang for the buck and will probably occur anyway if Obama's energy plan succeeds and the US has no longer business in the Middle East.

In sum, I raise the question what is the right course of action for the international community in the Palestine conflict. Nothing seems to work because the Israeli and Palestinian platforms of negotiation appear to be wholly incompatible. For years the world has wished that these platforms were dictated by the extremists and that eventually a majority of moderates would emerge. By now it seems increasingly clear that the extremists have significant support. Hence, no solution. Still, I believe it is our moral obligation to provide humanitarian aid in the area any time it’s needed. However, it is not clear to me, nor perhaps to Obama, that more direct intervention in the conflict is going to do any good to anybody. Should we keep on trying?

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Report on US-Latin America's Relations by Matias Bulnes, NYC

Last Monday the Brookings Institution released a report on the current state of relations between the US and Latin America, and the major challenges faced by the region, finally suggesting future policies to president-elect Obama. While highlighting the dramatic changes Latin America has undergone over the last two decades, the report insists on the need for respectful collaboration within the Americas.

The main reason why the US should seek collaboration with Latin American countries, according to the report, is pragmatic, having to do with the nature of some of the challenges faced by the region. Climate change, migratory policies, drug control, and nuclear growth exemplify challenges that demand a joint response—the report says. If everyone takes independent measures, the solutions achieved for these problems will doubtlessly be suboptimal and perhaps even insufficient.

The report also points out the feasibility of such collaboration with Latin America given the democratic stability and relative prosperity many Latin American countries have achieved during the last decades. While it still is poorer than the US or Canada, Latin America is on the rise, and drawing economic and diplomatic attention from various points on the globe. Latin America is entrenching its connections with Asia and Europe and as a result has become more independent of the US. But this boost in international participation is fueled by the consolidation of democracy in Latin American countries which also makes them better partners for the US.

In sum, the report ably argues for the utility and feasibility of uplifting the collaboration between the US and Latin America. What the report deliberately omits is their willingness to partner with each other. The last half a century of relations between the US and Latin America has been rocky, to say the least. There still is much mistrust and animosity between them—especially from Latin America toward the US. And though it is true that they both will pay the price for not collaborating, it is far from obvious that the US will find a warm response from many Latin American countries.

Consider the case of Venezuela—one of the biggest and most influential countries in Latin America. President Chávez has made the US a cornerstone of his political discourse. Chávez routinely uses “the Empire”—as he calls the US—as a scapegoat for all the evils in the world, both real and imagined. Should the US expect a warm response from him to collaborate on a common agenda? Even with Obama as president that seems unlikely. For no collaboration seems possible unless Chávez tempers his anti-American rhetoric. And yet Chávez’s popularity heavily relies upon his incendiary discourse. Thus barring a sudden change in its political direction, it seems unlikely that Venezuela will be on-board with a collaboration plan.

And with Venezuela a number of other Latin American countries follow suit. Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador, all belong to Chávez’s circle of trust. Moreover, all of the political leaderships of these countries have capitalized on anti-American sentiments in their respective nations. Similarly then, no much warmth should be expected from them.

On the other extreme of the spectrum is Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia. Unlike Venezuela, in Colombia the leftist rhetoric has worn out. Beset by guerrillas and their paramilitary counterparts, the Colombian people has grown used to the idea that violence will not subside without crushing the guerrilla. The US has thus been perceived as an ally in their efforts to regain internal peace. President Uribe is without a doubt the US’s closest ally in the region and one that will certainly welcome collaboration with the US. However, even here there is a little obstacle: the Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The US congress has proved reluctant to tighten the economic and political ties of the US with a country that tops the lists of violence in the world. In fact, Obama himself has opposed the FTA with Colombia and so it seems possible that it won’t be forthcoming during his administration. If so, the question arises whether the Colombian leadership will take offence. The report recommends approving the FTA but skeptics still remain. In any event, it is a sign of how difficult things can be with Latin America that the US will have to work so hard to get the favor of its foremost ally in the region.

Mexico would make for a good partner if it weren’t for the migration issue. For one, there are anti-American sentiments in the mid and lower classes of Mexican society, but more importantly, the Bush administration has abetted them with its project of building a wall along the border. The Mexican government has rarely been so close in ideology to the US, but I can’t help to be skeptical of the long-term workability of a common agenda with a nation the US is treating with so much disdain as to build a wall between them.

The report also recommends a complete redefinition of the US policy toward Cuba. Cuba has been a tenacious wedge between the US and Latin America, shaping in large measure the relations between the two. The report argues for the need to tamp down the hostilities with Castro’s regime if any close collaboration with Latin America as a whole is to be possible. Obama is in good standing to begin this revival of diplomatic relations with Cuba, but it would seem unrealistic to expect that the trust will be restored within Obama’s mandate. Also, any attempt to restore the trust will require mutual respect for each other’s internal affairs (a point omitted in the report). But this would seem very costly for any administration since it would arouse the fury of the Cuban American community. Again, not an easy task here.

Chile and Brazil are perhaps the best partners for the US in the region. Chile because of its economic leadership, Brazil because of its size, both are emblematic countries which are stable and economically sound. Also, because of historical circumstances there is a healthy distance between the US and their internal affairs. This in turn clothes Chile and Brazil with an image of neutrality that makes them more effective as negotiators within the region than submissive US allies such as Colombia. The US must engage them in a way that preserves this asset.

In sum, I believe that the report recommends the right course of action for the US toward Latin America. Nevertheless, the report does not acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge lying ahead. Latin America has internal divisions of its own, its politics is crossed by historical animosities and aspirations. Get them all to work together may be hard in its own merit. Expecting that Obama’s administration will get them to work together and with the US may well be impossible.

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Will Tuesday's Election Make History? by Matias Bulnes, NYC

Every election is the most important one ever. At least that is how the media portray it and people perceive it. Tuesday’s election is no exception to the rule. The media and public opinion have attached an enormous historical significance to it, using expressions such as "crucial" or "tipping point" to describe it. Of course the US is the most powerful country in the world and American culture a dominant force in our era. If only for this reason the election of its political leadership has a tremendous impact everywhere. But this has been the case with every presidential election in the US since at least the early XX century. More interesting is the question whether this election is special over previous ones, whether we should not take it routinely. Is it really more important than the last election or the one before? Can this election significantly alter the course of history? Let's analyze the issue carefully.


One of the arguments underlying this magnifying view of the ongoing election appeals to the international scenario and an alleged redistribution of power in the world. Since the end of the Cold War there has been no counterbalance to American dominance. This state of affairs, some fear, is beginning to change. China has had a decade of persistent growth around the 10% mark which has earned it both power and influence. China still is considerably poorer than the US or Europe, but if they continue to grow at half the present rate, not for too long. Additionally, its monstrous dimensions grant China an important advantage in the game—same advantage the US has enjoyed over its dismembered European neighbors. China need not equal the GDP of the US to surpass it in power and influence. Can the outcome of this election interfere with China’s raise to the summit?

Like it or not, let’s first accept that China’s investiture as first power is very likely inevitable. It is part of the natural historical progression that countries occupy the position of superpower temporarily. And given China's tremendous success and size it seems poised to be next superpower. The question is when (rather than if) this will occur. In the light of this, Tuesday’s election is crucial if the outcome can alter the speed of China's development. Can either candidate do this? Hardly because China's growth can be explained in large measure by internal events such as an accelerated urbanization and industrialization.

Barring influencing its economic development, the only way the next US president could play a significant historical role in relation to China would be by passing the title of first power to the Chinese. But this also seems highly improbable. Granted that China will likely be the next superpower, the imminence of this event is oftentimes exaggerated. For all its growth China is nowhere near the US in economic stature. The US still doubles China in GDP and its share of the World GDP does not seem to be in decline. Most likely the US will continue to be the most powerful nation on Earth when the next president leaves the White House, and very likely, for the years to follow.

The remaining international conditions have not changed significantly since Bush won the reelection. The threat of terrorism is still lurking, the Iraq War has worsened but is essentially equally untenable, the Israel-Palestine conflict is in the same deplorable state it has been for the last decade. So if the significance of Tuesday’s election is not being played in the international scenario, is it being played in the domestic one?

Some particularities of this election make it look special. First, the two frontrunners, Obama and McCain, stand in striking contrast even aside from their unremarkable political differences. One of them is unusually young, the other is unusually old; one is Black the other is White; one is the child of an immigrant the other belongs to a traditional military family. But all of these amount to simple anecdote. More important is the fact that this election has attracted more public attention than recent ones. The response to phone polls has been better and more enthusiastic than in previous election years and experts expect the turnout to near the historical pick (the 1960 Election between Kennedy and Nixon had a 64% turnout, the highest in recent history). But in itself this does not seem to me to endow the election with historical significance. It perhaps shows that the election is perceived as very significant, but this is hardly enough evidence that it will be. After all, if it is not, it would not be the first time public perception misrepresents reality.

In isolation none of the above conveys the historical significance of Tuesday’s election. But when put together within a cogent, independent historical narrative they constitute strong evidence that we may be witnessing an outstanding presidential race. I believe that the only coherent narrative that brings all these pieces together is the history of race relations and multiculturalism in the US and, more generally, the post-Cold War world.

The significance of this election to the history of race relations within the US is obvious from the fact there has never been a non-white president. But it is more than a mere mention in history textbooks that is at stake on Tuesday: an Obama victory would mark the culmination of a historical process and the beginning of a new era in race relations all across the Western hemisphere. It all began with the arrival of slaves from Africa and has continued intermittently with Asian, European and Latin American migratory waves. In West Europe the immigration is more recent and from Africa and the Middle East mainly. All the same, the last century or two have witnessed a remix of races that can only be compared to the barbarian migration to Rome back in the V century. That story did not end well as the Romans eventually abandoned the city and the Empire fell as a result. In the present case the prognosis is much better since the newcomers have integrated into the host societies—in fact, so much so that the next president of the most powerful one could be a newcomer.

Speaking more practically, race relations will most likely undergo a transformation as a result of this presidential campaign. While the non-white had traditionally been left out of the circuits of power, this has inevitably affected the interaction among individuals of different races and ethnicities. Having darker skin will no longer be a sign of powerlessness—whether or not one is willing to act upon this assumption. When going out to the street on Wednesday and seeing a black person we will have to contemplate the possibility that he or she could be a future president of the US. This slight change in our perception of one another can change American society for good and for the better.

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Change is in the Air by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The situation of the US seems to be as precarious as it has ever been: An unprecedented debt, a looming economic crisis of unbeknown consequences, an unmanageable war, the threat of terrorism lurking, China’s power increasing persistently and, let’s not forget, all this in the midst of a fierce struggle over interpretations of fundamental constitutional principles sparked by the Guantanamo Base prison and the wiretapping of citizens. And when one hits rock-bottom consolation comes from the realization that things can hardly go worse. But this is not to say that things are going to get better. For the US economy can go a long time before it recovers—as it happened after the Great Depression. And in fact, it may never totally recover, as some fear that China might relegate the US to a secondary role sooner rather than latter. The challenge of the day is to get out of the hole as fast as possible and, perhaps more importantly in the long-run, to get out of the course of events that led the country down this hole. The country needs change—and desperately so.

There can hardly be any doubt that the main responsible for the present state of affairs is the Republican Party in general, and the Bush administration in particular. Clinton handed the country to Bush with surplus after a decade of economic prosperity, no major military conflict, in fairly good terms with its European allies, and with the Israel-Palestine conflict having come as close to a solution as it has ever been. The Republican administration will likely return the country in the aforementioned deplorable conditions—may they not have another period to devastate it more.

Not even external, unforeseeable circumstances such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 can account for the magnitude of the disaster. There are plenty of fingers one can point to decisions that straightforwardly explain much of the problems. Economists from within and without the country had been warning for years of the risks involved in such a ruthless deregulation of the US financial market. Or as many have observed, it is just naïve to believe that a housing market that always goes up might not turn out to be a bubble. Or in foreign policy, even now nobody understands why go into Iraq in order to hunt down someone who is hiding in Afghanistan and, moreover, in a way that undermines international institutions and threatens one’s allies. The list goes on and on.

All of this is familiar territory. But more significant than the usual declamations about Bush’s mistakes is the ideology that has driven him through such unfortunate decisions. For as one would have expected, all the mistakes hang together nicely in a way that reveals American conservativism in the background. The deregulation of the markets is the battle flag of the conservative right, while preemptive war has been advocated by the religious right and the neoconservatives. These two policies account for a good deal of the present distress, both of them courtesy of American conservativism.

The association between the present crisis and the conservative views that have dominated US politics over the last decades is clear in theory. The question is whether it’ll be as clear to the voter’s mind. And I think we can be optimistic about change in the political direction of the country to the same extent that we should be pessimistic about the current situation and the near future. For the American electorate has proved to be more sensitive to shock therapy than to ideological reasons, and crises, when severe, are felt by everyone around both sharply and helplessly. If the crisis is as bad as experts predict, voters will look around for people to put the blame on and eventually find conservatives and the Free-market gurus.

In fact, this path has been traveled before. The Great Depression, lately used to inspire fear of the present crisis, also marked a point of inflection in US politics. After decades of Republican domination the Great Depression ushered in more than 30 years of Democratic control of the White House only interrupted by Eisenhower. In fact, that was the last time Democrats won back to back elections. And then you have Marx all over again: if you want people to change prick them on their pocket.

Democrats brought Keynesian ideas to the table putting thus an end to that old-school Capitalism advocated by Republicans which had led the country to the economic crisis. A smoother form of Capitalism ruled the US for a few decades while Conservatives regrouped around Milton Friedman’s ideas. With the Cold War a new era of Conservative dominance kicked off. Arguably an era that goes on until today.

Neoliberals would probably want to view the historical progression in a different light. They would rather say that the American electorate always falls back to their ideology because in the long-run it pays off. That is, even with the crises the sparkling dynamism created by deregulated markets is the key to the US economic success and its political supremacy in the modern world. But this view does not seem historically accurate as the US has experienced enormous prosperity in times of Democratic presidencies. And more importantly, it is not clear that the electorate should place such a tremendous importance on growth at the expense of economic stability. In the light of the current distress, it may well turn out to be more rational to settle for a moderate though sustained growth while avoiding such traumatic episodes as economic crises.

The analogy with the Great Depression is no more than an imperfect comparison. But it is one that exemplifies the underlying forces that produce significant change in the political landscape. While crises are always regrettable due to their devastating human consequences, they also urge revision of political institution and policies. In short, crises oftentimes ensue reorganization and change. It is my hope that the American electorate will react to this wake-up call and will finally opt for a more friendly form of Capitalism.

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America's Disingenuous Political System by Matias Bulnes, NYC

I have yet to hear an explanation of Ms. Palin's potential contribution as vice president of the US (and, let us not forget, possible president). All I hear is “women will vote for her,” “she is a hockey mother,” “it’s a smart move given the Democratic primaries,” etc. If we focus on her political credentials, the picture is rather unflattering. She has some political experience at the middle administrative level and none at the high level. Her academic training is far from impressive and she acquired her first passport a few months ago. As a result, she seems to be notoriously unprepared on international politics and diplomacy. Why would anyone think that she can be a good vice president? Except for a few million voters I suspect that nobody thinks she would be a good vice president. In fact, I should suspect that not even republicans believe so, on pain of disrespecting their political acumen.

But despite my suspicion the media has mostly welcomed Palin’s nomination (fortunately with some exceptions). Everybody seems to be celebrating the cleverness of the McCain campaign in making this move. And yet I can’t help the feeling that there is something deeply wrong with decisions like this. In this article I will explore what possible justification can ground a decision that by all informed standards jeopardizes the future of the country. I want to pay special attention to the insincerity of decisions such as McCain’s where the politician who makes them knows that they won’t benefit the country. I do not intend to mount a critique of the Republican Party in particular since I believe democrats acquiesce in the same logic—though perhaps with some more scruples. Ultimately I want to invite reflection on what kind of democracy can be built upon such a disingenuous political system and whether it is worth having.

Rightly or wrongly, making political decisions on purely instrumental grounds is widely condoned in the American media and, derivatively, by American society. It is, for example, assumed that politicians care more about winning elections than about principles such as authenticity or sincerity. Journalists and political analysts would not talk about the “real motive” underlying a political move ever so lightly if it wasn’t routinely accepted by the audience that politicians are usually insincere about their real motives. But as much as authenticity and sincerity are normally considered values, the obsession with winning elections has been justified in the liberal tradition in terms of a consumer-based conception of the political system (sometimes also called interest-group politics). According to this view, voters are consumers and political parties are suppliers of political projects designed to fit their preferences. As a consequence, the real motives of politicians are irrelevant; what matters is that their projects satisfy the consumers, hence that they win elections. This view of the political system relies on the hope that by pursuing politics in this market-like way the best optimum will be achieved—and moreover, in a way that doesn’t required a debate about the good.

But I doubt that McCain’s decision (as many others from all parties) can be justified in terms of this consumer-based model. For it would be analogous in an economic market to the case of a supplier selling a defective product to a costumer that he knows wants it out of ignorance or confusion. McCain should know perfectly well that Ms. Palin is hardly qualified for the US presidency in times of an unmanageable war, a looming economic crisis, an empowering China, etc. But instead of warning American voters of their crucial mistake he is happy to use it in his own benefit. Even raging liberals should agree that there is something deeply problematic about economic relations with such a crucial disparity in information.

One way in which the liberal could reply is by setting the responsibility on the Obama campaign to overlook McCain’s decisions and expose their flaws to the public light. Hence, should McCain’s choice of Palin be ultimately harmful to the US, the political system will react to it and eventually punish McCain with a defeat. But like with so many liberal arguments, their faith in the control power of the market is based on an ideal of social organization that is rarely instantiated in reality. In practice, this blind faith has earned the US 8 years of an erratic political leadership that has brought a previously healthy country to a state of tremendous economic and political uncertainty. But more important for the purposes of this essay is the observation that the political agents themselves know that the consumer-based model is at best a rough approximation to reality and bet on its imperfections. There can be little doubt that if the McCain campaign did after all choose Palin for instrumental reasons, they were aware of her profound political deficiencies and banked on the fact that the Obama campaign will not be able to turn the public attention to them in the short time before the general election. Not only doesn’t the political system guarantee an optimum outcome of the democratic process but politicians exploit the naïve expectation that it will.

The alternative to the liberal conception of political systems is unsurprisingly the social democratic one. The contrast between these views is usually brought out in terms of two opposite conceptions of political freedom introduced by Isaiah Berlin. But McCain’s decision can also make for a good illustration of the contrast. I suspect McCain chose Palin knowing that to be an overall bad decision for the country but based on public acclaim. This could be deemed acceptable only if we see the job of the politician as being the representation of the people’s preferences. But in the social democratic conception, rather than the people’s preferences, the job of the politician is to represent the people’s interest. In particular, making a political decision that goes against the interest of the nation but that has public approval is a violation of the duty of the politician. This together with the inevitable feeling that McCain is patronizing the people of the US, is perhaps what explains my discomfort with the choice of Palin. A democracy where politicians carry themselves in such a disingenuous way and voters are treated like means to seize political power sounds to me like a sham or, in any case, like a democracy not worth having.

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Is Education the Solution to All the Evils? by Matias Bulnes, NYC

Education is the footing for a better society. So at least goes the cliché. And though clichés lack originality by definition, some are nonetheless true. This one, in particular, seems to me to be one of those. So many of the evils of modern society seem to stem from our chronic ignorance of each other’s motives and concerns, ignorance of what society consists in, ignorance of what we are, ignorance of other countries and cultures, ignorance of this, ignorance of that. If ignorance is, as it seems, the root of all evils, then the remedy is education. Economists usually recommend poor countries to strongly invest in education as the best means to strive. At the more local level, people oftentimes blame it on education when faulting somebody for some bad. So if everybody knows what the problem is, and moreover their diagnosis seems plausible, why are so many people uneducated? Why the evils go on? Why don’t we perfect the Enlightenment’s project and educate the whole world—or, to be a bit more modest, the whole US?

Maybe the problem is that Capitalism needs uneducated people. This is reminiscent of conspiracy theories mounted by leftist adolescents who imagine some Machiavellian businessmen complotting against the whole world. However, setting aside the conspiracy part, it may well be true that the market is like an orchestra and in such an organized setting not everybody can play the piano; someone has to hit the drum. And, of course, the problem is that drummers need not be so educated, nor would a mere drum satisfy them if they were. True, education works as a virtuous circle: education ensues innovation, innovation ensues technology and the need for more educated people. But even innovators have to eat and somebody has to take care of at least food production. So there will always be a need for uneducated labor in a Capitalist society.

However, in all fairness this isn’t a problem for Capitalist societies only, for even under a Socialist model some drummers would be needed. Even if, as in a Socialist model, the rewards for labor are not proportional to the sophistication of the job, some people will have to do the unsophisticated work that doesn’t require too much formal education. It seems as though education inevitably has to be distributed unequally no matter which model one prefers. So again, what does it mean to say that education is “the solution”?


There are at least 3 types of answer for this question. The first one is that education is the solution to the extent that it can be carried out given the constrains imposed by the market. Since poor countries have not come near developing their “market potential,” education is what they need to take advantage of the existing technology and thus defeat poverty. In countries with a more comfortable economy, more education may not do any good for they may have exhausted their potential. So, according to this line, education is not “the solution” but rather a solution depending on the country.

Even though I don’t think this is all people mean when they demand better education, I find myself moved by the premises of this view. This is perhaps due to my teaching experience. It is not so rare that I have students whom, in the light of their work, do not seem prepared or even suited for the challenges of college (see this magnificent anonymous article for interesting discussion). This feeling is unpleasant in extreme, and perhaps even remorseful, but anyone who has taught students like these will most likely arrive at the conclusion that high-level education is not for everyone, whatever other utopias are true. Sad as it is, not everybody can play the piano. This much seems out of question.

A second type of answer is that education is “the solution” in certain sense of the term “education.” Not technical but moral education is what we need to solve our problems—so the line goes. And in fact this is probably closer to what most people mean when they explain others’ misbehaviors by their lack of education. The idea is that quite aside from whatever formal knowledge people may have, moral knowledge is what accounts for their moral defects. As a result of this view, moral knowledge is independent of other knowledge one may have about the world. This seems reasonable to me in so far as moral knowledge is understood as knowledge about moral norms independently of their justification. When justification is needed, moral knowledge becomes pervasive and, I believe, continuous with other knowledge. Whether or not I’m right about this latter point, it seems plausible that people learn most moral norms as dogmas, without the justification attached to them. Hence the explanation that somebody’s misbehavior is due to lack of moral knowledge makes sense since it points to the fact that the person in question was not educated into, or in any case, did not learn (if only in the Skinnerian sense of stimulus/response), the moral rules. The only problem is that “moral rules” here has to be understood as a conventional set of norms people take to encompass the right but not the right itself. But life is short, let alone this post, so let’s put this to the side.

The third type of answer recasts the problem for which education is the solution as a political rather than moral problem. Education isn’t so much the solution to all the evils of society as it is a necessary condition for a society to be just. However, this view usually stresses justice as an extremely important political value and failure to attain it as one important source of political evil. The idea is most notably inherent in Rawls’ work, more specifically, in his Difference Principle. Setting aside technical details, the idea is roughly that a just society must guarantee its members that they will be able to attain whatever position in society their natural assets permit regardless of the social class in which they were born, their race, accent, or other consideration irrelevant from the moral point of view—to use Rawls’ own expression. This is known in everyday jargon as “equality of opportunities.” A society can only guarantee its members equality of opportunities if it provides them with high-quality education. According to this line, we need education not to solve all the evils of society but to solve one in particular which is extremely important: social injustice.

This is, I think, the best way of making sense of the value of education and the importance people in the ivory tower as well as in the street place on it. This view also accounts for the remorseful feeling we professors have on occasion that some of our students are just not cut out for college. Everybody should have the right to develop her natural talents; but of course not everybody’s talents are equal. Hence, only some people should receive high-level education. What’s important is that who does or doesn’t, does not depend on their social class, race, accent, or other considerations irrelevant from the moral point of view. And this much we haven’t achieved nor are we any close to achieving.

Let me finish with a bold contention: achieving equality of opportunities should result in dispensing with private education altogether. In effect, it seems plausible that it is a necessary condition for achieving this political ideal that the state levels public with private education, for otherwise economic power would determine one’s chances of developing one’s natural talents. But this in turn seems impossible for any time public education approaches the quality levels of private education, the private students or their parents will have incentives to toss in more money and lift the best teachers from public schools or else switch to public schools altogether. Or to put it more simply, if public and private education are equal, private education is pointless. The reason why private education exists at all is that it gives those who can afford it an advantage. This obviously conflicts with equality of opportunities, but oh well, those who can realize this are precisely the educated, hence, the same ones who take advantage of this defect of our society. No wonder they find it more convenient to look the other way.

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Freedom and illegitimacy: the Bush Doctrine by MT Nguyen, NYC

George Bush and his administration are known for advancing foreign policy innovations collected under the authoritative sounding phrase 'the Bush doctrine'. This doctrine is in fact a heterogeneous hodgepodge of directives and 'principles' of post 9/11 foreign policy, anchored by the right to preemptive strikes, a deeply troubling, stunning and reckless departure from conventional thinking on international relations. One wonders though, since this anchor is but a means to an end, what the underlying rationale is. In name, the rationale is not far to seek, for in address after address since 9/11 Bush has announced that the ultimate aim of his administration is this: the world-historical advance of freedom or liberty (he uses the concepts interchangeably). Thus, in his 2005 inaugural address, he asserts that "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Throughout this speech and in others (here and here) Bush maintains this theme of bringing liberty to those parts of the world who he deems to not have it but nevertheless have a right to it. I want to avoid altogether the question of sincerity and inquire instead into the stated project on its own terms. So, my two questions are: What does he mean by the spread of freedom? And, Is it a coherent project?

The project's meaning is mostly unclear because of the obscurity of his use of the central terms liberty and freedom. This is so even though the terms are deployed a total of 42 times in the short speech (yes, I counted). Sometimes Bush uses 'freedom' or 'liberty' to mean independence or the general capacity to do as one desires; at other times, he hypostasizes freedom into a world historical force which combats tyranny and the resentment brought on by tyranny. Yet at other times he characterizes it as the political concept of self-government (but then why not use autonomy?). The latter is suggested by his frequent connection (and more often than not, identification) of liberty with democracy and, importantly, it explains why he sometimes formulates his mission in terms of spreading democracy. I return to this last notion at the end. It would be idle and truly mind-numbing to try to locate a family resemblance in his heterogeneous usage of these terms. I will take it however that whatever else he might mean by the concept, he must have in mind at least the following. Freedom as a concept is a property of persons and it basically means the freedom to do and live as one desires. Minimally, since everyone desires to live free from coercion (in all its guises), the basic concept as applied to the political is, crudely, the idea of living a life free from state coercion. This understanding is reinforced by how Bush uses these concepts as the bases for attacks on coercive states.

A quick argument against this is that all states are by their nature coercive, and hence in principle the stated project would run headlong into anarchism. This is too quick for although his rhetoric cannot allow for it, as all Americans know the Bush administration understands and demands that certain restrictions on freedom are necessary for any political life. [We need only remind ourselves of the Patriot Act and the recent debacle on telecom immunity to recognize this.] Given then that political freedom cannot mean living in whatever way anyone desires and given the project to spread it, how are we to understand what Bush aims to spread and what he aims to attack?

There is a benchmark to use here. This is the concept of the illegitimate state, and if we characterize that concept in a certain way we can see a basic connection between it and an intelligible conception of political freedom. Unfortunately for us all, the illegitimate state is not difficult to locate in the actual world. One case in point is Zimbabwe [update: for an excellent account of Zimbabwe's downfall under Mugabe, see Samantha Power's 2003 piece here]. After an election in which citizens dared to vote for the opposition party, Robert Mugabe clamped down and gerrymandered a run-off. Yesterday, not surprisingly, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew his candidacy amidst claims that his supporters were being intimidated and murdered. He said that he would not ask his supporters for a vote which would end their lives. The names of supporters whose life are at risk includes Tsvangirai himself, who is now under the protection of the Dutch embassy.

Being a relatively straightforward case of the illegitimate state, Zimbabwe is instructive. What makes it illegitimate? As Bernard Williams once helpfully put it, an illegitimate state is one in which the solution, the state itself, is worse than the problem, viz., life without an authority to settle disputes. In the case of Zimbabwe the state is but another party to the conflict of interested parties and instead of resolving disputes, adds to them. What's worse, and more problematic, as is obvious to everyone, the illegitimate state is typically the most powerful among the disputants. This makes it worse because being more powerful, it possesses the resources to perpetuate itself. Hence its existence serves to undermine the possibility of a legitimate state.

Prescient in the extreme, Plato recognized the nature of the illegitimate state and put its theory in his mouthpiece for political realism, Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus identified justice with power, defining justice in terms of the sole advantage of the ruling, strongest, party. No doubt he is wrong about that, but the theory is nevertheless helpful for it uncovers the preservatory genius of raw power. This manifests itself, basically, through its capacity to remain hidden: although it is at bottom raw power, it never expresses itself as such. (For all his evident thugishness, Mugabe nevertheless bothered to go through the motions of an election and a runoff.) Thrasymachus declares that the illegitimate state is like the clever craftsman who knows what he can do and what he can't do; and, if he should err on occasion, he knows how to recover from it (Vladimir Putin, Russia's de facto strong man, is perhaps the best exemplar of this). Translated to the conditions of the modern state, this means that the illegitimate state controls the media and hence the primary means by which citizens acquire and disseminate information and opinion, controls the military, and controls the judiciary by which the public pronouncements of justice are made and reinforced.

The illegitimate state so understood has a basic connection to liberty, for the former marks the most extreme curtailment of the latter. Restricted to this context, Bush's mission makes sense (I don't say it would be necessarily justified), for if there exists a good case to support and/or intervene on behalf of the freedom of any body of peoples it is the case of those who are terrorized by their government. However, how are we to evaluate Bush's endorsement of the much more ambitious and suspect extension of the mission to states which are not illegitimate in this sense but rather are non-democracies, non-ideal (from our vantage point) and unjust (again, from our vantage point)? His foray into Iraq (and his consideration of one in Iran) is a case in point.

Answering this question requires a standpoint free from utopian thought (or one might call it, political moralism) and its penchant for believing that politics is just the correct application of moral ideals. Most importantly, we don't want to confuse illegitimacy with injustice, for the reasons to confront the former do not necessarily extend to the latter. The relevant distinction is grounded on the idea that all sane (minimally rational) persons desire to live free from terror and it is the fundamental point of political authority to make that the case. This is a basic psychological fact unburdened by moral theory. Beyond that there are varying degrees of moral value, e.g. freedom of speech, right to economic well-being, autonomy, etc., which can emerge as important depending upon the historical, material, and political circumstances. It is up to political judgment to decide when, where and how these values are to be sustained, supported and protected. If so, it cannot be a coherent ambition to spread freedom per se, for beyond freedom from terror there is no univocal thing that is meant by it. Bush's project is incoherent in the way that a project to bring happiness to all of the world is incoherent. Despite the apparent univocality of these concepts, their application is too multivarious to sustain a unified project.

But beyond these rather fine-grained distinctions, we can certainly acknowledge the wide gulf between promoting freedom from an illegitimate state and Bush's mission, as he sometimes puts it, to deliver democracy (through violence if necessary). We know from history that legitimacy does not require democratic processes, and even if we agree with Bush that we should not "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," these are all a far cry from the desire for self-governance. Self-governance requires the kind of self-consciousness, self-reflectiveness and responsibility that represent, we might say, a cultural ideal. To be sure, many societies have no such aspiration even when they are free to do as they desire. Even if they did, however, it can be no part of another country's mission, as it is in Bush's vision, to deliver, no, demand democracy, for this demand has the same air of paradox as forcing someone to be free.

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