Does this thing still work?

 Is this thing on?

A few years ago I was at least updating this at least with the reading I was doing, if nothing else.

Books of 2018: Race and Leftist studies

In my last reading update, I said of my tour of black studies that I was "kinda finished." Except then I kept reading. Since that post, I read the following:

• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Y Davis
• The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
• The Racial Contract - Charles W Mills
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition - Cedric Robinson
• Racism: A Short History - George Fredrickson

In addition to these, I have one last book I plan to read as a part of this project (which is not to say that I won't read more black and race literature — I certainly will): Rethinking Racial Justice, by Andrew Valls. And yes, the caucasity of letting two white dudes have the last words on race theory is not lost on me. See my previous reading update for my assessment of black/race studies.

To break that project up a little, I also started my long overdue course on socialism and leftism, including finally reading Marx (the hate-read of the Communist Manifesto I did during the Randian haze of my freshman year of university doesn't really count, I think). Not a big total, but the Marx book was huge, and I consider Davis, Fanon, and Robinson from above to be part of this project as well.

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan (ed.)
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya

And I'm about 10% into the massive Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski. My thoughts on Marxism so far are mostly that Marx got a lot wrong, and he really didn't deserve the world-historical level of influence he attained. That said, the humanistic elements of Marxian thought — as discussed in the Dunayevskaya — are interesting and valuable. I tend to think that liberalism needs to be socialized (in that the social context is insufficiently attended to in a lot of liberal theory), socialism could do itself massive favors by adopting suitably altered liberal institutions, and that there is an attractive no man's land between the blurry frontiers of liberalism and (democratic) socialism.

The rest of my nonfiction reading for the year didn't conform to a theme. I finally read the Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, an excellent, timely book about the reforms we should be making to our political economy. And I read A Turn to Empire, by Jennifer Pitts. Pitts reviews the patterns of liberal thought on imperialism from the late 18th century through the 19th century, showing how the later thinkers in this period rejected an earlier liberal anti-imperialism. My yearly fix of Nussbaum was her Therapy of Desire. I had expected to like it more than the Fragility of Goodness, as the books have similar themes, but the former involves an explicit comparison of her Aristotelian ethics with other Hellenistic approaches, but Fragility managed to be less tedious, more engaging. That said, Therapy had some very interesting discussions on diverse topics. Finally, Dear Ijeawelle, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was a delightful little feminist manifesto, highly recommended especially as a jargon-free introduction to feminism.

I read more fiction than I reckoned I would. Two Star Wars books, one pretty good and one horrendous. Revan was an utter violation of the promise and philosophical sophistication of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I read one Black Panther graphic novel when I was hyped up about the film. I read the Wheel of Time prequel, which I'm certain I'd read many years ago, but I'd forgotten all the details. And the greatest new find was the Expanse series, the first book of which was wildly entertaining.

• Revan - Drew Karpyshyn
• Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• New Spring - Robert Jordan
• Black Panther, Book 1 - Ta-Nehisi Coates

A feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time

And now for something completely different: a feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time!

If Jordan Peterson is right that the symbolism of chaos as feminine and order as masculine is deeply rooted in the human psyche or collective consciousness or whatever, then the feminism of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is even more subversive than I'd previously thought. [Editor's note: Of course Jordan Peterson is a clown show, but when this was originally written, Peterson was all over the place. No respect for Peterson is intended.]

SPOILERS to follow.

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The protagonist is, of course, the Lord of Chaos. He is the breaker of bonds, meaning social relations would be torn asunder in his wake. He brought conquest and war. The White Tower, the most powerful institution, broke into civil war over how to deal with him. And of course the chaos of his actions corroded the seals on the Dark One's prison.

Rand is thus easily seen as a male representation of chaos. Importantly, it's not just that the protagonist happened to be a man. An obvious feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time is that toxic masculinity is literally a kind of madness, and it's a madness that threatens to destroy the world.

There are different ideas about what toxic masculinity means, but a common one is that masculinity becomes toxic when vulnerability becomes anathema. When vulnerability must be avoided at all costs, then men cannot share emotions like fear or grief, and these emotions are suppressed and left unexamined. Even love and affection are avoided because love opens one to the threat of loss. Basic human connection is strained and mental (and spiritual) health suffers. Anger, however, is conceived as an emotion coming from strength.

Rand fits this description quite well. He still feels love, but he struggles against this. He feels as if he must suppress all weakness in order to defeat the Dark One, be impervious to the threat of losing loved ones lest they be used against him. As the series (and his madness) progresses he lashes out in anger more and more. Cadsuane's project to make Rand once again cry and laugh is pivotal. We come to understand that Rand's toxic masculinity was the form the saidin madness took with him. When he finally learns at the peak of Dragonmount how to keep the madness at bay, he does so by once again learning how to laugh, cry, love, and fear. Post-Dragonmount Rand not only can talk about his feelings, but he can trust again, and his presence begins to heal the blighted world around him.

Chaos in the Wheel of Time is not just masculine, it is toxic masculinity.

Rand's foil is neither the Dark One nor any of the Forsaken or other darkfriends, but Egwene al'Vere, who symbolizes order.

As Rand is the breaker of bonds, Egwene is just as much a forger of bonds, and a healer of broken institutions. She forges connections between the Tower and other groups of female channelers, thus shining a light on a history of cover-ups and deceit while creating new relationships, alliances, and opportunities for fruitful exchange.

One of her primary arcs in the story is the campaign to reunite the White Tower and to heal the political rot within. She resists the temptation to accomplish this with open warfare, though she likely could have succeeded. It's hard to see such a strategy coming from Rand, who, for example, broke the Aiel in twain and hurled them against the wetlanders.

Instead, she nurtures back to health trust between the Aes Sedai factions and faith in the White Tower itself, the lack of which were the ultimate causes of the rot. She does this from within the Tower during her captivity by nonviolent protest in the vein of Gandhi and MLK. Her conspicuous vulnerability was her greatest strength. This contrasts vividly with Rand, whose own time of captivity only accelerated his paranoid madness.

Even her Talents with the One Power symbolize order. She has a knack for Earth (rare for saidar), suggesting solidity. She independently rediscovers how to create cuendillar, a material that becomes stronger with every attempt to destroy it (antifragility is a kind of order). And in an unfortunate bit of goofy writing, she's even depicted as inventing an anti-balefire. Balefire is a weapon of pure chaos that burns threads directly from the Pattern. It's fitting that Rand goes a little nuts with balefire, and it's equally fitting that it is Egwene who finds a way to directly patch the Pattern back together.

Egwene's representation of order is feminine in a traditional sense, featuring vulnerability, nurture, and an orientation toward relationships. But it's important to acknowledge that Egwene isn't a sexist caricature of femininity. She is also presented as brave (she has the heart of an Aiel, with whose Wise Ones she trained), adventurous, sharp (she's not only inventive with the Power, but a ferociously savvy politician), and possessing a strength of will rivaling any other character in the series (in one contest of wills she straight up breaks the mind of one of the Forsaken).

Summing up, the Wheel of Time inverts Jordan Peterson's symbolism of feminine chaos and masculine order. Rand consistently represents not just chaos but a particularly toxic-masculine form of chaos. And the most pivotal moment of the series is when Rand reengages his "feminine" aspects and becomes thereby a truly human, whole being. Meanwhile Rand's foil doesn't just happen to be a woman, but a woman who represents a particularly "feminine" order of nurture, vulnerability, and human connection.

Reading update: libertarianism, democracy, black studies, and Marxism

So long libertarianism

It's been over a year since my last reading update! In my last post I summarized both my feminism and libertarianism reading projects. One interesting development of the libertarianism reading project plus marinating in the Trump era is that I've determined I can no longer call myself a libertarian. One thing I gleaned from my reading is that there's a useful distinction to be drawn between libertarianism and classical liberalism, based roughly on the property rights absolutism/monism and anti-institutional tendencies of libertarianism versus the more comprehensive value pluralism and sensitivity to institutional context of classical liberalism. That's the theory. In recent practice, most libertarians have also just proven to be exceptionally useless in understanding Trump. Trump, to most libertarians, is just another politician, and not any kind of special threat. I wrote a rather long critique of libertarian anarchism, and most of the arguments therein apply to minarchist libertarianism as well.

Democracy

In my last post I also hinted at a miniature reading project inspired by Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, and I did read a few such books:

• The Difference - Scott Page
• Democratic Reason - Hélène Landemore
• Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance - Ryan Muldoon
• Against Democracy - Jason Brennan

I recommend Page and Muldoon, even though I somehow failed to review Muldoon's book. The common theme within all the books except Brennan's is that a pluralistic society leverages epistemic advantages by the very fact of pluralism. People from different walks of life, regardless of their raw intelligence, bring different perspectives, or different ways of organizing information about the world. These different perspectives each can make certain problems more readily soluble. I read Against Democracy as a sanity check on my enthusiasm for this idea. As I make clear in the link, I was unimpressed.

And all that other stuff

I took a break from major reading projects after this mini-project just to read a few things I'd been meaning to get to. I read Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments and Wolff & de-Shalit's Disadvantage, from the capabilities literature, back to back. I have a long simmering idea of writing an essay connecting these two works. Namely, I want to argue that access to effective, growth oriented institutions (Cowen) is a powerful example of a fertile functioning (Wolff & de-Shalit), or a capability/functioning that naturally tends to enable the development of further valuable capabilities/functionings.

In my hodgepodge between-projects reading, I also read Liz Anderson's wonderful book, Private Government. Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order and Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan both helped me write my critique of anarchism. And I finally got around to reading a couple classics: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and Seneca's On Anger. After finally serendipitously spotting it at Powell's after years of looking, I read Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness. All of Nussbaum is really an ongoing project of mine. I've loosely set a goal to read one Nussbaum book per year, which should keep me busy for the rest of my life at her rate of publication. Next up in this effort will be the Therapy of Desire. I read Capitalism: For and Against, by Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom after seeing it referenced by Charles Mills (see below) in his Occupy Liberalism essay (incidentally one of my favorite essays since my last update here). Ann Cudd is amazing and I'm looking forward to reading more by her. Finally, Jacob T Levy did not disappoint with Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (which, inexcusably, I neglected to review).

Black studies

That brings me to my tour of black studies, which I have kinda finished, though I'm still reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and I'm planning to read more Angela Davis for my next project (see below).

• The Making of Black Lives Matter - Christopher Lebron
• Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis
• The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
• The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
• The Imperative of Integration - Elizabeth Anderson
• Black Rights / White Wrongs - Charles Mills
• Stamped from the Beginning - Ibram Kendi
• The Killing Rage - bell hooks
• The Future of Whiteness - Linda Martín Alcoff

And I watched Black Panther. Only half kidding about this, given the amount of commentary I read both before and after the film's release and the discussion groups I participated in.

This was an incredibly productive reading project, significantly nudging my perspective, albeit in a direction I was already trending. Concretely, I was skeptical of affirmative action before embarking on this tour, and I thought reparations were a clearly bad idea, both for political reasons and problems with targeting. Anderson convinced me of the merits of affirmative action as an instrument for integration even while she criticized other more common defenses of affirmative action that I was familiar with (as compensation, for example). By the time I got through Kendi, even though he doesn't focus on this, I came around to the idea of reparations (details matter, obviously) and the principle of black power generally. Blacks and other marginalized or oppressed peoples have to seize what power (economic, social, political) they can when they can (though not by "any means necessary"). Waiting for those things to come from the grace of the powerful is getting the cart before the horse. Power and privilege is jealously guarded, and this seems to be just a feature of humanity. Interestingly, my thoughts on black power resonate with some of the things I've learned from, e.g., Fukuyama and Acemoglu/Robinson on how equality and inclusive institutions typically depend on historical contingencies that happen to empower some groups relative to the existing elites. This is also in line with Jacob Levy's sort of agonistic view of politics and pluralism, from which I've learned a lot.

I'm also enchanted with the idea of "black radical liberalism" as is being developed by Charles Mills. Mills accepts what I view as the most challenging critiques of liberalism in both theory and practice without trying to claim these aren't "real liberalism." He argues that liberalism can survive these critiques but only if it turns away from ideal theory and embraces instead a non-ideal and rectificatory approach. Specifically, racialization and sex/gender oppression seen in actual non-ideal societies should be the focus of corrective justice, rather than being seen as deviations from liberalism (see paragraph above). I'm itching to write about this, especially since I think there are potentially very fruitful alternative directions to the one Mills has chosen. He's working from a theoretical tripod of liberalism (Kant and Rawls), radical theory (Marx), and black critical theory. A black radical capabilities liberalism could, at least in some ways, replace both the Kant/Rawls and the Marx legs, with the additional advantage that the capabilities approach is already well-suited to non-ideal theory and liberal practices.

Marxism/socialism

I've just started the Selected Writings of Karl Marx, edited by David McLellan. I've only read one book on socialism thus far (Socialism after Hayek), and this seems like a clear gap in my knowledge, especially since some kind of Marxian analysis is often implicit in some of the other topics I've become at least peripherally interested in, like radical feminism and black radicalism (see above). I'm ... not exactly in danger of becoming a Marxist. Or a socialist, except insofar as democratic socialists blend into social democrats blend into social justice-oriented (neo!)liberals. But I do have the impression that Marx has a far more humanistic perspective than some of the more economistic classical liberals. Marx was also inspired to some degree by Aristotle. Whatever the failures are of the labor theory of value and like, actual communism in the world (understatement), I'm pretty open-minded that Marxian class analysis might have useful resources. Anyway, at this point I don't even know enough to know what to read, but here are a few I'm intending to read so far:

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis
• I dunno some other stuff open to suggestions
• Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski

Books of 2016, feminism and libertarianism

In my previous post back in April I gave the first impressions of my tour of feminism, which I concluded with this facebook post. I also previewed the tour of libertarianism I had planned to embark on, a syllabus to fill some gaps from my youthful libertarian indoctrination. It's amazing how these proposed lists differ so much from what I actually read. And then there was my New Years resolution to read more scifi and fantasy. I pretty much failed that as soon as I got inspired to read Les Misérables (just over 25% through that one ...).

Anyway, here's the list, with links provided to my reviews or relevant blog posts. Turns out I wrote a lot of book reviews this year.

• Justice at a Distance - Loren Lomasky & Fernando Tesón
• Women and Western Political Thought - Susan Moller Okin
• Feminine and Feminist Ethics - Rosemarie Tong
• Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men - Anne Fausto-Sterling
• Justice, Gender, and the Family - Susan Moller Okin
• Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics - Seyla Benhabib
• Sex and Social Justice - Martha Nussbaum
• See also this blog post on objectification.
• And this one on social justice versus social mercy.
• Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities - Martha Nussbaum & Jonathan Glover (eds.)
• Toward a Feminist Theory of the State - Catharine MacKinnon
• See also this blog post on how radical feminism is, like all fundamentalisms, epistemically closed.
• Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing - Miranda Fricker
• See this blog post on distinguishing between wrongness and culpability. 
• And this one trying to apply the concepts of testimonial injustice and (less successfully) hermeneutical injustice to rape culture.
• Justice and the Politics of Difference - Iris Marion Young
• Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? - Susan Moller Okin (lead essay)
• Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand - Mimi Reisel Gladstein & Chris Matthew Sciabarra (eds.)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
• The Warrior's Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold
• I, Jedi - Michael Stackpole
• Liberalism: The Classical Tradition - Ludwig von Mises
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia - Robert Nozick
• Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order - Doug Rasmussen & Doug Den Uyl
• Free Market Fairness - John Tomasi
• See also this blog post on my own version of market democracy: free market capabilities.
• The Future and Its Enemies:  - Virginia Postrel
• Elements of Justice - David Schmidtz
• The Tyranny of the Ideal - Gerald Gaus

Somehow I never got around to reviewing Elements of Justice, even though it was excellent. It argues for value pluralism. Our understanding of justice is a hodgepodge of multiple considerations, such as equality, need, desert, and reciprocation. Good judgment comes in understanding where and how these different kinds of reasons apply and why.

I'm finishing my tour of libertarianism (really classical liberalism) with Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality. Though I do plan to read Jacob Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom when it appears in paperback.

I don't have anything too coherent planned for a new reading project. Gaus turned me onto some new thinkers I want to check out: Helene Landemore and Scott Page. With current events firmly in mind, I want to read more history and history-based accounts of civilization and political stability. And I also want to devote some energy to reading books that have been sitting on my shelf for a long time collecting dust.

Feminism update, libertarianism preview

I've started off 2016, according to plan, with a lot of feminism. I've been trying to be faithful with writing some kind of review of each book, whether it's a full-on blog post, a Goodreads review, or even a facebook status. The links are to those items, not to like, amazon pages.

1. Women in Western Political Thought - Susan Moller Okin
2. Feminine and Feminist Ethics - Rosemarie Tong
3. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men - Anne Fausto-Sterling
4. Justice, Gender, and the Family - Susan Moller Okin (see also this facebook post)
5. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics - Seyla Benhabib
6. Sex and Social Justice - Martha Nussbaum (See also this blog post on objectification).

This is in addition to the feminist works I read last year (Mill's Subjection of Women and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, by bell hooks).

Benhabib's book ended up being a lot more about discourse ethics than feminism specifically, but I'm glad I read it. Feminism plays into discourse ethics by way of the necessity of including diverse perspectives in dialogue. Myths of Gender seemed very good, but I couldn't think of much to say about it. It's the kind of thing that unfortunately probably needs to be updated once every decade or so. And this has been done, both by Fausto-Sterling in newer books and by other feminist scientists. Okin's schtick of analyzing Western canonical philosophers through the feminist lens is pretty rewarding. I highly recommend Tong's book as an introduction to feminist ethics. My favorite book by far has been Nussbaum's book, which is a kind of harmonization of liberalism and feminism through a neo-Aristotelian approach. It also just includes great treatments of important figures in feminism, both good and bad (Andrea Dworkin and Christina Hoff Sommers, for example) and tricky topics (objectification, sex work, colonialism). I reckon I'm about 60% finished with this project. Here are the next books on deck:

1. Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities - Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (eds.)
2. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing - Miranda Fricker
3. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women - Susan Moller Okin (ed.)
4. A Vindication of the Rights of Whores - Gail Pheterson (ed.)
5. Economics for Humans - Julie A Nelson

And this list may expand with new ideas or contract with fatigue. I'll almost certainly take a break after Women, Culture and Development in order to gobble up Deirdre McCloskey's thrilling conclusion to the Bourgeois Trilogy which came in the mail this week.

But I'm already looking forward to my next reading project, which is a deep dive into academic libertarianism. I've come a long way from my youthful Rand-influenced anarchism. Usually I feel more post-libertarian than libertarian, and have lately been calling myself just plain ol' "liberal" more and more. In part because of this, I want to read some classics I missed and read what some of libertarianism's best exponents have to offer. I'm thinking these:

1. Anarchy, State, and Utopia - Robert Nozick
2. Liberty and Nature: an Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order - Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl
3. Elements of Justice - David Schmidtz
4. Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory - John Tomasi
5. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom - Jacob Levy
6. Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community - Loren Lomasky
7. Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms - Vernon Smith
8. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism - Chris Matthew Sciabarra
9. The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society - Jerry Gaus
10. Jason Brennan's and Bas van der Vossen's book on cosmopolitan justice.

Any suggestions welcome, for either good feminism or good libertarianism.

Books of 2015

I'm pretty proud of the reading I managed in 2015. I started the year finishing up my self-led course on virtue ethics (more on that in this post). I also honored my new year's resolution to read more substantive fiction this year (a resolution inspired in part by my interest in virtue ethics, incidentally). In addition to those below, I've got less than 100 pages to go in War and Peace, and I'll finish it by year's end barring hell, high water, and such.

Biggest surprise of the year: Structure of Scientific Revolutions was awesome, and made me realize I am apparently quite partial to postmodernism, at least as I currently understand it, and in what is probably one of its milder forms.

Socialism after Hayek was another delightful discovery. "Hayekian socialism" as a topic was just bound to be interesting, but I had no idea Burczak also appealed to the capabilities approach. This was fortuitous to find right after that little thing I wrote earlier this year.

Biggest disappointment was probably Burdened Virtues, which I expected to love based on my commitment to both feminism and virtue ethics. That said it was still interesting, and I don't regret reading it. Okay I take that back. The biggest disappointment of the year was Michel Foucault, which was so disappointing that I actually blocked it from my mind. I think I gave it one star on Goodreads.

Peace, Love, & Liberty, (Tom Palmer (ed.))
The Morality of Happiness (Julia Annas)
The State of the Art (Iain M Banks)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin)
Bourgeois Dignity (Deirdre McCloskey)
Burdened Virtues (Lisa Tessman)
Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Daniel C Russell)
Socialism After Hayek (Theodore Burczak)
Cordelia's Honor (Lois McMaster Bujold)
feminist theory: from margin to center (bell hooks)
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill)
The Subjection of Women (John Stuart Mill)
The History of Sexuality, Part 1 (Michel Foucault)
The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Daniel C Russell (ed.))
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, tentative)

Great list, right? Well, one thing that bites is I basically sacrificed all my reading of the Economist. I regret this and I'm resolving not to let that happen again next year. I'll probably read many fewer books next year because I want to get back in the Economist's good graces. Consider that a resolution.

Another resolution: read more sci-fi/fantasy! A few months ago I took one of those online quizzes that ask you what sci-fi/fantasy books you've read. Almost all my friends blew me out of the water. I consider speculative fiction to be part of my identity, so this made me feel like a bit of an impostor. I want to read at least five books next year. Probably going to start with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, then read some more Bujold.

Otherwise, I plan to read a bit of feminism and a bit of libertarianism. Susan Moller Okin, Elizabeth Anderson, and Seyla Benhabib are all on the list. And it seems like a few of the libertarian public intellectuals I stalk have books coming out in 2016 (although maybe I'm being optimistic here). And there are some classics like Nozick I feel I should get to at some point.

Continuing self-education update

I'm pretty proud of myself. I'm about 15 pages out from finishing my year-or-so-long self-led course on virtue ethics. This, along with a few scattered papers here and there (okay mostly Nussbaum) was my syllabus:

• The Bourgeois Virtues, by Deirdre McCloskey
• The impetus for the whole project
• After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre
• Offers the side benefit of being part of the conservative intellectual canon
• Basically I think he fails in his effort to smash modern ethics and begs a big question in my mind
• Virtues and Vices, by Philippa Foot
• Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives was a pretty interesting essay.
• Natural Goodness, by Philippa Foot
• On Virtue Ethics, by Rosalind Hursthouse
• The best book length introduction to VE I've read
• The Morality of Happiness, by Julia Annas
• Walkthrough of the debates about ethics in the ancient world, and a very good source for understanding eudaimonistic virtue ethics
• Damn, the ancient Greeks were really smart!
• Burdened Virtues, by Lisa Tessman
• Pretty interesting discussion about how conditions of oppression can stifle virtue, but I thought the book really needed a discussion of phronesis and the unity of virtue.
• Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, by Daniel Russell
• Probably my favorite of the set, but also the hardest. I'm glad I read it last.

Clearly, I'm missing a lot of books. I haven't even read Annas's Intelligent Virtue. And I want to read more MacIntyre ... but I have to stop somewhere and start reading other things again. I have a blog post half written about why I like virtue ethics so much, but I've been too lazy to finish it. Basically, it's an organic theory that is flexible enough to describe our extremely complex and open-ended moral world. Eudaimonistic theories of VE at least have the advantage of remembering that morality has a purpose beyond just facilitating social cooperation: it should describe a robust, broadly construed conception of human happiness (or, even better, flourishing). It's holistic, taking as its concern the whole character, rather than limiting its scope to actions-in-the-vacuum, and only those actions that affect other people. And I think VE is just descriptively closer to how actual people deal with actual ethical life. We do learn our morals from stories read to us at our mother's knee that describe admirable character traits and good reasons for acting; we learn from moral instruction by role models; and we learn from long years in the school of hard knocks. Maybe some day I'll elaborate with a proper blog post.

Anyway, now that I'm temporarily done with virtue ethics, I have to decide what to read next. The very first thing I'm gonna read is Socialism After Hayek, by Theodore Burczak. I've long been really curious to learn more about Marxism/socialism, but I'd like to do so from a source that isn't obviously insane (I know, not very charitable). From what I understand, this book is written by a proper socialist, but one who explicitly acknowledges that, yeah, the socialists just flat out lost the socialist calculation debate. Maybe afterward if I feel like it I can delve deeper. I hear Gramsci was good?

After that, what? I'm interested in learning more about Kant, but I don't want to read Kant himself, because it's common knowledge Kant is hard as hell to read and fuck that, this isn't my day job. Any Kantians or Kant-knowledgeable folks out there have a good suggestions?

To be honest I'm also interested in going back to my libertarian roots. I've never gotten around to reading some of the classics, like Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia or JS Mill's On Liberty. Never read Herbert Spencer either, and it seems like he's mentioned everywhere. Then there's also a whole bunch of libertarian works on the near horizon I'm pretty excited about. Kuznicki has a book coming out about the nature of government. Zwolinski and Tomasi have their intellectual history of libertarianism coming out (which will doubtlessly expand my reading list). Brennan and van der Vossen have a book on global justice coming, something of especial interest to me given my interest in cosmopolitanism and open borders. And of course, Deirdre McCloskey's thrilling conclusion to her Bourgeois trilogy is coming out next year ...

I feel like I'm a shoddy libertarian because I haven't read some classics, but I haven't read any classics of feminist thought, apart from like, the first third of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a couple essays by Voltairine de Cleyre. Feminism has become increasingly important to me in recent years, so I should probably do something about this. Second Sex is staring at me from my shelf.

Then there are the odds and ends. I'm sort of interested in Charles Murray's Coming Apart, Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, and the Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, by Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin.

Burdened Virtues

In Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, Lisa Tessman's basic thesis is that conditions of oppression obstruct the development of certain virtues on the one hand and, on the other hand, require cultivation of "burdened virtues" that act counter to the agent's own flourishing. Consider, for example, anger at injustice. Anger at an unjust act is appropriate and obviously necessary if we want to advance justice. But for, say, an oppressed minority, injustice occurs not in discrete actions from time to time but rather in a pervasive pattern of social life. Constant rage to match the patterns of injustice cripples an individual's chance at flourishing. Anger in a state of powerlessness further increases the possibility that that anger will find outlets at inappropriate targets, like one's comrades or loved ones.

Another example is loyalty, a characteristic especially important to cultivate in political resistance movements. But loyalty can pull in multiple directions, and often does in cases of individuals belonging to more than one disfavored group. Tessman gives the example of black feminists facing charges of treason when they turn their feminist critiques onto black culture. Racial deconstructionists, who seek to abandon the concept of race altogether as invalid and harmful, are likewise condemned for abandoning their racial communities (and further charged with doing so for selfish reasons).

One of the more fascinating discussions within the book is of the impact conditions of oppression have on privileged persons, those individuals who would seem to benefit from the system. To the casual observer, of course, members of dominant classes benefit from a system where the cards are stacked in their favor to varying degrees and in varying ways. They can use their advantages to go on to lead flourishing lives. But of course, knowingly benefiting from unfair privilege and doing nothing to correct this state of affairs is clearly vicious. Moreover, ignorance is not bliss. It's incumbent upon every moral actor to try to understand the injustices around them. The outward appearance (and indeed, inward feeling) of virtue and flourishing among privileged persons may be illusory when their understanding of who falls within their spheres of ethical concern is blinkered.

The book is valuable, especially for students and activists of feminist and racial politics, providing a useful alternative framework for understanding character under oppression. And the concept of burdened virtues is a fruitful contribution to virtue ethics under adverse conditions, extending Rosalind Hursthouse's ideas of moral remainders and moral damage. 

I do have one big complaint. The burdening of the virtues that Tessman discusses are examples of virtues in conflict, pulling against one another. She mentions from time to time toward the end the need for balancing between virtues. But the whole project cries out for a detailed discussion of the unity of the virtues, a central concept within many theories of virtue. Conditions of oppression surely exacerbate conflicts between virtues, but even in everyday moral affairs among individuals of equal social advantage there will inevitably be situations where different virtues demand different responses. It's an advantage of virtue ethics that virtues can pull against one another without breaking the whole enterprise. Understanding how to respond (how to act as well as how to feel) with virtues in tension is often presented as a kind of skill of moral living, learned by attentive practice and moral reflection and honed over decades of moral life. This practice and reflection is our old friend phronesis, the virtue of practical moral wisdom that unites the rest of the virtues into some kind of organic whole. But there's no mention of either phronesis or the unity of the virtues in the index.

Hayekian feminism: a challenge to libertarians

It's an understatement to note that libertarians (who are often male) are frequently hostile to feminism, and especially to the concepts of male privilege and rape culture. A typical libertarian response I've seen to these ideas is that they unfairly put men in a defensive posture. The male libertarian who doesn't just automatically dismiss the idea that men have systematic advantages over women will often protest that he shouldn't have to apologize or feel guilty for the advantages he happens to have. But this is an uncharitable interpretation. Feminism asks not that men flagellate themselves with guilt, but to acknowledge their systemic advantages as a first step to addressing the root causes of the problems of patriarchy. Mention of rape culture provokes the response that not all men are sexual assailants, and they shouldn't be treated as such. Of course, not all men engage in violence, but not all men have to for a culture to exist and for its effects to be felt widely.

Charles Johnson's "Women and the Invisible Fist" describes the mechanism of this last point in terms libertarians can appreciate. His argument is that rape culture, or the patriarchy if you prefer, can be usefully understood as a spontaneous order, à la Hayek. The spontaneous order that libertarians typically extol is a thing of beauty: individuals, acting on their own initiatives, with their own limited information, for their own ends, create in aggregate a pattern of economic productivity and exchange capable of satisfying the needs and desires of millions of people, all without a central authority running the show.

This is all accomplished on the basis of dispersed, consensual interactions. But spontaneous order can just as well arise from dispersed, coercive or violent interactions. The obvious example of this is biological evolution itself, the original inspiration for Hayek's thinking about spontaneous order. Nature is famously red in tooth and claw, with nearly every innovation dearly bought at the cost of some predator starving to death or some prey being eaten alive. Order can just as well emerge out of dispersed, violent human relations, without conscious design. But Johnson can say this better than I can (emphasis in original):

But nothing conceptually requires that emergent orders need be benign orders. If widely distributed forms of intelligence, knowledge, virtue, or prudence can add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into a benign undesigned order, then there's no reason why widely distributed forms of ignorance, prejudice, folly or vice might not add up, through many individual self-interested actions, into an unintended, malign order. So might widely-distributed, micro-level practices of violence; since libertarians are centrally concerned with individual freedom from violence and coercion, the possibility our threefold distinction raises of an emergent but non-consensual order must surely give us pause.*

[Susan Brownmiller's] hypothesis that stranger-rapists serve a Myrmidon function for male supremacy, with benefits that redound not only to practicing rapists but to all men, is best understood as arguing that the pervasive fact of rape, and the threat that its pervasiveness inflicts on all women, produces a spontaneous (emergent) but coercive order, in which non-consensual micro-scale actions inflicted by unrelated, anonymous stranger rapists, end up reinforcing a macro-scale pattern of male dominance over women, and the cultural and institutional superstructure of patriarchy. 

Feminists highlight the far-reaching significance of the everyday fact that the threat of rape constrains women's range of free action. These constraints operate through felt danger and through explicit warnings: don't walk alone; not after dark; not in that neighborhood; don't go to that party; not dressed like that; watch what you drink; watch what kind of "signals" you give off. Paternalistic double-binds often narrow the range to a vanishing point: don't leave a late-night event without a man to walk you back; don't leave with a man, unless you intend to invite him in--or you'll "give him the wrong idea," and who knows what could happen then? Women are warned about the dangers of crowded public spaces like subways, parties, or concerts while simultaneously being warned about the dangers of empty, secluded or private spaces like parking garages, alleys, empty country or a man's house or car. The double-binds construct both public space and private space, being either alone or accompanied, as pervaded with a lesser or greater degree of danger; ultimately the only space constructed as "safe" is male-protected space. And the reliability of male protection closely linked to personal connections with men, within a limited set of very specific, structured relations--usually either paternal authority, marital protection, or heterosexual availability. 

[...] The desire to protect others from violence is, in itself, a personal virtue, not a social problem. But the danger is how tempting and easy--and how corrupting--it is for men to take the psychological step of going from an attitude human solidarity [sic] to a fantasy of male rescue, of coming to see themselves as defined by their identity as a Protector in contrast to frail womanhood, and of coming to see women as uniquely dependent by nature--rather than uniquely threatened due to the chosen actions of other men. And to go even further, to try to make sure that women seek and depend on and stay within the scope of a man's "protection," whether or not they really want it--by using intimidating and restrictive warnings, by harassing women--blamed as foolish or wanton--who step outside the dependence of that "protection" or the stiflingly close boundaries of those "safety tips." That kind of imposed dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for women, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative in men, as any other form of structural dependence and power can. Libertarians and anarchists who so readily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn't have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male protection of women.

Do read the whole thing. I think it's the most brilliant thing I've read all year. And for an example of rape culture at work, read this recent Rolling Stones article on UVA (possibly triggering recounts of rape). 

The challenge to libertarians resistant to feminism is to take this quite libertarian argument seriously. If libertarians genuinely seek a world in which voluntary relations are the norm and coercion is minimized, then they should seek to understand systemic coercion. To do this they must grapple with feminism in good faith.

*The three-fold distinction mentioned is consensual versus coercive, polycentric or participatory versus directive, and emergent versus consciously designed order. I'll leave the detailed explanation of these terms to the text.

Virtue of the Dragon

UPDATE 2014.10.31: I have added a bit of detail here and there and edited some typos.

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The boy confuses them, [...]. He needs to be strong, and makes himself harder. Too hard, already, and he will not stop until he is stopped. He has forgotten how to laugh except in bitterness; there are no tears left in him. Unless he finds laughter and tears again, the world faces disaster. He must learn that even the Dragon Reborn is flesh. If he goes to Tarmon Gai’don as he is, even his victory may be as dark as his defeat. ~Cadsuane Melaidhrin

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time (completed by Brandon Sanderson) presents an excellent study in contrast of the pagan versus the Christian virtues, as well as a lesson in the balance of the virtues. I will assume FULL SPOILER knowledge of the Wheel of Time. This is regrettable, but the series is about 10 000 pages too long to facilitate easy summary, and the subject matter of the essay requires details up until at least the penultimate volume. This reduces the audience even more drastically than does the venue, but we march onward ...

Given the FULL SPOILER nature of this essay, the reader is aware that Rand al'Thor is the Dragon Reborn, the soul of Lews Therin Telamon recast into a shepherd boy's body in the twilight of the Third Age, when the seals of the Dark One's prison are weakening. The shepherd business is an early signal that Rand's story will at least partially parallel that of the Christian Jesus. But I am more concerned here with the so-called Christian virtues (which I will also refer to as the sentimental virtues), rather than the Christian story per se. 

The Christian virtues of Love, Faith, and Hope are a complement to the so-called pagan virtues of Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Prudence. This particular catalog of virtues isn't the one and only rendering. There's inevitably some arbitrariness, and I will be liberal with my interpretation of what these virtues comprise, especially Faith. My thesis is that our protagonist admirably embodies the pagan virtues, and his critical defect is his failure to attend to the Christian virtues.This imbalance of virtues corrodes his character--abetted of course by the taint on saidin--until it nearly culminates in the destruction of the world. This unhappy eschaton is only narrowly avoided by a redemptive moment when Rand opens himself to the full spectrum of virtues.

Courage is the easiest virtue to drape over the Dragon Reborn. Rand displays Courage throughout the series, from that first frightful flight to town with his wounded father in tow after the Trolloc attack. Courage doesn't lack in any of his early exploits, when the series reads more like an adventure than the drama it eventually grows into. The early days out on the road with Mat, out from under Moiraine's protective wing; befriending an Ogier--that requires courage as well. In the third book he sets out on his own to seek his destiny at the Stone of Tear, where the most conspicuous prophecies about the Dragon Reborn must either come true or not. And of course he knows that worldwide devastation at his hands and his own early death will result if he does turn out to be the Dragon Reborn. He ventures into the mysterious and deadly desert of the Aiel and enters their ter'angreal-assisted trial of worth. Most obviously, he spends the entire series hunting down the Forsaken, super-powered war criminals the tales of whom are regaled to frighten children--all as a prelude to facing the Dark One himself.

Rand's sense of Justice was in evidence especially in the middle to later books, after he has become a ruler by various conquests. One of the first things he does as de facto ruler of Tear, apparently an especially stratified society, is force the Tairen nobility to see to the needs of the commoners. Relief for the poor and those scattered by conflict would be a recurring concern for him throughout the story. In addition to the Prudential reasoning that he would need every channeler he could get, his creation of the Asha'man at least partially reflects his sense that no man should be persecuted or gentled just because of a condition he was born with. We see his sense of Justice in his agonizing over every woman that died due to his decisions (his flavor of Justice included a curiously chivalrous--sexist--element). And of course, Rand is rightly horrified by the Seanchan enslavement of women who can channel.

Feats of moderation don't often feature heavily in epic fantasy, but at the very least Rand's Temperance fulfills the basic requirements of not giving in to excess. He isn't a drunk; he certainly doesn't have the gambling and womanizing tendencies of Mat Cauthon. But his Temperance also manifests in his dedication to physical training. After beginning sword lessons early on with Lan, Rand sticks with this art form long after he has armies and loyal Aes Sedai and Maidens of the Spear surrounding him for protection. He adds to this hand-to-hand combat training after falling in with the Aiel, and carries this forward through the series. Rand resists using his political power abusively, or even frivolously. Rand's Temperance keeps him in control not only of the One Power, but power more generally. Early in the series, he obtains Callandor and the access keys to the Choedan Kal, items potentially giving him godlike power. But he resists the temptation to use them, knowing he isn't ready for them (file this under Prudence as well). And he resists this temptation to heavenly power even when it comes coupled with Lanfear's more earthly efforts at seduction. One counter-example to this is Rand's persistent problem with a very intemperate anger.

Source

We see Rand's Prudence in his military campaigns as well as his political maneuvering, most of which are fairly successful. Much of this success comes of course from his gifted advisers, but here again his practical sense shines through in his choice of counsel. He knows too when to keep his own counsel. There were solid strategic reasons--laid out by Moiraine--why Ilium should have been his next destination after Tear, but he wisely chooses instead to seek out the Aiel, informed by his own readings of the Prophecies of the Dragon. In another example of shrewdness Rand, with the "help" of the creatures beyond the doorway ter'angreal, figures out how to cleanse saidin, a thorny problem left unsolved even by the luminaries of the Age of Legends. In doing so he cleverly manages to destroy Shadar Logoth. We will see later that Rand's Prudence and Courage labor also for the Dark Side.

Before moving on to Rand's experience with the sentimental virtues, I want to note that the lack of Christian virtue is surely not his only problem. I have already mentioned anger. Rand's biggest vice, though, is Pride. Certainly for much of the story Lews Therin holds forth in the back of Rand's head about his dangerous Pride. This is seen in his attitudes toward Moiraine, Cadsuane, and essentially every Aes Sedai who tries to guide him, or merely even help him. We've already encountered Rand's obsession with mentally punishing himself with every woman who dies either for him or at his order. This too is a species of Pride: he cannot keep everyone safe in his cosmic battle, and other individuals in the struggle for the Light deserve respect for their choices and sacrifices; it's not all about Rand all the time. Rand even believes he can kill the Dark One (at the end of Book One, he believes he did kill the Dark One).

Pride is one major weakness, but it is by no means the main event. His Pride is almost comic relief next to the way his sacrifice of Faith and Love on the altars of Courage and Prudence corrode his character and jeopardize the Pattern itself. This is what Cadsuane's epigraph at the beginning of this essay is all about. Rand believes that defeating the Dark One at Shayol Ghul is the only thing that matters, and it must be accomplished at any cost. This is the warped view of Prudence as ends-justify-the-means, where other virtues that normally soften Prudence are disregarded. Rand believes his struggle is to rid himself of the human weakness and attachment that might cause him to falter from his ultimate goal of defeating the Dark One. This is the Dark Side of his Courage.

Cadsuane Sedai. Source

Rand the young villager of Emond's Field has the full complement of virtues, but his Faith in people is first weakened when the seed of doubt about his origin is planted during Tam al'Thor's fever dream. He and Mat are hounded by their pursuers after they lose touch with Moiraine, and they are lost in a world of strangers of evil intent. As he takes on the mantle of the Dragon Reborn, Rand suspects more and more that Moiraine is just manipulating him for her own Aes Sedai ends. Thus the person the reader knows he probably should trust more than anyone is relegated to the status of just another schemer out for her own good. By the time he has reached his stride mid-series, Rand is a paranoid wreck, seeing darkfriends, the Forsaken, and Aes Sedai machinations everywhere. He only truly trusts the small band of friends he left his village with and his three lovers. In his bleakest paranoia, he nearly murders his own father, suspecting he was in thrall to Cadsuane. Cadsuane herself is a good example of a companion whose trustworthiness had been demonstrated (she rescues him from Padan Fain outside of Cairhien, protects him during the cleansing of saidin, and again rescues him from Far Madding where he can't channel his way out of his difficulties).

There is a delicate balance of Faith and Prudence that must be maintained lest one or the other slip into vice. Faith without Prudence is gullibility. Rand really is in danger of hidden darkfriends and the plots of the White Tower. But his loss of the ability to trust warps his relation to humanity. He only halfway trusts Aes Sedai when they have sworn fealty to him, and are literally compelled by the Oath Rod to serve him. He believes the only way the world can work together to fend off the Dark is if he reigns over them. He purposefully abuses his ta'veren tendency to distort the Pattern to compel adversary negotiators to bend to his will. Part of Faith is trusting one's fellow human beings enough to relate to them as free and equal beings, but Rand increasingly can only "trust" others if they are bound and subordinate to him.

Love lingers longer in Rand than Faith. He certainly never loses the Love he bears Elayne, Aviendha, and Min. But he also considers this a failure owing to his weakness and he struggles against these feelings, believing that the only thing he has to offer any woman is pain. He forces himself to forget his village. He briefly rekindles his roots when he meets girls from his village in Caemlyn, on their way to Tar Valon to become novices. This reunion is cut short when their Aes Sedai chaperones appear and Rand resumes his emotionless persona. At least, he tries to restrain his emotions, but he shouts at the girls that he is no longer the boy from their village and leaves them cowering with a demonstration of saidin, an instance of his intemperate facility to anger. He destroys the bonds of affection and common experience he had with these girls and resolves that this is all for the best.

I admit to some shoehorning here. I lump in the ideas of human connection under Love in addition to the traditional compassion/charity interpretation of that virtue. Love on this view is the virtue that sustains human relationships and connections of all kinds, and includes romantic love and friendship, the bonds of affection and obligation that make family and village life possible, and the compassion and solidarity that operate at longer distances and across frontiers.

Perhaps the one person Rand really treats as a true friend rather than merely an instrument is Lan, perhaps because both characters have a similar obsession with the idea that their deaths have already been purchased (Lan's lone war against the Shadow has only been postponed by his service to Moiraine as warder). But in the end Rand sacrifices even this friendship to his misguided single-mindedness; he cannot be distracted from his own efforts and anyway Lan has his own duty to discharge. Lan, having finally freed himself of other obligations and warder bonds, launches himself at the Blight in a certain--and certainly futile--suicide mission. Rand's duty as a friend here is clear: he should either talk Lan out of his foolishness or at least send him reinforcements. It is left instead to Nynaeve to rally the Borderlands around their living legend in his quest.

Rand's terrible Prudence leads him to break any social norm as long as it serves his purpose. This is the degradation of Faith in humanity required to sustain social morality as well as Love (compassion) for those impacted. He grows increasingly comfortable with the use of forbidden balefire as he progresses, literally unraveling the Pattern even as his single-minded purpose is to save it at all costs. In one horrific scene late in the series, Rand sends a human pawn to Graendal, knowing the victim will undergo Compulsion; the disappearance of the Compulsion weave will confirm Graendal is dead as Rand erases the entire Palace and all its inhabitants from the Pattern with balefire. This is Rand at his most inhumane. He has achieved the "hardness" he believes is required to do whatever it takes to defeat the Dark One, and it has made him capable of committing clear war crimes where innocent lives are treated as so much cannon fodder.

Hope is in some ways the hardest virtue for my argument to accommodate. Apart from a spell of depression following the assassination of Herid Fel, Rand admirably maintains Hope quite far into the story. He creates the Asha'man primarily to be his weapons for Tarmon Gaidon, but he also intends for the Black Tower to persist and provide a home for men who can channel. Rand establishes schools throughout the nations under his rule, betraying his optimism about the outcome of the Last Battle and what might come after. Perhaps his greatest article of Hope is the effort he puts into the Dragon's Peace, which promises a legacy of world peace following the Last Battle. Hope in his success against the Dark One is inherent even in his terrible Prudence; it is its purpose.

But Hope is just the last of the sentimental virtues to go. Rand finally loses Hope at the summit of Dragonmount, having transported himself there after nearly blasting the Seanchan territories out of the Pattern with balefire. Rand is suddenly gripped by nihilism, entertains the idea that there is no point to his rebirth, the renewal of the Wheel, really anything, and that perhaps the Dark One is right to will the destruction of the Pattern.

The Dragon is troubled. Source

“What if he is right?” Rand bellowed. “What if it's better for this all to end? What if the Light was a lie all along, and this is all just a punishment? We live again and again, growing feeble, dying, trapped forever. We are to be tortured for all time!” 

[...] "NONE OF THIS MATTERS!"

With this final dismissal of Hope he prepares to obliterate the Pattern itself with the power of the Choedan Kal. But, of course, something stays his hand, his humanity resurfacing.

Maybe... Lews Therin said, shockingly lucid, not a hint of madness to him. He spoke softly, reverently. Why? Could it be... Maybe it’s so that we can have a second chance.

In the end Rand thus does choose to hold on to Hope, and to abandon his internal war on the sentimental virtues. But we glimpse that with Love, Faith, and finally Hope all gone, there was nothing left but destructive nihilism, and Rand's heroic expression of the pagan virtues was all for naught. All the bravery, self-control, and cleverness of the Dragon was not enough, especially when the ruthless maximization of those virtues came at the cost of the humane virtues. Choosing to re-embrace his humanity, Love returns: "Because each time we live, we get to love again." And "He remembered love, and peace, and joy, and hope."

After this epiphany, the character of our protagonist radically changes for the rest of the series. Rand casually strolls into Tar Valon to visit the Amyrlin Seat, even submitting to shielding without a struggle, something quite remarkable after his abduction and torture at the hands of Elaida's Aes Sedai mid-series. One could sympathize if Rand was overcome with uncontrollable tremors at the mere sight of an ageless face after such an ordeal. Rand again puts himself in a vulnerable position when he meets with the Borderlander armies stationed in Far Madding, where channeling is impossible. And where before Rand struggled to remain cold and emotionless at the many deaths caused in his wars, now he allows himself to feel the losses, and dreads the loss of Hope among his people, and it makes him angry. Rand Travels in to break the siege of Maradon and, in a move unthinkable for the pre-epiphany Dragon, he sets Prudence to the side and exhausts himself by single-handedly destroying the horde of Trollocs poised to overwhelm the city. And he puts himself at risk both because he was inspired by the bravery and skill of the city's defenders and to show them that their Hope and Courage and sacrifice were not in vain. He has tamed his Prudence with the sentimental virtues.

In the end, Rand needs Christian virtue just to survive to reach the showdown with the Dark One. But he also needs Faith to succeed in that confrontation. He places his Faith in Egwene to, well, place her Faith in him and his frankly crazy-sounding plan to destroy the last seal on the Dark One's prison, as well as to know when the time is right to do so. And he needs to surrender control to Moiraine and Nynaeve in order to use Callandor for its ultimate purpose. And in the contest of dueling realities played by Rand and the Dark One, Faith and Hope are needed to finally understand that he cannot just kill the Dark One; human beings must grapple with evil in order to be fully human.

This last point reflects another major theme of the books, that evil exists intrinsically within the human soul, and it must be combated there. The Dark One is only a demonic embodiment of the evil within. This is seen with Shadar Logoth and Padan Fain, evils born of the same paranoid distrust that afflicts Rand and is actually antagonistic to the Dark One's brand of evil. And we have every reason to believe the banal, institutional evil of the Seanchan enslavement of channelers will persist well into the Fourth Age, long after the Dark One is sealed away; the a'dam is an invention of human weakness, not of the Shadow. It is significant that the greatest conflict in the story is internal, one of Rand struggling with his inner demons. I have labored to portray this long conflict in terms of the virtues of Courage and especially Prudence manifesting in the protagonist to a disproportionate--even vicious--degree, and their overwhelming what I have called the sentimental or Christian virtues of Hope, Faith, and Love. The most dangerous evil depicted in the story then is that evil which arises from disharmonies within the human soul, all too realistic, and not the fantastical evil of a dark deity.

Other stories could have been written to explore the harmony of virtue. Our Dragon could have been a sappy figure, in touch with sentimental virtues but lacking the Courage to march down the path ending with his blood spilt on the rocks of Shayol Ghul. Or he might have struggled instead with playing the cold-blooded utilitarian gambits that really were required of our hero from time to time. Much more might have been made of the allure of Berelain and Lanfear, and the temptations of world domination.

Mileage may vary of course, but I'm glad Jordan chose the particular imbalance he did. I began reading the series as a young teenage male, and I remember loving Rand's cold ruthlessness and talent for violence. I mean, what a badass! For the elderly harpy Cadsuane, of course, I had little to no patience, nor for his other moderating influences. In this I'm sure I was unexceptional among my fellow teenage male fans. I took a hiatus from the books around the time our Dragon nearly slaughtered his own armies in beating back the Seanchan from Ilium, and I returned with the publication of a Memory of Light, arguably an adult. I now see the macho virtues of our hardened hero I so appreciated before as maniacal vices in their obsessively amplified expression. I get the importance of Love, Hope, and Faith now in a way I never could while under the spell of youthful ideas of toughness, bravado, and above all immunity to sentiment.

thoughts on Islam

I just finished reading a book on Islam, John Esposito's Islam: The Straight Path. Now I feel like I know next to nothing about Islam, but that's surely a step up from the nothing I knew before. The following are some quick and dirty and potentially not-so-politically correct thoughts. For those who don't know, I'm an atheist who considers himself friendly toward religious traditions (or at least non-hostile). Anyway, any Muslims or folks knowledgeable about Islam in the audience feel free to correct any misapprehensions.

The author contrasted Islam as concerned with "doing" whereas Christianity focuses on "believing" the right things. So Islam is judicial while Christianity is theological.

Islam seems strongly predisposed to politicization because of its history. Muhammed became a head of state, and much of Islam is based on the actions of the Prophet. So the Prophet's political decisions have to be taken seriously by Muslims. Muslims past (e.g., Akbar "It's a trap!" the Great and other Mughal emperors) and present (see recent Pew Research results) can craftily interpret their way to secularism, but the origin of Islam seems to present a hurdle here.

I rather like the concept of jihad, typically understood as the "struggle" to lead a virtuous life or follow the straight path of Islam. From my nascent virtue-ethical perspective, I like the emphasis that adhering to virtue is a lifelong struggle.

Islam has no concept of Original Sin. After the fact, this isn't so surprising, but I'd never realized that original sin is a doctrine peculiar to Christianity. I think it's one of Christianity's vilest doctrines, though I suppose in a way jihad and original sin are trying to get at the same idea. That is, virtue isn't automatic or easy. But jihad strikes me as giving greater agency to the individual. Original sin says the individual is wretched no matter what.

There is this principle I'd never heard of called "ijtihad" which is pretty cool. It means something like "intellectual struggle" (same root as "jihad") in a literal sense and is interpreted as "independent reasoning". This, along with the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet (Sunna), and consensus (ijma) are the four main sources of juristic authority. I found this mix surprisingly progressive and potentially democratic, but apparently many schools of thought deny or downplay the validity of ijtihad.

In the tribal context of seventh century arabia, much of what the Quran had to say about women were liberal innovations. This included limiting the number of wives a man could have, and advising against polygyny. Also, it introduced property and inheritance rights for women, as well rights to initiate divorce and education.

Shia Islam and its origin reminds me a lot of Christianity. There's a Passion story, where Hussain (the younger son of Ali, the last of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, whose reign was ended in the rebellion that ruptured Islam) fights valiantly in an epic battle against the evildoers who betrayed Ali. He dies dramatically, and Shiites get all worked up over remembering this the same way Christians get in a lather over Christ's betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. In some versions of Shia Islam, there is a "hidden imam" that will come out of occultation some day and lead the devout in a just society, similar to Christ's return. Finally, because the origin of Shia Islam was all about the partisans of Ali getting shafted by the Abassid powers that be, they share the persecution complex of Christianity, the early practitioners of which also famously suffered at the hands of the ruling elites.

What's the impact of a universal basic income on attitudes to foreigners?

Apropos of Matt Zwolinski's Cato Unbound forum.

My biggest objection to a universal basic income is that I fear it would make the populace even less receptive to immigration than it is currently, due to the conventional wisdom that people don't want to pay for social services for folks ethnically dissimilar to themselves. And of course this would be a perverse result from all ethical vantages that don't vertiginously discount the rights and welfare of foreigners. But is my fear well-founded?

The universality of a UBI might lessen the perception that it is really welfare. After all, people tend not to believe that programs they benefit from count as social assistance. Few comfortably middle class people sucking on the mortgage interest deduction teat think of themselves as welfare queens. The UBI could be purposefully framed to play up its universal aspect. This sort of decorative rhetoric was deployed by the crafters of social security, who made the program universal precisely because they worried that "programs for the poor are poor programs". Propaganda for the UBI could feature stories of this medical student who used her UBI check (Citizen's Dividend?) to fund a year of service with Doctors Without Borders and that small businessman who saved up a few years' worth of his dividends to launch his vintage auto repair shop.

If the UBI isn't seen as welfare, but just as another privilege of citizenship, then might I have some hope that immigrants wouldn't be seen as so much of a threat? If the UBI dividends were seen as secure (broad political support), then might they even act as a buffer to other fears people have about immigrants stealing native jobs. "I have to compete with immigrants for jobs, but at least I know I'll have my Citizen's Dividend in the worst case ..." And while, in my fantasy border regime, all who desire citizenship can ultimately do so, guest workers, tourists, and newly arrived migrants just aren't quite citizens yet.

These are quick and dirty thoughts articulated through the fog of sleep deprivation and I expect this avenue is just wishful thinking. More of a bleg really?

capabilities and the impossibility of justice

In my ongoing quest to grok justice, I read Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice and was duly impressed. The aim of the book is to extend justice to areas left out by other approaches. These areas include individuals with disabilities, individuals living beyond the borders of the nation of interest, and sentient non-human species. The book elaborates on the so-called "capabilities approach" to justice.

Before presenting the capabilities approach, Nussbaum offers several criticisms of formulations of justice based on social contract theory, which she views as the all-around best attempt at justice so far. The social contract theory (Rawls's is the one usually under her microscope) fails to grapple with these three areas of justice right from the assumptions. Whether you buy into the capabilities approach or not, Nussbaum's case that the neglect of these areas represents a critical failure of theory is--to me--compelling. 

The social contract theory assumes that principles of justice can be obtained by imagining idealized representatives of society, in a condition where their personal biases and knowledge of where they stand in society have been removed, sitting together to hash out what would be most advantageous to each of them. These representatives are assumed to be motivated by self-interest, and are stipulated to be roughly of equal powers and mental capacities.

There is an intuitive appeal to basing a theory of justice on self-interest. After all, if you can get a workable theory of justice assuming everyone is in it for themselves (and perhaps their kin and loved ones), then it seems somehow more robust. There is also elegance in the parsimony of this approach. Unfortunately, the appealing assumption doesn't fit the facts. I'm no expert, but my impression is that our current empirical understanding of moral psychology suggests that humans simply cannot be well-described as selfish maximizers. A theory of justice seems fundamentally flawed if it discards human nature right out of the assumptive gates. More troubling still, if it turns out that justice does demand unselfish regard for others, an assumption of self-interest in no way guarantees to move us in the right direction.

The stipulation that the folks negotiating the principles of justice are of equal powers is troubling if we want justice to work for the weak. The idea behind the assumption seems to be avoiding the problem of one person being able to just dominate the other negotiators at will. But this gets the cart before the horse: understanding justice would seem to include understanding why it would be unjust to abuse a position of power. Nussbaum's contractarian interlocutors aim to protect the weak by means alternative to justice, such as charity or humanitarianism. But this makes consideration for disabled persons, or sentient non-human animals, or desperately poor foreigners, supererogatory--certainly nice but not actually required.

Nussbaum also points out that the assumption of independence among the individuals at the bargaining table of justice isn't just worrisome for disabled individuals fundamentally incapable of looking after themselves. Even ignoring these people, we are left with temporarily disabled people, and even more dramatically the elderly and children, who require a great deal of care. It is clear that we can't just brush a few unfortunate disabled people off to the side and hope some theory of charity will suffice for them. Taking into account infancy, youth, and old age, every individual is extremely needy in different parts of his life. Human beings simply are needy creatures.

Nussbaum's capabilities approach differs from contractarianism in that it is outcome-oriented, in some sense evaluating what a just society would look like and then working backward to figure out what the principles should be. A just society consists of one in which each individual lives

a life that is worthy of ... dignity--a life that has available in it 'truly human functioning,' in the sense described by Marx ... Marx speaks of the human being as a being 'in need of a totality of human life-activities,' and the [capabilities] approach  also takes its bearing from this idea, insisting that the capabilities to which all citizens are entitled are many and not one, and are opportunities for activity, not simply quantities of resources.

Nussbaum lists these capabilities as the following:

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length . . . ; not dying prematurely . . .2. Bodily health . . . Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; being adequately nourished . . . ; being able to have adequate shelter . . .
3. Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault . . . ; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction
4. Senses, imagination, thought. Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to reason--and to do these things in . . . a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education . . . ; being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing, and producing expressive works and events of one's own choice . . . ; being able to use one's mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech and freedom of religious exercise; being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain
5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; being able to love those who love and care for us; being able to grieve at their absence, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger; not having one's emotional developing blighted by fear or anxiety. . . .
6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one's own life. (This entails protection for liberty of conscience.)
7. Affiliation. Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship. . . . Being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others.
8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.
9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
10. Control over one's environment. (A) Political: being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one's life; having the rights of political participation, free speech and freedom of association . . . (B) Material: being able to hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others . . .

This list is not complete, and indeed it is intrinsically open. All of these capabilities must be ensured to each individual sentient being to achieve full justice in the capabilities view. One capability can't be "bought" at the expense of another. In other words, a hypothetical authoritarian society somehow awash in material abundance cannot justify political oppression or thought control (4, 6, 10) by appealing to access to health and economic resources (1, 2, 9).

One concern that jumps out at me is the potential for conflict. Opportunities for sexual gratification, for example, require in most instances willing collaborators. But this can't be guaranteed in a way that respects the freedom and equality of other members of society. Of course, this is just an extreme example of the broader problem that social affiliation, economic commerce, access to medicine, and so on all require input from other individuals, all of whom must be respected as free and equal beings. This is just the old libertarian critique of positive rights, but the capabilities approach seems especially vulnerable to this critique due to the grand ambitions of the framework. But then, it's a jump to conclusions to think that capabilities must be enforced in some way, let alone enforced by the state.

Another potential concern is that capabilitarian justice is impossible to achieve. To the credit of the framers of the approach, it respects economic freedoms as well as other freedoms. Indeed it is to its immense credit that it makes no special differentiation between economic and other capabilities, in contrast to Rawls. But if this is the case, there will certainly be economic inequalities. Nussbaum doesn't make a big deal about this, but with technological progress, the economic elites of society will achieve new capabilities requisite for fully dignified human life before they are even understood to be core capabilities.

I have in mind those technological innovations that sweep over society and become basic necessities. I think it is reasonable to say that if an individual does not have access to electricity, she does not possess the full range of human capabilities. Internet access (I'll even go so far as to say high-speed access), mobile telephony, safe and efficient transportation, etc, all seem necessary for life as a modern human being. But these technologies didn't always exist, and they came into being gradually. Access to Internet-based social networks might not have been plausible as a core capability until a critical threshold of users is reached. Other core capabilities likely don't exist yet at all. If human immortality (or at least indefinitely delayed mortality from "natural" causes) is possible, then it seems like a straightforward derivation (1, 2, 4) that access to immortality-enabling technology must be secured for all sentient individuals as a matter of justice.

This might seem like it jettisons the capabilities approach from the sphere of reasonable ideas, but I don't think so. It's unclear to me that possibility is a defining quality of justice. And we've already seen that attempts to bridle justice with assumptions that make it easier to achieve (like the assumption of self-interested negotiators) risk limiting the concept so that it won't perform the work we want it to perform. Nussbaum concurs, "It may be true that in desperate conditions justice cannot be achieved; that does not mean, however, that it cannot be contemplated, and questions asked about how conditions arose that prevent justice from being realized." Here I would characterize "desperate conditions" as "life". The grand ambition is a feature, not a bug.

I am attracted to the capabilities approach because it is the closest idea I have yet come across at describing what it is I mean when I talk about human flourishing. This is the language I have been using lately when I think about what it is that I want society to do or to optimize. It isn't liberty and it isn't welfare, at least not narrowly conceived. But it's something that comprises both of these values, and more.

As an end note, I've been working off and on on this post for a couple months in my spare time. It's been on the perpetual back burner because of my other blogging commitments. What prompted me to finish it is the blog series on the capabilities approach that Ingrid Robeyns has recently embarked upon. It's off to a great start and if anyone finds this post interesting, I recommend heading there next.

"elitist philanthropy" and charitable prioritization

Ken Berger, the CEO of Charity Navigator, has penned an amusing takedown of his competitor and my favorite charity review site, GiveWell.org. It is amusing for more than just its transparently self-serving nature. For example, Mr Berger has modified the phrase "effective altruism", frequently employed by GiveWell and its fellow travelers, into "defective altruism".

His main complaint is that GiveWell has the gall to compare against each other not only charities operating within a common cause but also the different causes themselves.

By contrast, defective altruism is—by the admission of its proponents—an approach that not only unjustifiably claims the moral high ground in giving decisions, but also implements this bold claim by weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another. In this, it is not moral, but rather, moralistic in the worst sense of the word.

Italics are his. The idea is that an individual who is really passionate about one area of giving--say, funding and volunteering at animal shelters--shouldn't be deemed an ineffective donor because that won't save as many human lives as mosquito net distributions and deworming campaigns.

In recent articles extolling the virtues of this approach, the GiveWell blog has cited the work of several allies, among them Peter Singer, who spoke about the concept in a recent TED Talk. In an example of the Sophie’s Choice that the movement offers the donor community, Singer posed the following question: Which is the “better” thing to do? To provide a guide dog to one blind American, or cure 2000 people of blindness in developing countries? Even had he not employed the adjective “American,” which was clearly intended to make his audience feel a distinct pang of cultural guilt, it was obvious which choice Singer thought was the “better” of the two; indeed, he said the choice was “clear.” 

Nobody enjoys the prospect of weighing lives in the balance, yet it's something that reality forces upon us. Resources are scarce and tough decisions must be made. The innocent yet profound assumption at the root of "effective altruism" is that each human life is equally precious. When this is fully appreciated and the resulting charity evaluations are presented to donors, it would be surprising if the philanthropic options available weren't harshly clarified.

[In] taking on this cause and using the bully pulpit of its website as its forum, GiveWell truly is doing more harm than good to both the donor community and those thousands upon thousands of organizations that are doing much-needed work in areas that the defective altruism fringe deems unworthy.

I doubt that GiveWell is prepared to say that any subject area of charity is truly unworthy. Giving to a well-managed charity in your preferred area is almost certainly better than not giving anything to any charity at all, assuming GiveWell's more humanitarian and cosmopolitan values are not as highly prioritized by the donor.

Mr Berger goes on to ask what would happen if everyone were as ruthlessly and singlemindedly cosmopolitan as GiveWell?

GiveWell has a particular fixation with global health and nutrition charities. It at least implicitly recommends that one should support charities only in those cause areas. It is therefore not surprising that it has recommended only a handful of charities to its users. If we all followed such a ridiculous approach, what would happen to:

1. Domestic efforts to serve those in need?
2. Advanced research funding for many diseases?
3. Research on and efforts in creative and innovative new approaches to helping others that no one has ever tried before?
4. More local and smaller charitable endeavors?
5. Funding for the arts, and important cultural endeavors such as the preservation of historically important structures and archives?
6. Volunteerism for the general public, since most “worthy” efforts are overseas and require a professional degree to have what Friedman calls “deep expertise in niche areas”?
7. Careers in the nonprofit sector? Since the spokespeople for this opinion suggest that it might even be ethical to have a “lucrative job in an immoral corporation” so that you can be a so-called “do-bester” and give all the money away, it is unclear who would then run the charities to which defective altruists would give.

One possibility is that the greatest humanitarian problems would be eradicated, one by one, in order of severity. This doesn't seem like an obviously bad approach to me. But more importantly this is a ridiculous rhetorical question to ask. In no world remotely similar to our own will everyone adopt the ethical approach of Peter Singer. GiveWell indeed couples its services with a particular worldview, and perhaps, it markets that worldview as it makes its recommendations. The CEO of Charity Navigator may not think that is appropriate, but it seems to me that the world doesn't exactly suffer from a glut of GiveWell's worldview.

The question that comes to my mind when reading the example above is How many people even know about this possible trade-off? An American donor will see the need for guide dogs and may even know a blind American or two, but is much less likely to see so vividly the needs of poor foreigners. Even when the needs of foreigners are observed, like in those television commercials featuring gaunt African children with flies buzzing around them, they are observed at emotional remove because distant strangers are abstract, and because of a deep, biologically ingrained inability to really feel the plight of those who are not family or who do not belong to our tribes. Even the bleedingest-hearted of cosmopolitans recognize our moral obligations to distant strangers only intellectually. 

This biological deficiency is compounded by cultural biases that favor members of our tribe and steeply discount the moral demands of foreigners. Hence the inane insistence that we should take care of our poor before we fix the problems in other countries, despite the fact that the poorest five percent of Americans lie comfortably within the 60th percentile in the global incomes. And hence the cavalier attitudes toward the massive losses of life attendant to the foreign policy of America and its allies.

These are the hurdles that lie in the way of GiveWell's peculiar worldview achieving dominance and devastating the broader philanthropic sector that provides Mr Berger with his job. The danger is not that GiveWell's philosophy is taking over. Everything GiveWell does to enable people to appreciate the needs of foreigners goes a little way toward correcting an existing imbalance in philanthropy. It does not introduce a new imbalance.

As it happens, I do agree with Mr Berger that GiveWell's top pick charities are not the only charities that deserve support. They deserve more support than they are getting, and greater awareness of this fact is the service to humanity that GiveWell provides. But you can still support the opera if you choose. There's nothing wrong with giving to your alma mater. I, for one, give most of my charitable money to GiveDirectly, one of GiveWell's top picks. But close behind (and on par if I count my volunteer efforts) comes the American Civil Liberties Union, which saves far fewer lives than, say, mosquito net distributions, but which I believe is nevertheless important for making the world's most powerful nation something closer to the beacon of freedom to the world that its citizens like to think it is. I also like to throw some money in the direction of Wikipedia when Jimmy Wales comes around begging. Not too many lives are saved by Wikipedia, but its mission of bringing the world's knowledge to every human being is profoundly beautiful, and it Wikipedia powerfully expands the capabilities of individuals everywhere to pursue their interests and further their own unique ends. And so I close with Mr Wales.