Archive for the ‘ethics’ Category

On the Meaning of Sexism

Thursday, 11 May 2017









Spurious Invocations and Socialized Medicine

Sunday, 19 March 2017









No Need for Doors

Thursday, 9 February 2017











Dead Celebrities and the Constitution

Monday, 2 January 2017

The law has long treated the images of living persons as something like trademarks, so that the use of such images without the consent of those persons is restricted in various ways. Over the last few decades, there have been efforts — some successful — to turn these images into property of a sort that may legally be bequeathed upon death, as opposed to such images lapsing into the public domain.

The potential monetary rewards increased simply as celebrity became more culturally important. And the evolution of CGI has made it possible to fabricate the appearance of persons in video, not only increasing opportunities to make money from such images but to use those images in ways that many of us would see as grossly abusive (for example, in pornography).

Reflexively, quite a few people want law at a Federal level to protect the images of the dead. But there is some reasonable question as to whether the US Constitution empowers the Federal government to act.

The rub comes by way of Article I §8, which enumerates the powers of Congress. It specifically empowers Congress


As I've explained, this enumeration did not creäte copyrights; it instead gave Congress limited power to protect them; without that empowerment, the matter would simply have been left in the hands of common law and of the legislation of the constituent states. But neither §8 nor any other part of the unamended Constitution makes explicit mention of intellectual property of any other sort, and it is an unreasonable stretch to suggest that there is implicit reference to similar such property, exactly because there had been a felt need for explicit mention of the rights of authors and of inventors. Any prerogative to protect the images of the dead was left in the hands of the constituent states.

I used the word unamended advisedly, because one might try to make a case that the Fourteenth Amendment empowers the Congress to treat personal images as continuing to be property beyond personal death. But one can legitimately make that claim only if somehow the associated rights are basic rights of persons (or of US citizens as such) or can be shown to derive from basic rights; the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't empower Congress to reconfigure legal rights ad libitum.

There's a wide-spread propensity to confuse great desirability with moral necessity. But the penalties of law are always ultimately acts of violence, and there's a need for more than emotional appeal when the law forbids something. So, while it would be greatly desirable for the images of the celebrated dead to be treated with something like the respect that they would have received when alive, a solid case should be made for regarding them as property, or indeed they should be regarded as not property.

Some efforts to make personal images into property that remains such beyond the death of the persons have focussed on getting constituent states to have it treated as such in law. It's perhaps worth noting that the Fourteenth Amendment might be read to block the constituent states from converting these images to property (though I am sure that no court to-day would accept that reading).

The Present Is Another Country

Saturday, 31 December 2016






Monday, 14 November 2016



I drew attention to how this mythologizing bears upon social policy:









On the Meaning of Racism

Monday, 3 October 2016

The original definition of racism, and the one still found in standard dictionaries, is a theory or an adherence to a theory that merit is in part intrinsically a function of race

However, a few decades ago, some social theorists began insisting upon a new definition of racism, under which one could not be called a racist unless one not only were prejudiced against some racial group, but had social power. Devotees of this new definition variously baldly restate it, as if the restatement makes it so, or cite the theorists, as if such citation makes it so.

Those who make a special study of a subject sometimes take a term in popular use, and give it a peculiar, somewhat new definition. (For examp!e, we see that in physics, with the uses of energy, force, and work; and we see that in economics, with the definition of unemployment.) But what usually characterizes these redefinitions is that somewhat loose notions are replaced with more explicit, more precise, and otherwise more workable definitions. (For example, when an economist uses unemployment, she usually excludes people who have quit one job for another, but have not yet started that next job, because joblessness of this transitory sort is not typically considered to be a social ill.)

Alarms really ought to go-off about the redefinition of racism. The original concept was quite coherent and useful; if it were not coherent, then the redefinition (which essentially adds a condition) would inherit the incoherence. Racism on the part of people with little social power still has significant social consequences; any legitimate use of the new concept is far more sharply limited than that of the original concept.

Let's imagine that someone prejudiced against those outside his own major racial group makes a solo walking tour of Los Angeles. As he travels from one neighborhood to another, he gains or loses social power as the ethnic compositions of those neighborhoods vary. His beliefs about the relation between race and merit needn't change (and should not be expected to do so much if at all). Yet by the mere act of travel through a large city in which ethnic groups are not uniformly distributed, under the redefinition he would repeatedly go from being a racist, to not being a racist, to again being a racist. It would be extraordinary and dangerous to make a solo walking tour of all of Los Angeles, but a great many people regularly move across communities of different ethnic composition. Application of the proposed redefinition of racism would routinely become unworkable, under circumstance in which the standard definition remains quite workable.

There are certainly legitimate applications of the concept of socially empowered racism, but in those applications we can call it socially empowered racism or something similar.

When a concept loses its associated symbol, it becomes harder to discuss or even to think about that concept. Further, the response to symbols is largely emotive. Whether people learn by reason that something is good or that it is bad, or they are simply led to accept some valuation by imitation of those in their society, people come to associate positive or negative feelings with the words used for those things. Old concepts given new words don't provoke the same response; old symbols given new meanings carry with them some or all of the old feelings. Those who have adopted a new redefinition of racism can thus escape the recognition of racism, and the felt need to condemn some instances of racism, by allowing themselves to believe that some people simply cannot be racists, by virtue of their social standing.

We are simply dealing with an attempted hijacking of language, for purposes of subverting clear thought and discussion. That is most plain when the word racism has been introduced into some discourse with its standard definition, and in response it is insisted that something conforming to that original definition is not racism because it does not conform to the proposed redefinition. But any non-standard use that is not flagged as such is still a subversion of rationality. Those who have participated in the attempted hijacking are knaves or fools or both.

Toxic Taxonomy

Friday, 17 June 2016

Most of the time, the inability or unwillingness of people to understand the difference between sex and gender is simply a low-level annoyance for me.[1] But, over the past few days, I have been increasingly irritated by the bigotry that this confusion is facilitating.

Unfortunately, many cultures, including our own, put pressure on people of a particular sex to adopt a particular gender; this is bigotry of one sort. Unfortunately, people of a sex who don't want to be of the socially prescribed gender often develop an active hostility towards those of that sex-gender combination; that is bigotry of another sort.

People who want to be of a given gender but who are not do not represent a toxic expression of that gender, because they are not of that gender. Claiming that a non-masculine person were toxically masculine or that a non-feminine person were toxically feminine entails a logical contradiction, regardless of whether the person were a male wanting to be masculine or a female wanting to be feminine.[2] And when toxicity results exactly from the fact that a person is not of a gender that the person feels that he or she ought to be, the illogic is especially acute.

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen was certainly toxic, but he lacked at least one of the core attributes of masculinity. His desire as a non-masculine male to be masculine contributed greatly to his toxicity.

Whether intentionally or merely thoughtlessly, to use toxic masculinity in describing Mateen is a slur against masculinity.[3] And that slur will come most naturally to those who are implicitly or explicitly hostile to masculinity.

He simply wasn't of my gender; no one should speak or write as if he were.

[1] Sex is a condition of the structures of the body, and associated with reproductive function. The term gender is sometimes used as a foolish mincing term for sex, but I mean here to refer to the set of behavioral characteristics (including rôles) that are associated with sex by expectations at the social, familial, and personal level. The term gender is taken by analogy from grammar, as are the terms masculine and feminine.

[2] There are sexes other than male and female and genders other than masculine and feminine, but traditional social expectations have included correspondences amongst such sexes and such genders. Instead, people who do not fit neatly as male or as female have been expected either to seek some sort of treatment to become one of those two sexes (with a masculine gender for males and a feminine gender for females) or to withdraw from society.

[3] It would be accurate, but misleading, to instead describe his condition as one of toxic non-masculinity.

On the Concept of Ownership

Monday, 23 May 2016












[1.5] This paragraph was added on 24 May.



My 2½ Votes

Saturday, 27 February 2016

During the 2000 Presidential race, I was told by some Democrats that not voting for Al[bert Arnold] Gore [jr] were the same thing as voting for George W[alker] Bush. And I was told by some Republicans that not voting for Bush were the same thing as voting for Gore. Somehow it seemed that, by not voting for either man, I were casting a vote for each.

On Election Day or on the day after, one of those Republicans who'd claimed that I voted for Gore by not voting for Bush learned that I'd also refused to vote for Harry [Edson] Browne (the Libertarian candidate) and that Republican then declared That's even worse! For it to be worse would mean that I'd effectively done even more voting for Gore, though perhaps not a whole further vote. I didn't interact on that day with any Democrats, so I don't know whether they would have creditted me with still further support of Bush in my refusal to vote for Browne. But it seemed as if, by not voting for anyone, I had voted more than twice.

Well, enough of that nonsense. People who make such claims don't know much about the mathematics of voting, and either just lack mathematical sense in general, or allow their emotions to overwhelm their intellects.

My refusal to vote in Presidential elections, which predated that race and has continued since, doesn't stem from resignation, from laziness, from apathy, nor from ignorance.

It comes in part from my extreme reluctance to support one evil in an attempt to stop another. I won't vote for a candidate unless I think him or her truly fit to be President, and I've not seen such a candidate in decades. Browne, for example, represented a watering-down of classical liberalism, when a pure expression was needed (as remains the case).

Further, when it comes to the two major parties, I am acutely aware that, in most of these elections, one candidate doesn't win so much as the other loses; the winners aren't loved by the typical voter; rather, the principal opponent of each is detested. Yet the victor usually claims a mandate; even when he barely squeaks past the other creep and even when voters give the other party a Congressional majority.

We get these detestable candidates because the institutional structure is corrupt at a deep, infrastructural level. But those who vote, even for the loser, are demonstrating some hope, however faint, in the process, and from that demonstration legitimacy is persuasively claimed for that structure.

It is, of course, difficult to sort-out who fails to register to vote from dissatisfaction and who from lack of concern; likewise for those who register but do not go to the polls. But I am registered, and I do go to the polls. I take and submit a ballot. But I do not vote for a Presidential candidate. I vote on the issues that I feel that I properly understand, and I occasionally vote for a local candidate. It would be absurd to dismiss people like me as uninterested. Our numbers are presently tiny, but our message is far more clear than would be votes for whomever we thought the least objectionable candidate.

In the up-coming Presidential election, the major parties are going to offer the very worst candidates that they have in my lifetime. We didn't get here by virtue of people who didn't vote for nominees, but by virtue of those who did.