Wednesday, December 27, 2006

God and Evil in Hegel

Hegel talks about belief, and as he untangles the notions of what we believe about ourselves and a possible a separate insight we have about ourselves, Hegel decides that we couldn't, ultimately, have a relation to ourselves that didn't find itself embedded in circumstances.

I couldn't be me, the same me, in a Romantic world as in a Medieval world. None of us can be anything other than we are in the world in which we find ourselves. As Hegel spins this out, we relate to ourselves in a context, and that context is a historical one. There are problems.

Hegel has the notion of "absolute spirit". That's his successor notion to God. Hegel understands God as being the unfolding of human history, and therefore he understands God as history itself. The unfolding of history is God's autobiography. This is very difficult. Awful things happen in history. Any time one looks around, there are terrible things happening. If history is God, God is evil.

For Hegel, if this is his argument, it is enormously flawed. However, some have said that Hegel was an atheist, who uses religious language to cover his tracks. After all, he was "Lutheran" professor. Robert Solomon says that his Lutheranism was his cover. If he was a Lutheran, then he has not solved the problem of evil. Even so, History is evil. Sometime later I will explore the "end of history" and whether history and absolute spirit can ever not be evil.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

The Only Anarcho-Capitalist City in the World

Somalia fell apart in 1991, when several clan militias clubbed together to remove a dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre (who was a proponent of what he called "scientific socalism" i.e. Marxism) and then turned on each other. A year later US peace-keeping forces fought with Aidid's forces in Mogadishu, chronicled by the film Black Hawk Down. By 1995 the US and the UN had removed themselves from Somalia, leaving the country to continue fighting. Aidid was killed in 1996 in a gunfight.

Two northern regions, Somaliland and Puntland, seceded from Somalia in the 1990s but remain internationally unrecognized. Some have commented that Mogadishu is the only "anarcho-capitalist" regime in the world. But that is false because the city has no legal foundation whatsoever. One cannot have an utterly lawless regime and call that capitalism. It fails even the classical definitions put forth by Smith. Somalia is simply a failed state, which is entirely different in its ambitions and in its purposes.

But Somalia is a resilient failed state, and has some anarcho-capitalist features. Consider its amazing currency, the Somali shilling, which has operated for 14 years without a central bank or reserves of any kind, save the will of ordinary Somalis. Though the country has lacked a government, it has never quite ceased to exist.

Numerous attempts to revive the state, mostly backed by rich-country donors, have failed. A transistional government backed by Ethiopian forces, created in 2004 in the alternative capital city of Jowhar, began with a lot of ambition. But by June 2006, it had lost out to Islamist militias in Mogadishu, whose power is spreading. The Straussian Policymakers at Heritage have linked these forces to Al Qaeda. For any hope of stability in the region, engagement with political moderates would be necessary. There are too many extreme forces in Somalia. The Islamists are fiercely opposed to foreign troops – particularly their neighboring Ethiopians – in Somalia. Since November, war between Islamists and Ethiopians seemed very possible.

Ethiopia has just this week, on Christmas Day in fact, bombed the airport in Mogadishu. The battles now fought are between an alliance of Mogadishu warlords known as the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) and a militia loyal to Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).

Habitat, a UN agency that tries to provide housing and shelter, is struggling to bring some order here and in other Somali towns. But it is more trade, not aid, that might improve things the most. Saudi Arabia could help by restoring its imports of Somali livestock that were stopped in 2000, and Somalia needs help developing its offshore fishing waters, which are being plundered by foreign boats. The country also has some untapped oil reserves, which foreigners are too weary to explore for fear of violence. Trading oil wouldn't necessary turn Somalia into a healthy anarcho-capitalist regime, or even a healthy liberal democracy. Would we prefer living in Riyadh over Mogadishu? Islamist militias would most likely still fight over its oil, but the foreign investment this would bring is going to be worth the risk.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Pure Reason on the Meaning of Life

How should we understand the meaning of life?

How can we move toward this, if we don't know what our true nature is? Every time we talk about things like freedom, or whether time had a beginning, we fall into contradictions. Kant says that if we try to prove things about our true nature, as opposed to how we appear to ourselves, we fall into something he calls paralogisms. It means there are fallacies in reasoning involved in every attempt to prove what our real nature is. Everything we experience is through interpretation. We even our experience of our selves, and therefore we never know our true nature, only how we appear to ourselves. Kant's particular account of reason, that we must rely on it: it is our sole confidant and means of knowing. He also tells us how limited our reasoning is, which creates a collision. We must use our reason, but it's extremely limited regarding the things of metaphysics.

The history of Western Philosophy Post-Kant involves philosophers saying things like, "Kant couldn't be right, but yet he says important things..." The question was asked, what was the standpoint from which Kant spoke? After all, Kant said that we interpret everything, even our encounters with ourselves. Kant is not exception. Where does he stand when he tells us we are merely interpreting these things? Kant's pronouncements appear to be self-defeating. Pure reason has already failed us. But now practical reason has failed us too! We are only interpreting that we interpret everything. If interpretations are no good, then Kant's interpretation of our nature is no good.

Kant says that we have to ask certain questions. For example, questions about the meaning of life. He has a notion of the "I", in which this word does not connect us with our inner selves. It's a concept we use. He makes a distinction between (a) the concept of I, (b) our experience of ourselves in categories of subject or object, but underlying all this, he says, there must be our (c) true selves. By the way, he seems to add, it is in the nature of our reason that we cannot know our true selves. Yet we have to ask this question. We cannot be sure of the source of the question. We don't know who "I" is.

Then Kant says something which seems like it comes from nowhere. All of our knowing arises from something he calls the power of imagination. It's a blind but indespensible part of the human soul in which we are scarcely aware. We are supposed to use our reason. But all use of our reason arises from a blind but indespensible imagination. This is something that is the power, the energy, that drives our being. This is a mystery in Kant. I've been thinking about this.

There's an old development that lives on in philosophy. It has to do with the relationship of power on the one hand, and structure or form on the other. One group says that anything, even the energy of the universe, could be altogether understood rationally. But there's another view that says at least some realities, and usually a good candidate is the self, cannot be known altogether rationally. The self somehow goes beneath our rational comprehension. Kant talks about imagination in suggestive and problematic ways. What are we supposed to say about an energy deeper than our reason and drives our understanding--but we cannot use our reason to get down to it and find out its nature. So how does Kant know that there even is such an energy? Is this energy non-rational? Can we become one with it?

At least one thing is important: the search for this deepest energy will continue on.

The New Military Field Manual

I just read some excerpts from the new marines field manual, the "FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency". Apparently, now American troops must be “ready to be greeted with either a handshake or a hand grenade” and must be “nation-builders as well as warriors”. Under the new doctrine, fighting insurgents involves “armed social work”. “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction,” says the manual. The best weapon is sometimes none at all. The prime objective is not to kill as many insurgents as possible but to maximize support from the local population. Above all, troops must adapt quickly.


The 242-page manual reads at times like a list of the things America has done wrong in Iraq. But I don't find anything about troop withdrawal from Iraq. Everyone is talking about Bush's sudden shift from "we're winning" to "we're not winning or losing" in Iraq. His strategies are based on how he believes Publius (that is, the public) will respond. Our government does not tell us exactly what happens for fear that we may lose confidence in the situation. Bush is taking a step in a better direction: that is, admitting there are serious errors in their military strategy. But there are also serious errors in our foreign policy. The new Military Field Manual is also a set in the right direction, but doesn't address underlying causes of failure in American foreign policy and occupation.

If American commanders' response to Vietnam was to foreswear nasty "small wars" as they're called by the military, their reaction to the fiasco in Iraq seems so far to be quite different: to learn to fight them better. The new manual is a first step, but America's military culture is in need of deeper change. A start might be to rewrite the first words of its “warrior ethos”, whereby every soldier declares: “I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America.”

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Theories of Politeness and Theories of Ridicule

For an introduction to ridicule, an entertaining French film by the name of Ridicule (1996) wonderfully portrays the aristocracy of the ancien régime and their obsession with wit and presige at the court of Versailles during the days of King Louis and Marie Antoinette. This was an era in France where wit could earn you a passport into courtly favor, and one verbal faux pas could ruin a man's reputation and position in society. So much about a person was judged on the basis of how well they could stand to ridicule, and in fact ridicule others, that it's a wonder anything ever got done! Instead of writing a review of the film, I thought it would be more intersting to study politeness and ridicule. One often hears advice on how to go about being more polite, and having better manners. But we hear much less about ridicule, mostly because it's a learned through experience, not by instruction. I find that understanding enough about the social dynamics of ridicule could determine whether you sink or swim in many situations.

One striking thing about politeness is how consistent it remains over time, suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local conventions. Ridicule on the other hand, is much more evasive. For example, the principle that it is rude to interrupt another speaker goes back at least to Cicero, who said that good conversation required “alternation” among participants. In his essay On Duties, Cicero remarked that nobody, to his knowledge, had yet set down the rules for ordinary conversation, though many had done so for public speaking. He had a shot at it himself, and quickly arrived at the sort of list that self-help authors have been echoing ever since. The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.


Probably only two cardinal rules were lacking from Cicero's list: remember people's names, and be a good listener. Each of these pieces of advice also has a long pedigree. Both found a persuasive modern advocate in Dale Carnegie, a teacher of public speaking who decided in 1936 that Americans needed educating more broadly in “the fine art of getting along”. He designed a course on self-improvement and his book How to Win Friends and Influence People is still in print 70 years later and has sold 15 million copies. To remember names, and to listen well, are two of Carnegie's “six ways to make people like you”. The others are to become genuinely interested in other people; smile; talk in terms of the other person's interests; and make the other person feel important. Objectivists certainly contend that Carnegie's self-improvement is manipulative in nature, which raises the question of whether politeness is simply indirect manipulation.


The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylized as a ballet. And for a connosieur of the arts, one must know how to enjoy as well as ridicule the ballet. The basic skills brought to the courts and tables were expected to include politesse (sincere good manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement (cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the conversation took flight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical figures involving “subtle, unexpected wit”, according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an “eloquent” silence, a “mocking” silence and a “respectful” silence. The mastery of such “airs and tones”, he said, was “granted to few”.

The Quality of Conversation in America

The French love to talk. In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the “strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English”. But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a “love of trade”, which limited men's interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand to a competitor. If you think about it, the idealization of silence is strong in American culture into the 20th century: for example, the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.

Conversation had always been important to the French. I love watching Eric Rohmer's films andthe complexities and beauties he finds in dialogue. Arguably the second golden age of conversation--the first was in Athens--happened with the French elites in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Historians associate the rise of conversation at this time with the prestige enjoyed by women in French high society, which was perhaps unique in Europe before or since. Women ran the salons where the culture of the time was created, and their presence civilized the men they invited there. Another factor was the leisure forced on the French aristocracy by an absolute monarchy. Their political ambitions thwarted, the upper classes turned their energies towards entertaining themselves. A man without conversation was liable to find himself devalued, whatever his other qualities: “In England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematician of the century,” wrote Jean d'Alembert, a French philosopher and mathematician; “in France he would have been expected to be agreeable too.”

Conversation was flourishing across the channel in England during the early 18th century, but for a different reason. This was the golden age of the British coffee house. Whereas the French salon excluded politics from polite conversation, in the British coffee house politics was a main preoccupation. It was most likely due to the fact that men ran the coffee houses in England that politics was openly discussed. Foreign visitors remarked both on the free range of speech there and on the mingling of classes and professions. A modern German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas, linked the coffee houses with what he called the “rise of a public space” outside the control of the state, or, as we might say now, civil society.


Conversations over the internet are quite interesting. From the instant messaging between avatars on Second Life to the headset microphones in Counter Strike Source, we have found a way to talk to each other while sitting alone in a cold apartment room. An American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would “speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.

What the Teaosophers Say About Tea

The following list from is a list of tea qualities every teaospher should know about. The liquid produced from the tea's leaves is known as the liquor, not to be confused with distilled alcoholic beverages. When appreciating the liquor of tea, the teaosophers tell us to pay attention to the following things:

  • Bitter: An unpleasant bitter taste.
  • Brassy: An unpleasant, bitter metallic taste.
  • Course: An undesirable harsh, bitter taste.
  • Complex: A multidimensional aroma or taste profile.
  • Dry: A slightly bakey or scorched taste.
  • Fine: Tea of exceptional taste and quality.
  • Harshness: An unpleasant degree of strength.
  • Light/Pale: Liquor that does not have depth of color but may be flavoury or pungent. Darjeeling tea is a good example of this.
  • Rich: A pleasantly thick and mellow liquor.
  • Round: A full, smooth-tasting liquor.
  • Strong: Liquor possesses strength of body and flavor.
  • Woody: Tea that has a sawdust-like character.

Friday, December 15, 2006

The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge



Thursday, December 14, 2006

Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments and Neuro-Welfare Economics

During the past decade neuroeconomists have confirmed the insights of Adam Smith. People who trade money with strangers in a laboratory setting have an instinctive sense of fair play and reciprocity. Chimps and capuchin monkeys also possess this instinct. These non-human primates display, just as we do, a sense of trust in response to generosity, and resentment in the face of selfishness. Such brooding resentment, in fact, that volunteers (and chimps) will often forgo reward in order to punish selfish participants. This neuroeconomic research suggests that individuals’ preferences are determined not by what is good for them as a person, as a paternalist moral philosopher would say, but determined by the satisfaction of moral sentiments bound to subjective preferences.

Briefly my argument is that sympathy is a pre-condition of moral behavior. But I will argue that individual preference satisfaction is a better, more preferable, theory for welfare economics. The two theories actually fit together, rather than, as Hausman and Macpherson suggest, they are opposed. Hausman and Macpherson are two contemporary economists who have argued that economic models need to include actual preferences. Not simply what the paternalist moral philosopher argues is good for the person.

In the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith writes: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” This principle in man’s nature which no doubt is a true principle, may be thought to negate the doctrine of the Invisible Hand. Smith does not deny selfishness. Not only does he say “how selfish soever,” but he also writes that the benevolent man “gets nothing from it” but adds “except the pleasure of seeing it.” This seems to rule out benevolence the fruits of which cannot be observed (or at best imagined) and that is important in thinking about the principle.

Hausman and Macpherson, two contemporary economists, argue in Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy for a preference satisfaction theory of well-being as opposed to Smith’s “mental-state” theory of welfare, which Parfit considers an “objective-list” view, and which the authors themselves consider to be a “perfectionist” theory. Hausman and Macpherson say that welfare economists ought to find individual preference utilitarianism attractive and embrace it because this is similar to standard welfare economics. “Just define the rough-and-ready utility functions,” they say, “that will represent the preferences of the individual affected and stipulate a way of making interpersonal utility comparisons.” If one looks past the complications of actual life to the central realities captured in standard economic models, one can see that welfare is in essence the satisfaction of preferences.

Smith asserts in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that each individual, though he can have no immediate experience of what other men feel, is endowed with the capacity to form the idea of their feelings by imagining what he himself would feel in the same situation. Hence we are able to derive sorrow from the sorrow of others and happiness from their happiness. This capacity for fellow-feeling, which Smith calls sympathy, is present in all men.

Sympathy, according to Smith, is the basis of our "moral faculties." In the first place, sympathy is the foundation of our judgment of the conduct and character of others. When we see someone else angry we will approve of his anger if, upon examining the situation, we find that we too would become angry if we had been in his position. Though we are only spectators, in imagination we change places with the other person, and our sympathetic anger harmonizes with his original anger. This harmony of sentiments constitutes a judgment that the other person's behavior is proper. But if we find that his reasons for becoming angry are not such that we could share--that we, in short, would not have become angry under the same circumstances--we will not be able to sympathize with him. This disharmony of sentiments constitutes a judgment that the other person's behavior is improper. There is another set of qualities ascribed to the behavior of mankind, distinct from propriety and impropriety, which are also the objects of a species of approbation and disapprobation. These are merit, the quality of deserving reward; and demerit, the quality of deserving punishment. The first quality requires us to share sympathetically in the gratitude felt by the receiver of the benefit; the second, to share sympathetically in the resentment felt by the receiver of the hurt.

Sympathy is also the foundation of our judgment of our own conduct and character. It is significant that Smith deals first with our judgment of the behavior of other people, for he holds that all our moral judgments are dependent on our social situation. A solitary man could not judge of the propriety or merit of his own actions. To be morally conscious, one must look at one's own behavior as other people see it. The device for doing this is what Smith calls the "impartial spectator" within the breast of man. The man who has lived in society long enough to become morally conscious divides himself into two, and judges his own passions as other people would judge them. He carries out this division because he has a natural desire for the love, honor, and gratitude of other people--a desire that arises out of sympathy. He uses the "man within the breast" to humble the arrogance of his self-love, bringing it down to a level with which other people can appreciate.

The sophisticated way in which Smith uses the "man within the breast" is shown by his treatment of the love of praise and the love of praiseworthiness. Because of our desire for love, honor, and gratitude, we love to be praises. Smith then asks whether we love to be worthy of praise for its own sake, or merely because we believe that being worthy of praise will bring us praise. Smith's answer is that we naturally desire not only to be praised, but also to be worthy of praise. If we are praised when we are not worthy of praise, the man within the breast tells us that we do not deserve the praise, and we do not derive satisfaction from it. Contrariwise, if we do a good act we still get satisfaction from the praise of our internal spectator, even though no other person praises us for it. Thus, our love of being worthy of praise comes to be independent of our love of being praised by other people. In this way the individual is rendered anxious not only to appear fit, but also really to be fit, to live in society.

In an attempt to show the extent to which "the man within" corrects the otherwise unnatural inequality of our sentiments, Smith makes a distinction between "passive feelings" and "active principles." Our passive feelings, Smith states, are almost always sordid and selfish. For example, if a "man of humanity" in Europe knew that he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would sleep securely if he were to learn that a hundred million Indonesians had been swallowed up by a tsunami. Our active principles, on the other hand, are often generous and noble. Despite the fact that his passive feelings would be more disturbed by the destruction of his finger than by the destruction of a hundred million Indonesians, this same man would certainly be unwilling to have the lives of a hundred million Indonesians sacrificed in order to save the finger. Indeed, human nature would startle with horror at the thought. The man within the breast, who regards every situation from the point of view of the impartial spectator, preserves harmony between men in the face of our selfish feelings.

Smith's moral system, then, is based on the single connecting principle of sympathy. Using this principle and its various articulations--the sense of propriety, the sense of merit, the man within the breast--Smith claims to have constructed a moral system more comprehensive than any other moral system. "If we examine the most celebrated and remarkable of the different theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our moral sentiments," Smith states at the beginning of the section of The Theory of Moral Sentiments dealing with "Systems of Moral Philosophy."

But in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith never presents his moral system as a mere pleasure or mental machine, like the illustration given by Robert Nozick, nor does he ever suggest that the principle of sympathy does not actually exist within human nature. Yet Smith has no explicit epistemological principles by which he is able to substantiate the existence in the external world of the principle of sympathy. He has never detected this principle in man, nor has he ever observed "moral faculties" to which it supposedly gives rise. As the recent studies in neuroeconomics suggest, Smith’s mental state theory of welfare has been validated. Neuroeconomics has shown us that "the man within" corrects the otherwise unnatural inequality of our sentiments, and affirms our sense of fairness.

Smith's failure to admit the purely mental nature of his moral system may be in part a result of the fact that to do so would be to come close to admitting that his was an unacceptable "hypothetical" system, rather than a system based on fact. Hausman and Macpherson, who are opposed to the idea of a mental-state theory of welfare, argue that moral sentiments are not based on mental-states, but rather, economic models should include preference-based welfare theories.

It must be said that Hausman and Macpherson are not wholly satisfied with preference satisfaction. They say that it mistakenly suggests that all policies should attend to individual preferences, even if they’re antisocial or expensive. They judge preference satisfaction from a public policy point of view. But the overall argument is that we need to include preferences in economic models. A preference-satisfaction theory of well-being is easily and better-suited to work with fundamental welfare economic theory. The mental-state theory of well-being is not the only answer either. The synthesis of mental-state theories and individual preference theories forms the basis of moral interactivity and public policy. Adam Smith’s mental-state theory simply does not disappear; it is not, as Hausman and Macpherson suggest, a defunct theory.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The Pretentious Waterbaby Bagatelles

The third act of Allan Dameron’s Dancing of the Front Porch of Heaven is titled, with great alliteration, Waterbaby Bagatelles. Twyla Tharp, who is very well known and respected, choreographed this dance. It is a skillfully composed ballet, written in a clean, slightly acid, diatonic style that strongly resembles a sterile swimming pool. It poses some problems of interpretation, especially with the title, but also the dance itself, which demands an interpretive display of virtuosity. It is an ideal piece for variety in the musical score, the soloist being free to concentrate on details of tonal balance in the distinctive contrasts that are relevant to the form of the piece.

Since I don’t know much about ballet, the first thing I did was research the title. In musicology, says the PNB press release, a bagatelle is “a short and unpretentious composition.” The most well-known bagatelle is Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” Twyla Tharp’s piece is composed of seven of these. They take place on a pristinely surfaced stage overhung and aquatically lighted by rows of stark, rearrangeable, fluorescent light tubes, like those of an aquarium. The bare-chested men and the bathing-capped women reinforce the dance’s swimming pool connection. The first couple of bagatelles establish a mode a self-pointing that runs through the whole act, and tells us that Waterbabies are desirable creatures. But the act contradicted this by glorifying the male body more than the female body. The bathing caps were clever, but it tended to make the muscular men stand out more. Also one notices that the women are always seen together, in a pack, whereas the men are oftentimes by themselves and free to dance ostentatiously.

The female dancers are more like synchronized swimmers, or perhaps schools of fish, whereas the male dancers have the impression that we are inside a shark tank. At one point a really big fish came dancing out onto the stage, twittering his behemoth feet, lifting up a tall woman effortlessly into the airy waters. The music was slow, steady, as if to suggest we had sunk to the dark disarray at the bottom of the pool. All the other sharks had by this time scattered, leaving him to dance pas de deux (“not as two”) with his fishy paramour under the dim lights. This bagatelle, I’ve lost count which one, was like watching a steady couple, unconcerned with courtship, but interested in passionate love.

As soon as these swimming beasts floated off-stage the more agile and hormonal sharks came back on the scene to impress the eye-batting waterbabies, who were seated as if on the edge of the pool to watch the competitive males show off their “attitude” with twists, turns, en dehors, en dedans, and tours en l’air. At first the men were like quick blurs of curved silver darting away, and then coming back unexpectedly. But then they became more—dare I say it?—pretentious and remained on stage for some time showing off their dances. The waterbabies thought this was quite the cat’s meow, and began clapping for their favorite men, cheering them on as they encircled the women and the stage. This escalated the men’s bravado.

The biggest problem was not with the act itself, it was wonderful, but the description of the act in the press release. If I were a ballet connoisseur, I would have been outraged that it was considered “unpretentious”. If bagatelles are considered to be “unpretentious” then I’m not sure what to call the third act of Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven! The men were certainly pretentious. Their daring dances demanded skill and bravado. It was clearly intended to impress others. All things considered, it was a ballet worth seeing, and I plan on returning to the PNB to see more shows.

Classical Tenets of Capitalism

I have compiled a list of seven classical tenets of capitalism, to be used for later reference. The ideas and terms stated below are to be understood as the classical tenets, i.e., the tenets of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Some would consider John Stuart Mill classical. But Mill came later and even though he still accepted the basic tenets, I wouldn't consider Mill classical.

1) Private Property


In common law, property is divided into:

  1. real property - (immovable property) interests in land and improvements thereto
  2. personal property - interests in anything other than real property

Personal property in turn is divided into tangible property (such as cars, clothing, animals) and intangible or abstract property (e.g. financial instruments such as stocks and bonds, etc.), which includes intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trademarks).

The two major justifications of original property, or homesteading, are effort and scarcity. John Locke emphasized effort, "mixing your labor" with an object, or clearing and cultivating virgin land. Benjamin Tucker preferred to look at the telos of property. He asked "What is the purpose of property?" His answer: to solve the scarcity problem. Only when items are relatively scarce with respect to people's desires do they become property.

2) Self Interest

There are many types of "egoism". Psychological egoism says that individuals are motivated by self-interest. Ethical egoism says individuals ought to do what is in their self-interest. And rational egoism says that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Adam Smith, writing the Wealth of Nations, espoused a psychological egoism. But he argued further that this was a good thing, because:


~WON ch.2

The concept of the "invisible hand" is nearly always generalized beyond Smith's original discussion of domestic versus foreign trade. Smith himself participated in this generalization, as is already evident in his allusion to "many other cases", quoted above. And the invisible hand is a natural inclination, not yet a social mechanism as it will be after Leon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto.

3) Competition.

Seen as the most important pillar of capitalism by many people in that it may stimulate innovation, encourage efficiency, or drive down prices, competition is touted as the foundation upon which capitalism is erected. According to micro-economic theory, no system of resource allocation is more efficient than pure competition. Competition, according to the theory, causes commercial firms to develop new products, services, and technologies. This gives consumers larger selection and better products. The greater selection typically causes lower prices for the products compared to what the price would be if there was no competition (monopoly) or little competition (oligopoly).

4) Market-based.

How are goods and services going to be allocated? A market-based economy is one where the price of each item or service is arranged by the agreement between sellers and buyers; the opposite is a command economy, where supply and price are set by committee or a body. However, while a purely free market necessitates that government does not dictate prices, it also requires the traders themselves do not coerce or defraud each other, and that all trades are morally voluntary.

The ideal of a free market is voluntary exchange. If an exchange takes place under coercion or fraud, then that exchange is not considered a free exchange.

5) Economic Freedom

Economic freedom is different from market freedom. The tenet of economic freedom applies to individual economic agents, and is more like a "Free to Choose" principle, which is in essence what capitalist economics is all about. Some have even called 'economics' the study of choice, because what decisions entities make are important to economists. Modern economics studies Rational choice theory which assumes human behavior is guided by instrumental reason. Accordingly, individuals always choose what they believe to be the best means to achieve their given ends.

In Adam Smith's day, however, this had a much more basic notion. The idea was that economic agents were free to choose where to put their investments, what to consume, and what to do. This free exchange and free choice principle allows the capitalist economy to allocate resources as the consumer chooses.

6) Consumer Sovereignty

Those with money and other assets are able to use their purchasing power to tell producers of goods and services what to produce (and how much). Customers do not necessarily have to buy and, if dissatisfied, can take their business elsewhere, while the profit-seeking sellers find that they can make the greatest profit by trying to provide the best possible products for the price (or the lowest possible price for a given product). In the language of cliché, "he who pays the piper calls the tune."

To most neoclassicals, consumer sovereignty is an ideal rather than a reality because of the existence -- or even the ubiquity -- of market failure. Some economists of the Chicago School and the Austrian school see consumer sovereignty as a reality in a free market economy without interference from government or other non-market institutions, or anti-market institutions such as monopolies or cartels. That is, alleged market failures are seen as being a result of non-market forces. However, it has also been argued (e.g., by Goutam U. Jois) that even a "pure" market system violates the consumer sovereignty norm.

Does the doctrine of consumer sovereignty imply that the consumers of labor (the employers) are the sovereigns over the time supplied by workers? The neoclassical school, would argue no since workers can choose which employer to work for (as long as the employer will have them).

Since the demand for labor is a 'derived demand' what workers produce and how they do it is a direct result of the demand for products, and thus they are sovereigns, albeit at secondhand. Conversely, the Marxian school argues that the concentration of purchasing power in the hands of a small minority (the capitalist) means that the bourgeoisie is the sovereign in both product and labor markets. This is reinforced by the normal existence of the "reserve army of labor" which restricts workers' ability to choose between jobs.

7) Laissez Faire

short for "laissez faire, laissez aller, laissez passer," meaning "let do, let go, let pass." From the French diction first used by the eighteenth century Physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it became used as a synonym for strict free market economics during the early and mid-19th century.

The laissez-faire school of economic thought holds a pure or economically liberal market view: that the free market is best left to its own devices, and that it will dispense with inefficiencies in a more deliberate and quick manner than any legislating body could. The basic idea is that less government interference in private economic decisions such as pricing, production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services makes for a better (more efficient) economy.

As said before, Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations argued that the invisible hand of the market would guide people to act in the public interest by following their own self-interest, since the only way to make money would be through voluntary exchange, and thus the only way to get the people's money was to give the people what they want. Smith said you do not get what you need by appealing to the "love" of the butcher, the farmer or the baker. Instead you appeal to their "self interest", and pay them to exchange their products for yours.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Tarski and Proper Classes

A "set" is a class which is a member of a class. A proper class is a class which is not a member of anything. In one established theory about classes, viz. the theory expounded by Monk, proper classes are asserted to exist. According to other theories, e.g., Zermelo-Frankel set theory, all classes are sets. Here I will argue for the following claim:

If Tarski's semantical account in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics for what he called 'the language of the calculus of classes' (called C) is correct, then Monk's theory is false.

In particular, Tarski's definition of truth for C is inconsistent with Monk's assertion that there are proper classes.

If Tarski's definition of truth for C is correct then the truth conditions of each sentence of C are detrimental. Still there remains the question: which sentences of C are true? Different theories about classes constitute different answers. A theory about classes in C can be construed as a particular subset of C's sentences, viz., the theory's theses. If the theory is an axiom theory this set consists of the theory's axioms and all logical consequences of its axioms.

C is a first order language whose non-logical constant is a sign for class inclusion. Any theory about all classes is formulable in C as long as the theory's primitive non-logical constants are definable solely in terms of the sign for class inclusion. Monk's is such a theory, for its primitives are all definable in terms of class inclusion and it is a theory about all classes. My argument for this is as follows. Suppose Monk's really is a theory about some but not all classes. Then a language L is appropriate to Monk's theory only if L's variables range over some but not all classes. But then Monk's assertion of proper classes is verified by the fact that among the values of variables of L are classes that are members of none of the values of those variables. But this point is trivial, for no one doubts that there are classes among which some are not members of any others. Since it is not this triviality that is intended by the Monk assertion of proper classes, Monk's theory is about all classes.

It is true that according to the standard characterization of an interpretation of a first-order language an interpretation consists of a non-empty class, called the domain of discourse, plus a function that assigns the usual things to the non-logical constants of the language. When one goes to the definition of truth under that interpretation, it is plain that the domain of discourse is the class of those entities which are the values of the variables under that interpretation. But a Tarski-style definition of truth for a first-order language does not require a domain of discourse for either language or metalanguage. All that is required is a specification of the objects over which the language's variables range.

Tense Operators Versus Quantifiers in Modal Logic

Professor Cannon suggested earlier this semester that the English tenses, past and present, behave surprisingly like pronouns, and this suggests encouragement of theories of natural language in which tenses get represented by the use of quantifiers and variables that range over times. He also suggested that these tenses cannot be represented by operators, as is customary in many versions of tense logic. But this is not obvious. Tense operators are in fact capable of manifesting at least some pronoun-like behavior.

Take "variable-binding" for example. Operators do something like this by means of scope. To illustrate with a non-tense example, we can write either:

1) daimond A


2) For some possible world w, A is true in w.

The appearance of 'A' within the scope of the operator 'daimond' serves the same purpose as the binding of w in 'A is true in w' by the quantifier of 2). Similarly with tenses, compare:

2) It was the case that A.


4) For some past time t, A is true at t.

The main advantage of the explicit quantification of times over the use of tense operators is that the former is a more powerful notation--it can be used to express things that cannot be expressed in the tense-operator notation. But if the expressive resources of English tenses do not exploit this extra expressive power, i.e. if the expressive resources of English tenses do not exceed the expressive power of tense operators, then this is an insight about English that is worth noting.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Reason, Love and Ontology in Midsummer Night's Dream












Femme de l'aviateur, La

Or, The Aviator's Wife, directed by Eric Rohmer. Rohmer is one of my favorite directors and this is one of my favorite films.

The film's proverb is "It's impossible to think about nothing." One thing I love about Rohmer's films is that you cannot predict where they will go. But I'm always thinking about the dialogue and where it would go. Another thing is his incredible attention to authentic detail about how people talk and how they feel without cliche and without any compromise with reality--Rohmer's reality of course, which I find is very much like the reality that I have experienced.

The story progresses around several photographs discussed throughout the film. The Aviator's wife, incidentally does not appear except in a photograph, but that is all to the point. Everything is a bit off stage in this intriguing drama: love especially is a bit off stage. And yet how all the participants yearn. Rohmer's intriguing little joke is about the aviator's wife. Who is she and what is she like? We can only imagine. And this is right. The woman imagines what the other woman is like, but never really knows unless she meets her.

As we follow this talk we see that Anne's heart is breaking or has broken--and all the while we see her skin as Francois does. She wants to be touched, but not by him. And then she allows him to touch her, but only in comforting gestures, redirecting his hands away from amorous intent. And then she goes out with a man in whom she really has no interest.

Such is life, one might say. Rohmer certainly thinks so.