June 17, 2010
Win! A free subscription to the London Review of Books
An offer you can’t afford to miss!
As I have just renewed my LRB subscription, I can nominate ONE lucky person to get 1-year’s free subscription worth however much that costs (I have forgotten).
Rather than show partisan personal preference, I thought it would be better to have people compete for my patronage. Thus, an open essay competition, conducted via comments below, with the winner decided by the supreme judge, who is me.
Suggested topics:
Why Bad Conscience is so Clever
Why Bad Conscience is so Wise
Why Bad Conscience Philosophises with a Hammer
But really, I’m open minded. Let’s see what you’ve all got.
Not Flushing Toilets vs. The Impartial Spectator
Amongst all the terrible classes of person, perhaps the worst are those who urinate on toilet seats, do not flush the bowl, and leave the mess for others to find. Although anyone can be occasionally forgetful, those who habitually leave lavatories in such a state are scoundrels. The insult and disgust they cause is only heightened by the sheer laziness lying behind the infliction of suffering on their unknown, unsuspecting victims.
Finding myself in the position of the unsuspecting victim yesterday, I pondered what could be done. Would a healthy knowledge of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy do the trick?
One of Smith’s most innovative and insightful ideas was of the Impartial Spectator, a hypothetical disinterested observer whose emotive reactions to our behaviour we should imagine to ourselves. This allows us to gauge whether our behaviour is morally and socially befitting, or if we are in fact letting selfishness and self-overestimation blind our judgement.
The Impartial Spectator is thus not a million miles away from the “golden rule” of the Gospel: do not unto others what thou would not have done to thyself. But it’s better, because it’s more sophisticated and more flexible, so can cover more situations. For example, the Impartial Spectator is not an indifferent spectator. He does not think (mechanistically and simplistically) that all people should all be treated the same in all cases. On the contrary, if a father were to act and (crucially) to feel in exactly the same way towards his own son as to a child who was a complete stranger the Impartial Spectator would condemn this. Why? Because to a morally well-functioning human being in our sort of society, it is right and normal that fathers feel special affection for their own children. Those that do not are not good fathers, and rightly condemned by the Impartial Spectator.
But equally, fathers that spoil their children are going too far the other way; it is important for children’s own good that they learn to go without, and to accept no for an answer.
Similarly, whilst it is right and proper that a man care for his own financial affairs more than a stranger, or even a close friend’s, the Impartial Spectator will take a dim view of the man so consumed by avarice that he cheats and manipulates his (so-called) friends for profit.
The Impartial Spectator thus becomes a useful point of reference in moral thinking. On the one hand, when contemplating how we should act, he can help guide our decision-making. If I say to myself “what would the Impartial Spectator approve of?”, this can help me suppress my more self-consumed passions, and to sympathise with the concerns and values of those around me, perhaps helping me to take the better moral path. Furthermore, the Impartial Spectator in turn functions as a form of conscience – hence why Smith often called him “the man within the breast”. It is often by adopting the perspective of a disinterested third-party that I realise I have acted in an unacceptable way, and feel shame for my actions.
It seems to me that greater reflection about the views of the Impartial Spectator would help cut out a lot of cubicle offending. If people thought to themselves “what would the Impartial Spectator think of this mess?” before exiting, a fair number of them would see their selfish passions drop and sympathy with others’ having to suffer the mess come to prominence. Organic lavatorial vandalism would, I predict, decrease.
But sadly it wouldn’t end. For there are inevitably some who laugh in the face of the Impartial Spectator, or shrug their shoulders and are non-fussed about the mess they are leaving regardless of the man within the breast.
What can we do about them? Sadly, it seems there is not much we can do – short of toilet-offender-execution-squads, which are probably undesirable for other socio-political considerations.
If somebody really doesn’t care, or actively enjoys leaving a mess in the cubicle, then even the Impartial Spectator isn’t going to help. What we have on our hands are Hume’s Knaves. They do bad things, and they just don’t care so long as they don’t get caught. Lacking the passions to do good things, no amount of pleading or reasoning is going to change that. These sorts of hard-core seat-piddlers are badly brought up people, with poor moral functioning. Lacking the right passions to behave properly, no amount of exhortation or reasoning will work once they are in that cubicle with the door locked behind them.
So come to think of it, maybe the hit squads aren’t such a bad idea after all. Especially if we decide to listen to Hobbes:
“Of all Passions, that which enclineth men least to break the Lawes is Fear. Nay, (excepting some generous natures,) it is the onely thing.” (Leviathan, Ch.27)
June 16, 2010
Incentives, Football and Relativism
One has to feel a bit sorry for North Korea’s football squad. Despite a spirited performance against Brazil yesterday evening, and managing to go in 0-0 at half time, they lost 2-1.
By any normal standards this was a remarkable result for a squad in which only 3 members play overseas. Indeed cheer might be taken from the fact that the 0-0 draw between Portugal and Ivory Coast was probably one of the worst world cup games ever, suggesting that North Korea might produce a surprise upset and qualify for the knock-out stages.
But this of course remains unlikely. And for the North Korean players the prospect of failure comes with far greater consequence than normal sporting disappointment. You see, it’s reputed that leader Kim Jong Il likes to send under-performing players to work as slave labourers in coal mines.
Which raises the question of whether this sort of approach can possibly work. What we have is a fairly rudimentary case of incentive structuring: as well as disappointment and letting their nation down, the North Korean players are faced with the prospect of imprisonment, hard-labour and death. Will this (dis)incentive make them play better?
Incentive structuring is nothing new. Machiavelli wrote about it in his Discorsi, early in the 16th century. For example, he thought that sometimes freedom could only be secured by the sword – point turned against the citizenry. After all, if the people are preparing to flee the city but they are coerced into swearing an oath to defend it – and then succeed in that defence – their long-term freedom is secured by creating (aggressive) short-term incentives for them to fight. Bingo.
But in more recent (i.e. post-war) times, incentive-talk has become the preserve of economists (and political scientists who want to be economists, but aren’t good at maths). It’s customary therefore to talk of “pay-off” structures and rational gambles, and to draw little boxes with numbers in them and talk wistfully of strategic actors in utility-maximising prisoners’ dilemmas. And other such tediums, the findings of which almost always turn out to be either blindingly obvious, tautologous, or false.
Nonetheless, and for example, we might want to talk about whether North Korea’s international squad are incentivised to play better by the threat of hard labour. On the one hand, it might be that they are indeed propelled by their fear to give their all. On the other, the “incentive” might be counter-productive: fear is distracting, and can lead one to make mistakes through poor judgement. Alternatively, the whole thing might be irrelevant whichever way the incentives work: North Korea are still North Korea, and no matter how hard they try they’ll never be as good as Brazil in second gear.
But all that misses another, much more important, point: that “incentivising” players this way appears plainly wrong. It doesn’t matter if it works, because it’s a horrible thing to do and no morally well-functioning person thinks otherwise, ceteris paribus. Similar things can be said for the reputed torture of Iraq’s national team whenever it lost a game under the management of Saddam Hussein’s son, himself the torturer-in-chief.
But then, as Quentin Skinner is always keen to remind us, context is important: maybe sometimes hard-labour incentives should be welcomed. Step forward, the England squad. Perhaps the threat of a penal colony would be just the ticket for a team stuffed with petulant, lazy, over-paid, immature whinebags. Perhaps the prospect of a lifetime mining uranium without protective equipment would sort out the Gerrard-Lampard incompatibility, whilst electrodes to the testicles might encourage Shaun Wright-Phillips to learn how to cross the ball.
But again, the “incentives” – and whether they work or not – aren’t really the point. The true virtue of so-incentivising the England squad would be the intrinsic worth of torturing the feckless bunch of over-paid, useless donkeys who can’t even beat the USA.
And you can therefore see, I’m the sort of moral hypocrite who wants to make allowances for authoritarian communist dictatorships, whilst pouring vitriol and violent fantasy upon our Brave English Boys. Furthermore, that probably makes me a moral relativist. And shock-horror, I’m also an academic (well, sort of). Lo, behold! In one short blog post I have exemplified everything Nick Cohen, Francis Wheen and David Aaronovitch hate.
You have to admit, I’m good at multi-tasking.
June 15, 2010
Red Ken, Blue London?
Jon Cruddas has endorsed Ken Livingstone as Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London. This in itself doesn’t strike me as all that significant – Cruddas himself is more likely as Labour deputy leader candidate, and JC and KL’s politics are hardly worlds apart.
I’m fairly convinced that Livingstone will get the Labour nomination. And this strikes me as not good.
First things first, I’m suspicious of Livingstone’s politics. Hearing him at the Ken Campaign Conference (aka Progressive London), I found it pretty galling that somebody in 2010 could stand up and unashamedly endorse the Chinese Communist regime, and demand that Britain’s economy-government relationship become more like those of China and Vietnam. They call him “Red” Ken for a reason, after all. But Livingstone continues to strike me (like his former advisor John Ross) as the sort of person who admired the Soviet Union until the bitter end. And that’s a part of the left’s history that needs to be discarded, not preserved.
Those who remember the 1980s often take a different view: as a friend once put it, Ken was (after all) the only person on the left that Thatcher went after but never got. I’m sure that elicits a certain fondness. But it doesn’t add up to making Livingstone the right candidate for Labour. After all, a man who fought his big battles and made his mark in the 1980s is not exactly what Labour needs to show it can govern effectively in the 21st Century.
In all honesty I’m slightly sanguine about whether or not Ken will win (if he does, he thankfully won’t be in a position to emulate China, as I suspect he would like to). My sense is that Boris is popular (proof, perhaps, of deep voter misjudgment given how atrocious he has been if one pays attention) and will beat Ken. And why would people vote Livingstone back, after giving him the decisive boot last time around? He’s offering absolutely nothing new, and his pitch of “I’m not Boris!” isn’t going to work if people think BoJo a sort of amusing affable chap who is funny on the telly.
Instead, it rather reinforces the message that Labour has no fresh blood, no fresh talent and no new ideas. Which is, perhaps, accurate. But for peat’s sake this is politics and the party should at least try to make itself look the other way around. Of course, London experienced a big counter-national, pro-Labour outcome in the General Election. Perhaps this will repeat in Ken’s favour. But then, perhaps it won’t because the dynamics are different.
Either way, it’s worth moving beyond the tribalism and asking: what’s the state of Labour in London when a hard-leftist apologist for authoritarian regimes, believing it is his god-given right to rule the capital, is effectively allowed to continue as such despite a decisive electoral rejection at the last showing? Where is the internal pressure in Labour telling Ken that his time is over and it’s time to retire into amphibian-raising obscurity.
So, despite my belief that the Labour machine is too in-thrall, or in-debt, to Ken to pick anyone else, I think Labour should choose Oona King. I don’t think she could beat Boris, to be hoenst. But sometimes in politics winning isn’t everything.
David Cameron’s Splendid Isolation
Although I’m half French by birth and citizenship, I’ve only every used my British passport and I (with a certain amount of resigned despair and disgust) am currently supporting England at the World Cup.* But visiting France is always a useful experience to gauge our neighbours’ reaction to British politics and politicians.
Given that foreign interest is almost inevitably superficial, it’s hardly surprising that the French for a time were generally well disposed to Tony Blair – albeit for little more than he spoke decent French. Of course, that changed after the ill-conceived Mesopotamia Adventure of 2003. And indeed for much of the past 7 years Britain’s reputation has not stood particularly high on the continent.
Yet this summer it seemed Britain was finally enjoying something of a rapprochement with our French cousins. Again, the distance of foreign political issues means that most French don’t care for the particulars of UK domestic politics. Hence the worst failures of Dumbo Gordon were generally lost in translation, and he was instead seen as a firm and stable economic heavyweight, rightly credited with taking a decisive post-crisis recovery.
As for the Lib-Con coalition, the French have a certain difficulty appreciating just how rare a situation in Britain this is. For them, politics is generally built around particular personalities who conjure parties into existence for the transient purpose of putting whichever Chief into power. Coalitions of varying degrees are the French norm, and until Jacques Chirac introduced a bunch of reforms it was not unusual for the French President to be on the opposite political side to the Prime Minister (so-called co-habitation).
But one thing some of the French I spoke with did find disconcerting is Mr Cameron’s decision to pull the Tories out of the European People’s Party to sit with far-right crazies that D-Cam’s new best mate Nick Clegg recently called “nutters, anti-semites and homophobes“. In France the Front National polls up to 20%, and fascist leader Jean Marie Le Pen made it to the final head-to-head round of the 2002 Presidential election. Playing with the far right at the international level, for personal domestic gains, is no trivial matter. Not least because President Nicolas Sarkozy is himself a well-worn practitioner, but one struggling to remain popular.
Nonetheless, Britain seemed to be enjoying something of a renewed period of good-will.
I’m not sure how long it will last.
Mr Cameron has, after all, decided that the most important – and strategically wise – thing to do regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is speak out about the importance of BP as a British company, and defend it from American criticism.
Just to recap: we’re looking at one of the absolute worst oil spills in history, which some experts are saying could go on until Christmas, and which is getting media coverage around the globe. The offending corporate party has chosen to show as little contrition as possible, and to blow repeated raspberries in the face of the American people. What does D-Cam do? He accuses Obama of picking on Britain.
The mind boggles, because Cameron’s reaction just seems so pointless. Why do this, when he could just say nothing at all? Why irritate the beleaguered Democratic administration – especially after Obama has already previously described Cameron as a “lightweight”? One suspects that Cameron is not tuned-in to the fact that half-Kenyan Obama with an acute awareness of British Imperial legacies (who conspicuously refused to talk of a US-UK “special relationship”) is cut from a different cloth to previous WASP presidents.
This does not bode well. If Cameron’s judgement of international matters is so poor (or his capture by interest lobby groups so extreme) that he wrongly calls one of the most blatantly obvious early diplomatic relations tests he could face, we can forget about the legacy of a 100 year entente cordial. Instead, prepare for a return to splendid isolation. But this time imposed instead of chosen, delivered by the cold shoulder of needlessly alienated nations.
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*I have never, ever supported France and indeed the only thing making England’s perenial awfulness bareable this time around is the fact that France are shaping up to be even worse – albeit sans extreme goalkeeping incompetence.
