The Moral Character of Mitt Romney

This is an ethics blog.

With the election getting near, I have to note the low moral quality of Romney’s character.

Liar

The first moral flaw is a basic dishonesty. Romney does not “distort” or “spin” facts. He outright lies. Here are four examples.

(1) His first advertisement against Obama quoted Obama as saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we are going to lose.” In fact, this was taken from a speech where Obama was quoting a McCain aid from the previous campaign. The quote is, “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’ ”

(2) Romney ran advertisements saying that the Obama administration was seeking to end the work requirements for welfare. In fact, the Obama told some Republican governors who had asked for exceptions that if they can prove that they get a higher employment percentage using their own system that they can get an exception from federal mandates.

(3) The Romney campaign falsely accused the Obama administration of restricting voting rights for the military in Ohio. In fact, the Obama administration was seeking to extend a deadline for non-military members as well – which did not change the rules for military voters one bit.

(4) Romney is currently running an advertisement that says that Chrysler was sold to the Italians who are shipping manufacturing jobs for the Jeep to China. In fact, the company is expanding Jeep production in the United States (while, at the same time, building factories in China to help to meet demand in that country).

Bully

A bully is a person who abuses power over others – concerned with his own convenience and seeming to enjoy “putting others in their place” where their interests and concerns do not matter.

Three incidents highlight this disposition.

(1) An incident in high school where Romney rounded up a group of friends in order to assault and forcibly cut the hair of a long-haired student that he and his clique did not like.

(2) Having his dog ride on the roof of the car in family outings.

(3) His comment about the fact that he does not need to worry about the 47% who never pay taxes, who view themselves as “victims” and who are too lazy to do anything constructive with their lives and who will be voting for Obama.

Romney wants to add $200 billion per year to the military budget.

What does a bully want with that kind of power? And what will happen to foreign policy as Romney tries to bully the rest of the world?

Contemptuous and Secrative

"You can't handle the truth!"

Romney is secretive – he does not think that other people need to see what he is doing or what he has done. His behavior gives every indication of, "If they knew what I had done - or will do - they would not approve - so it is best that they do not know."

Here are three examples:

(1) When leaving office as governor of Massachusetts, he and his staff bought the hard drives off of their government computers and erased all records they could legally erase.

(2) Romney refuses to reveal any information from his tax returns more than two years back.

(3) Romney has not given any details on how he plans to cut taxes, increase military spending by $200 billion per year, and pay down the deficit, all at the same time.

This not only shows a secretive nature – giving us good reason to ask what he will be doing behind closed doors as President and who will be profiting by it. It also demonstrates a basic contempt for others. “You can’t handle the truth!”

Of course, his secretive nature and his contempt for giving us the truth goes hand-in-hand with his willingness to lie.

Seriously, is a person this secretive going to be a model of open government? Or is it going to be a model of "doing whatever I can get away with as long as nobody else finds out about it?"

Overall

Romney is not a person of good moral character.

Failures in Romney's Economic Proposals - Wealth Inequality

Adam Smith's "invisible hand", whereby a free market economy benefits society as a whole, requires an assumption of near-equal economic power.

Some are going to read this and think that nothing more absurd has ever been written. Clearly, free markets care nothing about differences in income.

While it is true that the free market has nothing to say about differences in income as a result or output of the system, its "invisible hand" component still requires economic equality as an input or Adam Smith's "invisible hand" will not work as advertised.

The way free markets are supposed to work, they direct goods and services to those who value them more. It's a simple process. If you want something more than somebody else, you are willing to pay more to get it. As prices rise, some people quit buying - they are just not willing to pay as much. The people who keep buying as the prices rise are the people who really want or need what is being sold. The free market guarantees that things go to their most highly values use, while trivial and less important uses fall are given up.

Right?

Well, yes . . . IF we add the hidden premise that all bidders have the same economic power. However, it becomes false the instant we abandon this assumption of economic equality. Furthermore, as economic inequality increases, Adam Smith's invisible hand becomes less and less effective.

Imagine that a hurricane has hit a major city. There is little fresh water. One person with a few bottles of water offers to sell a bottle. There are two bidders. A mother who wants the water to give to her sick and dehydrated child, and another who wants it so she can shampoo her pet poodle. Let us imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the mother desperately wants to save her child - she fears for her child's life. While the other thinks that her poodle would like to be clean, but it is not a priority concern.

The water would go to the mother. The woman with the poodle would be the first to give up in a bidding war.

The free market works - Adam Smith's invisible hand sees the water going to the person who values it more.

But now we will add the assumption that the poodle owner has $20 million dollars, while the mother of the sick child has $20.

Now, is it still true that the free market will assign the water bottle to the person who values it more?

No, it is not.

$20 to the person with $20 million is like 0.0001 cents to the person with $20. The poodle owner can raise the price to $200 without a care. However, she is not stupid. There's no need to. She can get the bottle of water for $20 - and it may well be worth it for her to do so.

The important fact is that $20 is not the price at which the poodle owner proves to the market that she values shampooing her dog more than the mother values the well-being of her sick child. It's the price at which she proves that she has more money than the mother of the sick child can spend.

Give the two mothers equal economic power - donate $20 million to the mother of the sick child - and we will see who values the water more. If the assumption of economic equality is true, the market will give the water to the woman who values it more. Where that assumption is not true, the free market will, at times, give the water to the person with the most money to spend even where that person values it less.

The more economic inequality we have, the more this happens.

It is a well-known economic phenomenon. As incomes rise in a region, those with money begin to buy more meat. In doing this, they bid up the price of grain. They purchase better tasting food for themselves, and those with less money starve as a result. Yet, certainly, those with money do not value the taste of a steak more than those without value the calories and nutrients in seven loaves of bread.

We see it today where those with money want energy, some of which they make out of corn - bidding up the price of corn and, in doing so, bidding food off of the table of people who are literally starving to death. A number of children will die to provide this energy to those who can afford to pay for it. Yet, there is no sense to the claim that the rich like their "clean energy" more than the poor mother hates to see her child starve to death.

The rich also bid food away from the poor by bidding away the land on which food can be grown, using food-land for their estates.

The things that the wealthy are able to bid away from poor people (who have a higher-value use for those goods and services but no money to spend on them) is not limited to food. It includes quality medical care, quality education, and energy itself. The wealthy can spend thousands of dollars on energy for pleasure cruises and airplane trips while the elderly couple freeze to death in their homes.

Other things included in this list is access to the media - and, with this the ability to determine what people believe by determining what they see and hear. They create Fox News and fill it with market-tested propaganda to get people to believe what it is profitable to them to have people believe.

This also includes access to political power.

How many millions of dollars have you contributed to super-packs recently? How many television spots can you afford? How many times have you heard an advertisement that you judged false or misleading where - with enough money and the right connections that money buys - you could have gotten that message out to the public? Instead, the only people who see it are a few people on your friend's list or who read your blog - tweets and blog postings that have to compete with the slick market-tested products of those with money.

These are not areas where the free market are directing the resources to the users who value them the most - where Adam Smith's invisible hand provides a benefit to all of society. These are areas where those with money but who value something less are bidding them away from those without so much money but who actually value them more.

Of course, we are not told about this hidden assumption of economic equality built into these arguments of how the free market benefits all. Where this assumption is true, Romney's economic plan will benefit all. Where it is false - where there are vast differences in the amount of money people have to spend - it creates a system where economic goods are accumulated - not by those who value them more, but by those with more money to spend.

Failures in Romney's Economic Proposals - Legitimate Market Transactions

Sorry, I took some time off to suffer from an illness, but I am better now.

I was discussing how Romney's economic plans would fail in the real world - and doing so from a capitalist free-market perspective.

In earlier posts I mentioned how his plan fails to harvest positive externalities (e.g., from education and public health measures). Furthermore, it allows for rampant negative externalities - costs that are forced on others against their will and without compensation such as the costs of pollution and climate change.

In this post, I wish to discuss the fact that the plan Romney is defending is one that requires that all agents be perfectly informed and rational - regardless of any action that other agents may take. In the real world where this is not the case it allows for exploitive business practices that violate fundamental principles of a free-market system.

Free market economics say that a market transaction between two rational and well-informed agents, free from force or fraud, benefit both parties. This is what makes it possible for agents pursuing their own interests in a market free - one in which force and fraud are eliminated to employ Adam Smith's "invisible hand" to benefit all of society. Billions of these individual transactions every day, each benefitting both parties, adds up to a sizable overall benefit across whole societies.

That's the theory.

Please note that the theory only applies to transactions among informed and irrational agents that are free of force and fraud. If these criteria are not met, one party ends up obtaining a benefit at the expense of others. More often than not, the benefit acquired by those using force or fraud or taking advantage of the ignorance and irrationality of others obtain less of a benefit than their victims suffer in terms of cost. This produces a net loss in overall social well-being.

To see this in practice, ask a free-market economists what free market principles have to say about an adult enticing a child into engaging in dangerous sex acts. This will give you an idea of the importance that free market principles place on informed consent in defining a legitimate market transactions.

I want to put some emphasis here on the concept of a legitimate market transaction. This is what Romney's economic plans are ignoring, to a large degree.

Free market economics draws a line between legitimate and illegitimate transactions based on the use of force or fraud or on parties being ill-informed or irrational.

These terms are not clear-cut (as some might imagine).

A boss finds an employee with a sick child to be attractive. "Have sex with me or you will lose your job and your medical coverage." Is this a legitimate transaction? Or is it a form of rape comparable to, "Have sex with me or I will shatter your child's skull against the concrete?"

Is it the case that failure to reveal certain information the another party counts as "fraud"? If I do not tell you that the car I am selling you requires a special type of motor oil that costs $100 per quart, have I lied to you in order to manipulate you into a transaction you would not have agreed to as an informed customer?

What counts as "informed consent?"

Who gets to answer these questions? How do they get decided? What are the correct decisions? What criteria determine which answer is correct or incorrect? How do we resolve disputes?

Romney and his kind like to protest "regulation".

What they bypass is the fact that free markets are a regulatory system. They are a set of rules for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate market transactions.

What many of Romney's backers are demanding in their call to repeal regulation is actually a call to repeal free-market capitalism. They are seeking a liberty to use force where the free market would prohibit it (such as in generating negative externalities as discussed in the previous post) that free markets would not permit. They are also seeking a liberty to engage in manipulative and exploitive marketing practices that would violate the principles of informed consent that Adam Smith's invisible hand would require.

Not surprisingly, they have an incentive to weaken these restrictions. They restrict the amount of wealth that the super rich can extract from the poor and middle class. Why trade with the poor and middle class when you can take from them? To take from them in a democracy you convince them that free market principles that protect them are "regulations" that are "bad for the economy". You use this to persuade them to vote away the rights that free market principles would insist on protecting. Once they vote away these rights, they are open to plunder in ways that force wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to the rich.

The recent banking practices that resulted in the economic crash of 2008 provide an example. The lending practices that these business engaged in to make their profits were not "free market" transactions. They were exploitive and manipulative offers that depended on customers being ill-informed and irrational about the true potential costs of the agreements they were getting into. And the banks continued to demand the "right" to engage in these exploitive and manipulative practices, even though free-market economics would condemn them as illegitimate.

Without these safeguards, what free market principles say have to be purchased from the middle class and the poor in legitimate market transactions can be taken through force and manipulation instead. And taking is much better than buying - at least from the point of view of the taker. Or, in this case, from the point of the view of those whose lobbyists can persuade the government to grant them a liberty to manipulate others.

The question I continue to ask is: How much wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor would we need if we simply stopped the forced transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich?

How many lobbyists are on your payroll? And do you really think the lobbyists working for those who can afford to pay them are not ultimately getting paid to use the government transfer wealth - or to obtain a liberty to transfer wealth - from your pocket to those who can afford to pay them? They are earning a profit for their employers, or they would not be there.

Romney's economic plan might work in a world of perfectly informed and rational agents who cannot be exploited or manipulated. In the real world, they provide a recipe for the forced transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. In ways that violate the fundamental principles of free market economics.

But, then, maybe that's the point.

Failures in Romney's Economic Proposals - Negative Externalities

The topic of negative externalities identifies a place where the Republican Party completely abandons its own morality.

Free market economics calls for defending certain rights to life, liberty, and property. It condemns violations of those rights. However, within the topic of negative externalities, the accepted position of most Republicans (though not all - an important minority on this point can still sometimes be heard) is that the owners of capital shall be free to kill, maim, and poison people and to destroy their party - even to destroy whole cities and wipe out whole nations - when it profits them to do so.

The first reaction many are likely to have to this statement is that it is an example of politically motivated exaggeration that is common this time of year.

Actually, it is not. It is quite literally true exactly as written. Though you do have to take care to note that "as written" includes the phrase "within the topic of negative externalities". Failure to note this clause could lead to misinterpretations of what I wrote.

What follows is a demonstration of this fact, as well as an explanation of how it stands in direct violation of the principles of rights and free markets that Republicans claim to support.

What are negative externalities?

Negative externalities are costs created by some activity that are forced on other people.

For example, let's say that I begin to tan hides on my back porch so that I can sell these hides. This produces a horrible stench. You live next door. Even with your windows closed, the stench seeps into you house. It is nearly enough to make you vomit.

How much would it be worth to you to avoid that smell? How much do you think you would have to knock off of the price of your house to get others to buy it if you put it up for sale?

These are costs. They are costs that are created by my act of tanning hides in my back yard. However, they are not costs that I have to pay. These costs are being forced on you - against your will. You get no compensation. You do not even get a share of the profits that I receive when I sell my hides.

These types of costs are negative externalities. We find them when companies produce obnoxious noises and smells, poison the air and water, and even when they contribute to climate change that - in turn - spreads disease, destroys property due to sea-level rise and extreme weather events, promotes drought, and inflicts similar harms on others.

Free markets abhor negative externalities. They prevent markets from being free, actually. They represent a form of forced transfer of wealth from those who suffer the costs of negative externalities to those who are making a profit without offering any form of compensation. If you are truly a supporter of free markets, then you too must abhor negative externalities and be seeking ways, where possible, to internalize these costs.

Let us add some sample numbers that illustrate the costs of negative externalities - how they violate free-market principles - and why these costs must be internalized for free markets to work as they should.

How much would you be willing to take, in the form of compensation, to put up with the stench. We can assume that you would do so for $10 million, but not for $1. There is some amount in the middle where "the stench and the money" is equal in value to "no stench and no money". Let us say, for the sake of this example, that this amount is $500 per month.

I am profiting from an activity that is costing you $500 per month. In economic terms, this is no different than me gaining access to your bank account and simply subtracting $500 from your bank account as a part of running my business. I am not taking the money - or the value - per se. I am simply destroying it. If it was my own $500 per month being destroyed, I would have an incentive to do something about it - to stop it. However, because it is your $500 being destroyed, I have no incentive to prevent it, and I allow it to continue.

Internalizing the costs - which is what the free market demands - means that if I create a cost for others, that cost must come out of my own pocket. I must compensate people for the harms done at least to the point that "harm plus money" is of equal value to the person being harmed as "no harm plus no money". If I do not, the market is not free nor is it running efficiently.

Let us say that I cannot afford the $500 per month it would take to compensate you for the harms done. My business only brings in an extra $400 per month. According to free-market economics, this business should not exist. Its costs to society are greater than its benefits. It is a business that makes people - all things considered - worse off rather than better off.

Now, let us assume that there is a process I could use costing $200 per month more that has no smell. If costs are internalized - if I have to pay you $500 per month as compensation for the smell - I now have an incentive to adopt this $200 alternative. I spend $200 per month, I save $500 per month, so I benefit. Free market principles where costs have been internalized give people an incentive to do things that benefit the community.

However, if I am free to impose these negative external costs on you with impunity, then why should I spend $200 for a procedure that would reduce the smell? I get nothing out of it. You are paying the costs of the smell, not me. Perhaps you want to pay me $200 to adopt the procedure. Personally, I am going to charge you $495. You still get at $5 benefit. Or, better yet, I might threaten to produce a smell so bad you would pay me $1000 to get rid of it - and then charge you $995 not to use it.

There is also a right's based moral argument that generates the same conclusion.

Let us assume that you bake a pie. It is your pie. If I want any of it, I must offer you enough in exchange to get you to voluntarily give up a slice of pie. If I take the pie without just compensation, I am a thief. If I spit on the pie, or I pour a cup of motor oil on it - in other words, if I pollute the pie - I have destroyed or diminished its value. I owe you a pie. Rights-based morality demands this. Nobody can claim to be a consistent defender of rights-based morality and hold that I can destroy the value of your pie by polluting it without owing you compensation for harms done.

However, the Republican position on these things is that, while a common citizen may not destroy another person's pie, a factory owner can destroy her health, poison the water she drinks and the air she breathes, even destroy her property, and not owe her a dime in compensation. Environmental regulations that would prohibit these activities, or that would require that the owner pay some sort of fee that can go to compensating victims for their costs - represent "excessive government intrusion" and is to be condemned. The Republican position is that those who own factories or other means of production must be permitted to kill, maim, and poison people - and destroy their property - with impunity.

If anybody has to pay for these harms done, it is the government, not the people who do the harm. And having the government pay for these harms itself represents an unacceptable "growth of government" that ought not to take the place of these people suffering the costs themselves.

So far, I have been talking about pies and a $500 stench. This may give the illusion that these cases are trivial - and as such they really do not matter.

However, these examples only illustrate the principles. Climate change provides a prime example of a real-life application of these principles. Here, the Republican position is to permit people to engage in activities that threaten to destroy whole cities, wipe out whole nations, decimate whole populations, submerge tens of thousands of square miles of property under sea-level rise, promote the spread of disease that will kill millions, prematurely kill countless elderly with heat stress - without paying one single dime in compensation to the victims.

The rich get to pocket their profits - the poor get the bills.

In principle, it is no different than the hide-tanner forcing a $500 cost on his neighbor or the person destroying the pie. In fact, greenhouse gas emitters are forcing death on hundrends of millions of people and the complete destruction of vast amounts of property.

This is not a mere academic exercise. This is not something that one should be able to read and shrug and say, "I don't care" - any more than one should shrug one's shoulders with indifference to setting of a nuclear warhead in a major city. This is a moral wrong of tremendous proportion - not by some outside standard that Republicans reject anyway, but by its own standards.

To preserve their egos, they simply ignore the evil they defend. "These things are wrong and those who do or defend these things" go in one mental compartment. "I do or defend these things" go into another, and they are kept far apart in the Republican brain.

Romney's economic package could work in a fantasy world where negative externalities do not exist. In the real world where negative externalities are common, and in some cases massively destructive. A Republican true to his moral principles will be telling the world his plans to internalize these costs and to prevent the forced transfers of wealth from those who do harm to those harmed. However, the official Republican position is that those with capital must be free to kill, maim, and poison others - and destroy their property - whenever it is profitable to do so, as long as the method for doing so is the production of "negative externalities."

Failures in Romney's Economic Proposals - Postitive Externalities

I am a fan of free markets. However, I am no fan of the Republican Party when it ignores what is understood about how markets work. This poisonous brew they are selling and that they want us to drink over the next four years is a poor imitation of a free market system that will leave many of us worse off than we would otherwise have been.

The first of its problems that I will discuss is the fact that many positive externalities are ignored. This leaves people worse off than they would have been if these positive externalities could be harvested.

Here is an experiment that you can repeat with any group of strangers that demonstrates the fact that things that produce positive externalities are underfunded when left to voluntary contributions.

Let us assume that you have collected 10 strangers in a room. In the middle of the room you place a "magic money machine". The way this machine works is that when somebody puts $20 into the machine, $5 will appear in the pockets of everybody in the room (or something worth $5 will appear in the lives of everybody in the room).

There really is no magic money machine. In this experiment, what you will do is tell people that if anybody gives you $20, you will give everybody in the room $5. You can use monopoly money if you wish - as long as you announce that, at the end of the game, the person with the most money wins.

Then, see what happens.

What the machine represents is not magic either. It represents goods that produce a positive externalities - benefits for people other than the people who pay for them.

If one person sprays a stagnate pool for mosquitoes, everybody benefits from fewer mosquitoes (and less malaria or West Nile). If one person gets a flu shot, everybody benefits from having one less path for the flu virus to travel through to get to Great Aunt Nellie or little baby George. If one person finds and confines a rapist, everybody benefits from greater safety for themselves and those they care about. If one person pays a company upwind from town to produce less pollution, everybody gets to breathe cleaner air.

These things exist in the real world. The "magic money machine" simply captures the economically essential properties in an easy to grasp example. One person spends the money. His benefit is less than the cost. However, the overall public benefit is greater than the cost.

This is an experiment you can run anywhere at any time so you can see how it works.

Now, you have your magic money machine in the middle of the room. You tell people that if any of them gives you $20, you will take it and give everybody $5. You might want to limit this to one $20 contribution per person.

If everybody gives you $20, everybody walks away with $50. However, if one person keeps his $20, then everybody else leaves with $45, but he leaves with $65 - a smart move. Remember, the person with the most money at the end of the game wins. However, if everybody does this "smart move", everybody leaves with just $20, when they could have left with $50 if they were just less smart.

The question is: How do you fund goods that produce positive externalities.

My objection to Romney's economic plan is that he provides no way for funding goods that produce positive externalities. He would have everybody keep their own $20 in their own pockets, and only spend money where they, themselves, get more back from the investment than they put into it. He claims that this will make everybody better off. However, in the real world - a world in which some goods produce positive externalities (produce more social good than good for the person who spends the money), it leaves people poorer and worse off than they would otherwise be.

Let us collect 10 more strangers and put them in another room. We make them the same offer. Chances are, we will get the same results. Nobody invest $20 to give everybody $5 except the sickeningly irrational and unselfish "bleeding heart liberal" who actually likes the fact that he has produced a social benefit. Yet, for his efforts, he ends up poorer - and the person who would never dream of parting with even one dime ends up wealthier and more powerful.

However, in this room we will introduce a new policy option. If enough people agree to it, you will impose a $5 tax on each person and feed that money into the magic money machine (into goods that produce positive externalities such as those presented above). With this $5 tax, everybody ends up with $50.

While, at the same time, in the room next door where people are waiting for voluntary contributions from people who are told that it is simply wrong to do anything that leaves you, personally, worse off - everybody has $20.

Please note how this follows the "conservative" plan with respect to global warming. The official Republican position is to wait around for people to voluntarily contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in an environment where one is punished for doing anything that benefits people generally but leaves the investor worse off. We do see some sickingly irrational and unselfish "bleeding heart liberal" types making these contributions. But they end up poorer, while those who would never dream of parting with even one dime end up wealthier and more powerful.

At this point, the conservative charge - at it is a valid point - is that the government method of collecting taxes and feeding them into the magic money machine (economic goods producing positive externalities) is inefficient and prone to corruption. The government does a poor job of deciding what produces positive externalities and funding them at the appropriate levels. Instead, the money gets diverted to cronies and campaign contributors, lost to corruption and bureaucratic red tape.

These are serious problems.

However, the people in the room that taxes people to fund goods that produces positive externalities can argue that, even with $20 of inefficiency, the $30 it leaves in everybody's pocket still leaves them better than the people with $20 where nobody funds these goods.

This is not to say that corruption, red-tape, and pork can be ignored. Here, too, if $5 invested in reducing these inefficiencies produces $10 worth of efficiency, it is worthwhile to make the investment - but that is a side-issue.

Furthermore, these problems exist for all goods that produce positive externalities, not just those that Romney and company decide to ignore.

There are two sources of positive externalities that conservatives do not ignore - national defense and criminal law. America has more people (per capita) in prison than any other country. We spend huge amounts of money keeping people behind bars. Plus, we have a massive military - much larger than that of any other country.

How do conservatives justify spending money on these things?

The argument is that these are "public goods". They are goods that produce positive externalities and, because of this, they tend to be under-funded if we leave their funding up to voluntary contributions. What happens is, just as is shown in the example of the magic money machine, people are prone to hang on to their money and to wait for others to make voluntary contributions that leaves them poorer but those who do not spend a dime on such things wealthier and more powerful.

The conservative answer to this problem is to use the government to tax people in order to make sure that the military and police/prison systems are properly funded. Proper funding, in this case, is funding that approximately equals the value of the benefits people obtain living in a society where they are well defended from external and internal threats.

At this point a charge can be made that the government method of collecting taxes to fund the military and police system is inefficient and prone to corruption. The government does a poor job of deciding what to invest in - wasting money on such things as a war on drugs and other victimless crimes. A lot of the money gets diverted to cronies and campaign contributors, or gets lost to corruption and bureaucratic red tape.

Against this, the conservatives can answer that we are still better off taxing people in order to fund these services that produce these positive externalities. We are still better off with the corruption and inefficiencies of government than we would be if we did not tax people to invest in goods that produced these positive externalities.

As these examples illustrate, free market economics is quite confortable with the fact that there are some goods that produce positive externalities, that these goods will be under-funded if we stand around waiting for people to make voluntary contributions (particularly contributions that leave them poorer and weaker while those who do not contribute become wealthier and more powerful). In these cases, it is a legitimate purpose of government to collect money from people proportional to the benefit they receive in order to fund these public goods.

Romeny's plan will work great in an imaginary world where military and police are the only goods that produce positive externalities. However, they will fail in the real world where this is simply not true. They will leave us standing around with money in our pocket that could be invested in goods producing positive externalities. However, these investments will not be made because - on his system - wealth and power are accumulated in the hands of those who refuse to fund such things.

Four Problems with Romney's Economic Proposals: Introduction

Over the course of the next four days, I am going to discuss four reasons why Romney's economic intentions will fail.

Furthermore, I will make this criticism from within the context of free-market economics. Effectively, I will make it from a context which Romney's running mate Paul Ryan would have to agree with - if he is at all consistent with the free-market principles he claims to uphold.

Free market economics actually tries to be about the real world. It tries to incorporate facts about the real world into its system. What Romney and company is peddling, on the other hand, is a cheap knock-off of capitalism that profits the seller and poisons the buyer. They steam the label off of capitalism and put it on their snake-oil as a way of increasing sales - a way of getting more voters to buy it. It will kill some of those buyers, maim others, and otherwise impoverish still more. It will, however, profit the sellers.

In order for Romney's snake-oil to be effective, the following four things will have to be true:

(1) There are no positive externalities.

(2) There are no negative externalities

(3) All agents are perfectly rational and fully informed.

(4) All agents have the same economic power.

In the real world, none of these are true. Consequently, in the real world, Romney's snake oil will not work. The sellers will pocket the money, but the buyers will end up no better off as a result of the snake-oil. Some will end up significantly worse off.

Positive externalities are the side-benefits that people get from living in a community where the population is well-educated and its people understand the real world in which real-world decisions are made. They are the benefits that come from being secure from internal and external threats. It comes from a good infrastructure - a good foundation for the exchange of goods, services, and information. It comes from a population that is healthy and it comes from good sanitation. Any population that does not have these things suffers, and Romney's plans will diminish these things. They will do so, not because Romney is evil (though if I had the moral failings of a typical Fox News commentator I would be claiming that Romney must hate America and is seeking its destruction). It will happen because Romney's plan is blind to positive externalities and makes no room for harvesting their benefits.

Negative externalities are harms inflicted on others in the course of economic activity. Imagine a society in which corporate leaders are free to kill, poison, and maim others - and destroy their property - whenever it profits them to do so. That is what Romney's system provides. The killing, poisoning, maiming, and destroying comes from polluting the air we breathe and the water we drink. It comes from creating dangerous working conditions where the owner of the factory pockets the profits and the injured worker or dead worker's family pockets the bills. It takes the form of destroying cities and whole nations with climate change - destruction that the rich can afford to walk away from, but the vast majority of the residents of areas harmed cannot economically leave.

Perfectly rational and informed agents can efficiently pursue their own interests. Irrational and uninformed agents make mistakes. None of us are perfectly rational and informed. We can't be - we do not have enough time. Therefore, we have reason to support institutions that help us to avoid at least the most serious harms that uninformed and sometimes irrational agents make. Taking away these safeguards leaves us vulnerable not only to our own follies, but to parasites who feed us false information and rhetoric in order to suck out of us our economic life blood. Nobody is in a better position to drain our economic life blood with rhetoric and misinformation than those with enough money to control hire experts in public manipulation - the public relations consultants.

Certainly, Romney's system is not one where he expects everybody to have the same economic power. However, his system is one that will not work as he says it will unless everybody actually has equal economic power. Ideally, in a free market, goods and services go to those who value them more. They go to the person who is willing to pay a little bit more to get them. The person who pays less, it is assumed, did not want it as badly. In reality, where economic power is not equal, people with a trivial interest in certain goods and services can bid them away from others who value them greatly - who even need them for survival. Imagine somebody following you around and each time you go to buy something - food, medical care for your children, gasoline to go to and from work - he offers more than you can afford to pay. There is nothing you can do about it. You have $50,000. He has $50 million. As you die of thirst, you can bid $50,000 for a bottle of water. He can bid $50,001 and pour its contents out at your feet and still have $49,949,999 left over. As he watches you die, he did nothing wrong according to the system Romney advances. You did not want the water as badly as he wanted to watch you die.

Briefly, these are the four real-world facts ignored in Romney's economic plan.

These facts require including in your economic package some method for harvesting positive externalities as well as avoiding negative externalities. It calls for promoting institutions that help less-than-fully-informed and sometimes irrational agents avoid the worst mistakes that such agents can make. It also defends them from those who would manipulate them with rhetoric and misinformation. It is a system that recognizes and respects the fact that $50,000 in the hands of somebody with $50 million is worth a lot less than a bottle of water in the hands of somebody dying of thirst.

These are facts.

Nobody's score in a political debate can change these facts. No amount of entertaining rhetoric will erase these facts or protect people from the harms that will come from ignoring these facts. The person handing you cyanide-laced fruit drink may be quite convincing as he asks you to drink it - but that will not negate the effects of the cyanide.

It is also doubtful that a person can adequately explain these problems with Romney's plans in the two minutes one is allowed in a debate. Fortunately, I do not suffer from having such a limit.

Tomorrow, I discuss positive externalities.

Why Should I Accept Desirism?

Why should you adopt desirsm?

Answer: If I am right, you already have.

You may have a favorite account of how you think you do morality. And, from time to time, you may actually appeal to it to answer a moral question. However, for most of the moral judgments we make and the actions that we perform, desirism provides the best account of what we are doing - whether we recognize it or not.

Have you ever been blamed for something and answered it by giving an excuse? I would bet that the excuse fit the model of a claim that blocks the inferences from a prima facie wrong action to the conclusion that you did not have the desires people (believe) they have reason to promote or inhibit. The criminal law already employs mens rea (or "guilty mind") in a way that is best explained in terms of whether the accused actually lacked the desires that people have reason to promote or inhibit. We already recognize a distinction between moral prohibition, obligation, and non-obligatory permission - and we defend our claims by asking about the overall effects on objective desire satisfaction that we could expect if everybody had the same sentiment. We already use praise and condemnation to mold desires.

People have been doing these things for thousands of years without even hearing the word "desirism".

If you are a religious person who thinks you get your morality from scripture. First, scripture was invented by human beings who already had a long history of interaction with other people - testing moral systems in the real world. The results of these thousands of years of trial and error is what they wrote into their scripture. Different people wrote different scriptures and offered different interpretations of the scriptures they adopted. In all of this, different versions were "tested" by their ability to promote the objective satisfaction of the desires of those who did the testing.

As it turns out, the authors of these religious moral guidebooks did future generations a huge disservice. They claimed that these were the words of an all-knowing perfectly good deity incapable of error, rather than the best current understanding of substantially ignorant group of mortals still struggling to understand the world around them. Consequently, moral progress in some communities came to a grinding halt.

About 400 years ago, areas dominated by the Christian religion threw off some of this dead weight when people began to suspect that they could independently investigate and understand God's universe. This included its moral universe. Thus, we got the moral writings of the enlightenment. Natural rights theories of morality emerged next to Newtonian physics. Neither got the facts exactly right, but both made progress over centuries of dogma that had been written into scripture and made the unerring word of a supernatural creature.

There are still throwbacks who want to bring primitive morality into the 21st Century. However, a substantial number of Christians have embraced moral progress. Rather than using biblical interpretation to drag civilization back into the dark ages, they use modern moral progress to (try to) interpret scripture.

Finding property rights, women's rights, democracy and opposition to slavery in the Bible is like finding an account of the use of penicillin as an antibiotic in the writings of Hypocrates. However, with a loose enough interpretation, mentally blocking out the passages that do not fit and loosely interpreting those who do, it is certainly possible. I suspect in a couple of decades we will learn that the Bible never meant to condemn homosexual marriage - it only meant to condemn a few types of deviant sexual practices that some people had engaged in over 2000 years ago and are no longer important.

This is a trick that more Muslims are picking up - finding modern moral discoveries in their ancient text, thus modernizing Islam in the process.

While philosophers debated moral theories, non-philosophers continued to practice morality. The practice of morality no more depends on the philosophy of morality than the practice of science depends on the philosophy of science.

Some noticed that moral claims tend to be justified by appeal to what people want. In the 1800s, they had not fully figured out the concept of objective desire satisfaction, but they found close proximations of what fit this description in "happiness" and "pleasure and freedom from pain". Pretty close is good enough for practical work - engineers still design using Newtonian physics rather than the more precise calculations of Einsteinian relativity. These people became utilitarians and began to try to justify everything in terms of its effects on what people want.

Yet, even Utilitarians do not always maximize utility. They show favoritism to their own friends and family out of proportion to overall universal happiness. They are reluctant to convict an innocent person even if it will bring pleasure to others, and they do not ask if the person who abuses a child actually enjoyed it more than the child who was abused will suffer. They still practice desirism while they preach utilitarianism.

Recognizing these discrepancies, some people promoted a system of natural rights and duties. The things the utilitarian was reluctant to do even when it maximized utility was just wrong, they said. Yet, they had a hard time deciding what things to put into that category and, when they entered into a debate on that subject, utilitarians were quick to point out that they were using utilitarian arguments. "What are the effects of adopting this principle universally on what people want?"

Kantians recognized that part of morality concerned with asking about the consequences of promoting certain desires and aversions across the whole community and interprets that as, "Act on that principle that you can, at the same time, will to be a universal law." When put into practice, as John Stuart Mill noticed, it typically turned into, "Act on those principles that, if everybody adopted them, will do the best job of getting the most people what they really want."

Some notice the significant role that praise and condemnation play in the institution of morality and conclude that moral claims are nothing but expressions of emotion - praise and condemnation - lacking a truth component. Yet, they continue to use and defend moral claims as if they are propositions having a truth component - offering evidence for and against various claims in terms of people want. While their theory denied that claims had a truth component, their practices were still those of desirism where there is a truth component as to what people have many and strong reasons to promote or inhibit using praise and condemnation.

Other forms of subjectivists noticed that people based their moral claims on their own likes and dislikes. Desirism is confortable with this - but added that there was a second step to moral reasoning where people ask what they should like and dislike - and they defend claims about what people should like and dislike based on the effects that those likes and dislikes, if made universal, have on others. However, ignoring that part of morality, the subjectivist tells us that morality is subjective while she continues to engage in those second-level practices. She never actually accepts the inference from somebody else that, "I would like you to have sex with me; therefore, you are obligated to have sex with me" as valid, in spite of her subjectivism.

It is almost amusing to listen to the hard determinist make moral claims that he himself asserts are necessarily grounded on a false premise that we have free will. When confronted with the inconsistency, they shrug and say, "I can't help it. I am determined to act this way."

Saying that people already practice desirism does not imply they practice it well or that they are conscious of what they are doing. This is true in the same way that all people currently use logic without knowing the terms, "modus ponens" or "disjunctive syllogism". However, some use logic better than others, and an education in logic helps one to do so. We all practice medicine - taking care of our own maladies and those of people around us. However, a few years of education and focused experience dealing with medical issues will help one do a better job of practicing medicine.

Similarly, an acceptance of desirism should help a person do a better job of answering questions about right and wrong - praise and condemnation - obligation, prohibition, and non-obligatory permission. This does not change the fact that people have, more or less, been engaged in the practice for thousands of years without being fully conscious of how the parts fit together.

Why should you adopt desirism?

Actually, for the most part, you already have.

Effective Change

In a recent appearance, President Obama said that one of the things he has realized is that Washington cannot be changed from the inside. It must be changed from the outside.

The Tea Party and the evangelical community have certainly realized this fact. They know what it takes to make a change in Washington. The Tea Party is the only group with an unfavorability rating higher than atheists, yet they wield extraordinary power.

Large corporations also know this – those that are successful. To make a change in Washington, they spend a great deal of money on public relations, selling their ideas to the people. The campaign to spread doubt on global warming among the population is motivated precisely by the fact that change in Washington must come from outside of Washington – and that doubt makes effective change difficult to come by.

To illustrate what I am talking about, I would like to look at the issue of closing to Guantanamo Bay detention center.

The Obama administration made plans to close Guantanamo Bay and transfer the prisoners to prisons in America. However, many people in America were opposed to the plan. Congress added a rider to the 2011 defense authorization bill to deny funding for any type of transfer – effectively outlawing any attempt to close the plant. Obama’s only option was to veto the defense authorization bill – which would have had significant impacts across the whole economy. It is unlikely that the American people would have been willing to endure those economic harms for the sake of closing Guantanamo. Therefore the detention center remains open with no opportunity to close it.

Many people blame Obama for failing to close the detention center. I hear few people even mentioning the names of the senators and representatives responsible for getting that amendment added to the 2011 defense authorization bill. Nor do I hear people explaining how they would now go about closing the detention center if they were Obama in light of the fact that congress itself prohibits funding.

If one wants Guantanamo to be closed and the rule of law to be respected, blaming Obama and yanking support from those who want to close the prison camp but cannot is entirely the wrong way to go. One needs to focus on those who insist on keeping it open and who supported legislation that would block funding.

The way to make change is to talk to your neighbors, friends, family - to use twitter and facebook and other tools at your disposal – to publicly identify those people who support the prohibition on funding prisoner transfers and who oppose fair trials in a court of law. When the people demand change (and promise to support the agents of change), change will happen. Until the people demand change and offer sufficient support to the agents of change, change will not happen.

In another example, President Obama has said that his views on gay marriage have "evolved" since 2008. He now supports gay marriage.

My guess would be that Obama's views have not evolved at all. Instead, in 2008, Obama was running for President in a country in which he could either claim to support gay marriage and let the McCain/Palin team win the election, or oppose gay marriage and have a chance of winning the election. He selected the final alternative. For 8 years before the 2008 election, Republicans have been using the gay marriage issue to pull conservatives to the polls to elect Republican candidates. It was a very effective tactic.

By 2012 things had changed. This year, it is possible to win an election as President and support gay marriage. In fact, the homosexual community and those who care about people who are homosexual offered more support for a candidate who favors homosexual marriage than conservatives are offering people who oppose it. Over thirty elections to define marriage as between one man and one woman gave the homosexual community a way to effectively organize. While they lost many of these battles, each battle allowed them to gain a little more public support and acceptance.

By 2012 things had changed. But the change did not come from within Washington. It came from outside of Washington.

That same technique is how one goes about actually closing Guantanamo Bay, or seeing to the separation of Church and State, or seeing to it that the deficit is tackled in part by taxing people who have more than enough money than they need to pay for food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care.

When somebody protests that Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay, I ask, "What are you doing to make it possible to be President AND to close Guantanamo Bay? What are you doing to get the law changed so that the funding for prisoner transfers is no longer blocked?”

If the answer is, "Me? Are you nuts? I would lose my friends. My family would disown me. My boss would hate me. They would think I was a traitor. I'm not going to actually tell people that I oppose Guantanamo Bay. I want Obama to do this on his own – and take all the heat and the blame (and still be President). If he cannot, than he is a failure as a President."

Well, if this is the answer to that question, my response would be, "Obama is not the one who decided to keep Guantanamo Bay open. You made that decision."

Do you want Church and State to be separate? Then do not demand that the politicians separate church and state. Instead, you need to do something to change the poll numbers. You need to do something to make it the case that no policitian who wants to keep his job will dare to oppose the separation of church and state.

Along these same lines, writing letters to elected representatives is another irrationally inefficient waste of time. Letters should not be sent to representatives. They should be sent to your friends, family, neighbors – put on posters carried in a march to City Hall, on billboards, in 30 second radio and television spots, and the like.

An elected official is going to take your letter, look at the poll results, and simply conclude where you fit on the poll. If you write a letter opposing capital punishment, then the elected official knows that you are among the 30% of the people who oppose capital punishment. Your letter gives her little to no reason to buck the 70% who favor capital punishment. If you want your elected official’s position to change, what you need to do is to change that poll – to lower the percentage of people who favor capital punishment to the point that the politician can now speak out against it without losing his political life.

Sending letters to politicians does have a political role to play in a particular context. Consider the case of an opinion leader speaking to an elected representative. “With a snap of my finger, I will have 10,000 letters, emails, and phone calls sent to your office on this issue.” If he can pull that off, then that represents powers. A person who can deliver 10,000 pieces of correspondence at the snap of a finger can deliver 10,000 votes. She can direct those 10,000 people not to send letters, but to send campaign contributions.

This represents power. However, it requires organization. It requires already having been effective at bringing about a certain amount of change outside Washington, and bringing that weight to bear to make effective change within Washington.

Obama is right on this. Effective change does not come from inside Washington. It comes from the outside. It comes from you and me.

Of course, effective change is one thing. Good change is a different thing entirely. Not all of those who are effective are good, and not all of those who are good are effective. That's a problem.

Outsourcing

After recently posting on why I have not written much on politics recently, I want to say a few things on where the policies that Democrats tend to favor that are in error.

Please note that I write this as somebody who very strongly supports Obama over Romney and somebody who wants every Tea Party Republican and theocrat voted out of office at the earliest possible opportunity.

However, one area where I think that the Democrats make a serious mistake - one which betrays the same moral qualities that they are fond of condemning in others - is on the issue of outsourcing.

I hold that outsourcing tends to benefit the average American and, even if it did not - at its worst, outsourcing lifts people out of poverty, giving them better access to medical care and education and greater opportunities in their own lives at a small cost to those in the top 10% in terms of global income.

Democrats, at least in principle, speak as if they favor lifting people out of poverty and seeing that they have better health care, education, and opportunities even at the expense of those in the top 10 percent. However, put the word "Outsourcing" in the statement, and suddenly many Democrats loathe the idea of seeing the top 10 percent suffer any type of economic setback, even if it results in large numbers of impoverished people obtaining these benefits in health care, education, and opportunities. We see them pointing to those living in impoverished reasons in the world as a threat and using arguments defending the status quo that would make a Republican supporter of the top 1% beam with pride.

I have mentioned in the past few days the fact that China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, gaining access to levels of health care, education, and opportunities unimagined a generation ago.

It is impossible to separate this fact from the economic practice of outsourcing. What lifted these people out of poverty was American citizens purchasing goods and services that they produced.

I do not think that America has suffered from this development, any more than the top 1 percent of the population suffers by living in a world where the other 99 percent are healthier, better educated, and surrounded with opportunities.

With respect to oursourcing, Americans have obtained the benefit of lower-priced goods. In terms of overall economic status, there is no difference between cutting the prices of particular goods by 50 percent and getting a pay raise that would have allowed one to purchase twice as many of those goods at their original price.

Furthermore, increased wealth in other parts of the world means greater demand for American goods and services. It gives those people the means pay for things that people living with starvation and disease cannot buy.

Americans have suffered some economic downturns. Certainly, those people who were responsible would love it if we targeted the Chinese and blamed them for our troubles rather than blame those who were actually guilty. However, the guilty party in this case was not Chinese factory worker. It was American bankers.

Those bankers robbed the American people twice. First, they robbed us by selling sham mortgages - promising great benefits and burying the risks and costs. Then, when their financial slight-of-hand ruined their industry and their companies started to suffer, they robbed us again by collecting tons of government money and passing the bill on to us, our children, and our grandchildren.

The heads of these financial companies are the people who drove many Americans out of their jobs and homes - not the Chinese factory worker. Yet, they certainly do not mind the fact that Americans are blaming the Chinese factory worker and insisting on driving them back into squalor and starvation than meanding that these corporate executives lose their jobs and their multi-million dollar homes.

As I sit here in Colorado, I see nothing but benefit in the fact that people in Iowa or Florida or Washington state are doing well. I ask myself, "Would I be better off if California was a land of poverty, squalor, starvation and disease with no factories and no jobs and a population with no hope or opportunities? I do not see even the beginnings of an argument that says that this would benefit me in any way.

Similarly, it would be hard to make the case that my life would be better if only it were the case that Europe and Japan had the level of poverty and disease that we now find in Africa. I do not see how a case can be made that when 20 million to 40 million people starved to death in China from 1958 to 1961 that this was such a huge boon for - well, for my parents, in this case, that it was to be celebrated. I do not see an argument for attempting to arrange for a second great famine because of the economic benefits I would enjoy.

This latter point not only illustrate some of the economic aspects of outsourcing, it illustrates a moral issue. Even if it were the case that American workers - who are almost all in the top 10 percent in terms of income in the world - were to suffer a loss of a few dollars per hour due to outsourcing, there are moral problems with demanding that a couple billion people live with starvation and disease just so that those few Americans can purchase a few more sports tickets and beers.

In saying this, I am not claiming that all outsourcing is necessarily virtuous.

There are cases in which corporations go to foreign governments and say, "Let us build a factory and 'hire' your citizens as . . . well, as slave labor, though our marketing department tells us we cannot call it that. We will ensure that you and your military supporters obtain some of the benefits of this slave labor."

There are cases in which the corporation says, "Let us build a factory, poison your air and water, destroy your land, and spread disease among your population. We will profit from the goods we sell elsewhere and, again, make sure that you and your military backers are properly compensated for your support."

There are cases in which the corporation says, "Pass laws keeping my competitors out of this region, allowing us to better exploit the local population and circumstances by denying your people the opportunity to pursue alternatives to what we provide, and we will see to it that you and your military supporters share in the profits."

However, the problem here is not "outsourcing".

In these types of cases, it is important to focus on the actual evil. Mis-identifying the evil results in cases in which some good is inaccurately branded as evil while also increasing the chance that some evil will be missed because it does not contain this mis-identified property. In this case, it means that good outsourcing is inaccurately condemned, and domestic production containing the same evils are ignored because they do not qualify as outsourcing.

When I hear Democrats condemn outsourcing, I hear people making the same types of arguments and defending the same types of economic injustices as Republicans defend when they seek to protect and promote the interests of the top 1 percent at the expense of everybody else. I see people condemning in one sentence the very same set of principles and practices they embrace in the next sentence. It makes no sense to me.

The Arrogance of Unwarrented Certainty

It is utter arrogance to pretend to have certain knowledge on the matter of political and economic systems.

This point is relevant to comment made to my last post on the benefits of market liberalization. In that post, I compared Africa to China. I noted that the former was the target of a great deal of liberal style aid and intervention while the latter engaged in market liberalization. Africa has seen little improvement in the past 30 years, while China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty - giving them better access to health care, education, and other opportunities in the process.

Mojo.rhythm pointed out the following:

I don't think it is fair to compare China and Africa. They are not exactly a ceteris paribus situation.

it s an accurate statement.

The fact is, we cannot set up sound scientific experiments for social systems.

A sound scientific system would take a group of people, randomly assign them to two different groups, each carefully constructed to isolate variables, and take objective measures of the state of each civilization over time.

This can never happen. There are not only ethical problems with this system, but the logistics themselves are prohibitive. All we can do is look at the actions people take in the real world and try to come up with a way to explain and predict the results that follow from those choices. We will never have a clean and uncontaminated set of data on which to base conclusions on political and economic systems.

One of the implications of this us that we have good reason to condemn those who pretend to unerring certainty in the conclusions they draw on which systems work and which fail. We have good reason to hold in utter contempt those who share an attitude common in today's the Tea Party movement where many members act as if they have such perfect access to THE TRUTH that they hold anybody who disagrees with them as having sinister motives and are worthy of the most vile hatred.

We have reason to condemn these people, not for being wrong (because they might not be wrong), but for their tremendous and horrendous arrogance (because they might not be right either, and they should respect that fact).

One reason for compromise on political and social matters is simply because none of us has sufficient information of good enough quality to allow us to be comfortable with our conclusions. Instead, a proper attitude to have is, "I think I am right. However, since I do not have the types of evidence that allow me to be certain, I need to respect the opinions that others draw from the information they have available. Let us work together to come to a conclusion that, with luck, catches more about what is right and removes what is wrong in all of our different views."

So, I will agree that the China vs Africa comparison I drew does not give us an uncompromising and unequivocal proof of the power of markets in all circumstances. That type of proof will never be available.

Yet, we do have the fact that market liberalization in China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. For a person truly interested in fighting poverty and providing people with better access to health care and education, this is extremely significant. Furthermore, China did not accomplish this by a system of wealth redistribution (taking from the rich and giving to the poor), but through a system of wealth creation where rich and poor both prospered.

China's economic development has even made a significant contribution to world peace. China's economy is now tied in with that of the rest of the world. A major global conflict would be economically devastating. A global China has reason to seek peace and avoid conflict that an isolationist China did not have. Consequently, if peace is your project, then this, too, has been well served by market liberalization in China.

While we cannot pretend that this proves without the possibility of error that market liberalization is the one and only true path to promoting the lives, well-being, and interests of people, we should also be careful to avoid tossing aside this evidence for no good reason - simply because it does not conform to one's prejuces regarding the types of systems one prefers.

And let us not adopt the horrendously arrogant attitude of those who are so certain they are right that they refuse to listen to or compromise with others who disagree.

Writing On Politics

I was asked

Why haven't you been writing much about politics lately? Surely it is a meaty topic given the upcoming election?

I haven't written much recently because I have had company.

Another reason why I have not written much on politics is because I want to create a definitive site on desirism - which I have been doing at a desirism wiki I will be returning to.

However, a third reason I have avoided writing about politics is because it is extremely frustrating and depressing.

A couple of decades ago, there was a faction of the Republican Party that felt that it was very important to provide and support institutions that provided people with food, shelter, health care, security, and opportunities to live their lives as best they could. These were not government solutions - which were prone to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies. They were private solutions offered within a framework that guaranteed that people treated each other fairly and honestly and peacefully.

It is a faction that would look at Africa as a model of leftist aid and intervention where things have gotten no better in 30 years, and at China where the economy was freed up and hundreds of millions of people were lifted out if poverty, and say, "See! That is what I am talking about." It is a faction that would have celebrated the fact that hundreds of millions of people living in China had better access to health care, better access to education, more freedom, and opportunities than their parents thought possible. It would have told Democrats, "If you care about doing real good in the real world, that is how it is done."

It would not accuse Democrats as being evil or of wanting nothing but to destroy America. It would accuse Democrats as being naïve - as having good intentions but as failing to recognize that the good they are trying to do is being swallowed up by corruption and inefficient bureaucratic centralized planning.

That Republican faction probably still exists, but I have trouble seeing it.

Now, the Republican Party is the favorite of those who promote fantasy over reality. They deny the findings of science and, in doing so, promote policies that would may work in the fantasy world of their imagination, but that have no place in the real world.

I compare them to a person stepping out onto the street having faith that the truck heading their way does not exist. The person who steps out onto the street ignoring reality deserves what she gets. However, these reality-free Republicans insist on dragging the rest of us onto the street as well - and the effect on our children will be disastrous.

This earlier faction held that it was great to seek personal wealth, but not in ways harmful to others. Killing others for profit was not considered a part of "free trade". Force and fraud were condemned. Theft was considered a moral crime and legitimately made the subject of criminal punishment as well.

Consequently, poisoning the air and water - or filling the atmosphere with chemicals that would destroy the life, health, and property of others - was immoral and ought to be illegal. It does not matter how wealthy it made the person causing harm to others - that was not a legitimate way to make a living. In the language of the day these harms were called "negative externalities." To the degree that negative externalities existed, to that degree the economy was suffering from inefficiencies - failing to produce the best results.

These points were central to a form of economic organization called the "free market". This term was once used to refer to a system where countless private transactions ended up promoting the overall public good. However, for this to happen, force and fraud had to be prohibited and costs and benefits had to be internalized. Where force or fraud was permitted or costs and benefits were not internalized, people had an opportunity to gain personally at the expense of others, or failed to invest their time and resources efficiently.

Consequently, governments were used to punish force and fraud in the market place, and to see to it as much as possible that the costs and benefits of goods and services reflected the total social cost by internalizing the cost of negative and positive externalities.

However, this "free market" interests very few people in today's Republican Party.

Today's party is dominated by people who think it is perfectly legitimate to do harm to others in the course of pursuing profits. It labels any attempt to prevent people from poisoning the air or the water, or to internalize the costs others must face as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, as "government intervention" that must be condemned. In doing so, they condemn the free market itself, favoring instead some new system that they ALSO call a "free market" (since market research shows that this name helps to confuse people and get them to buy into this alternative to the free market).

Today's party shows little respect for truth.

Some of Romney's campaign statements are flat-out lies - like the lie that President Obama attempted to eliminate the work requirements for welfare. This was a claim that Romney used in a recent commercial and continued to use even after it was shown to be false.

In Romney's first political advertisement, he had a clip of Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." Actually, what Obama had said was, "[McCain's] campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' " The shortened clip in the commercial was not an innocent mistake. It was a lie. It using it, Romney identified himself as a liar when there was still pleanty of time for the Republican Party to select a more honest person into the role of Republican standard bearer. However, Republicans did not care enough about truth to condemn this action.

The claim here is not the Republicans must not make mistakes or that Democrats do not lie. Any response among these lines misses the point. It would not matter if the Democrats spoke nothing but lies - that does not give Republicans permission to care nothing for the truth. The faction I am writing about would not accept, "Democrats lie so Republicans can lie, too." Instead, it would accept, "Republicans, at the very least, ought to care about the truth and condemn lying, not only when Democrats lie, but when other Republicans lie as well."

They were not hypocrits that called something evil when done by a Democrat but turned a blind eye when Republicans committed the same evils.

It was a faction that felt that people can make their best decisions when they are accurately and fully informed of the facts of the matter. Attempts to manipulate people through deception might provide some short-term benefit but, in the long run, promoted a culture of deception that would harm society. It was not to be done, and was not to be condoned.

For the same reason, that former Republican faction liked to base their conclusions on the evidence. It should be possible to be a conservative and, at the same time, believe that human activities are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that this is warming the planet. This should be no more difficult than being a conservative and believing that a bullet fired into the brain of an individual tends to severely impair brain function. Scientific facts are neither conservative nor liberal.

In the faction that I once knew, a person could accept these facts and still believe that a market that is free of force and fraud, where costs and benefits were internalized, and where people were permitted to freely negotiate and trade among themselves as fully and accurately informed agents produced the best overall solutions. It reduced poverty, promoted education, and gave the most people access to the best medical care.

Today, to be a conservative, you have to deny reality. You have to pretend that greenhouse gasses produce no ill effects - as well as deny evolution, deny the fact that the universe is more than 10000 years old, deny research into the effects of giving young people accurate information about the reproductive system, rewrite American history so as to support the myth that the founding fathers wanted a Christian nation and brand its advocates heroes even after much of their research has been shown to be fraudulent, and think that we can control the frequency and course of hurricanes by altering laws regarding homosexuality, abortion, and school prayer.

However, there now seems to be a faction in the Democratic party - still young - that says, "You know, what matters is fighting poverty, promoting widespread access to quality health care, promoting freedom, and giving people opportunities. And if this system can accomplish these ends, perhaps it is worth looking at." It is a weak voice at the moment. It is currently hard to tell whether the Republicans will take these people back, or the Democrats will make room for them.

I find it hard to write about politics these days because people on one side of the political isle considers an evidence-based conservate to be a traitor, and the other constantly misinterprets what they write to cast them as members of the now-ruling faction of the Republican party.

But, perhaps, those are the very same reasons why it should be done.

Key Phrases in Desirism

In my writings, I employ certain phrases ad nauseum - because they put an emphasis on what I consider to be important - what I want people to focus their thoughts on - when applying desirism.

Most of the common phrases are captured in the following proposition, which is the core of desirism:

People generally have many and strong reasons to employ social tools such as praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote those malleable desires that tend to objectively satisfy other desires, and inhibit malleable desires that tend to prevent the objective satisfaction of other desires.

"Have (many and strong reasons)". The only reasons that exist are desires, and a "desire that P" is a reason to act to realize a state of affairs in which P is true. To have a reason is to have a particular desire or aversion. However, since an aversion to P is a desire that not-P, we can typically speak only of desires.

"(Have) many and strong reasons". Many desires outweigh few desires. Strong desires outweigh weak desires. However, there are also cases in which few strong desires can outweigh many weak desires - or where many weak desires can outweigh a few strong desires.

A single life-threatening allergy to X can imply that everybody in the population must give up their weak and easily substituted interest in X. However, if the interest in X is less weak and not so easily substituted, we may reach a point at which the person with the life-threatening allergy does not justify having everybody else sacrifice their interest in X.

Plus, there will be a range of cases in the middle where the two interests are near to balancing out such that it is very difficult to decide which way to go. This is a fact of life. It is no argument against desirism that it concludes that some answers are difficult to discover - particularly where it is true that some answers are difficult to discover.

I speak of having a reason because only reasons that actually exist in the real world are relevant. We can speak hypothetically of relationships between desires that do not exist and states of affairs, but the relationships we speak of do not exist either. They are fictions not relevant in the real world.

"Objectively satisfy" . This reflects the fact that the motivation of a desire that P is to realize a state in which P is objectively true. It is to be contrasted with "subjective satisfaction" which us acquired by believing that P us true. A parent who lives his child wants his wish for the well-being of his child to be objectively true. The mere subjective satisfaction of this desire (believing that the child is well off while the child is in agony) is not good enough. Objective satisfaction of a desire is what people are after. Subjective satisfaction - when objective satisfaction has been acquired - is icing on the cake.

"Malleable desires." These are desires that can be strengthened or weakened, created or destroyed, or modified in terms of shifting their object (changing "P" for a desire that "P") by interaction with the environment.

Because each of us is a part of the environment of other people, to the degree that their desires can be changed through interaction with their environment, to that degree we have the ability to mold those desires. The desires we can mold because we are a part of their environment are what I call malleable desires.

Praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment act on the reward center of the brain to alter certain malleable desires. These are the tools of morality, and they are there to be used in promoting desires people have many and strong reasons to promote, or inhibit desires people generally have many and strong reasons to inhibit.

"People generally". There are 19 people on a bus who have various interests that involve a certain amount of silence. They wish to catch a few more minutes of sleep on their way to work, to finish up a presentation before the 9:00 meeting, to talk to their sick mother, etc. There is one who wants would like to listen to a song very, very loud - or who just wants to talk to his friend about the party that afternoon. But he does so in their living-room voice - loudly, so that the whole population of the bus knows the details of the party by the time he is done.

We can speak of a boat going generally in a westerly direction, or of orbits being generally circular. We are not saying that these claims are true in every single instance, but that they are likely to be true in any given instance. I speak of people generally having many and strong reason to promote certain desires in this sense.

The phrase "people generally" looks at all of the desires and aversions that people have. It recognizes that there are few desires that everybody has. Yet, some desires are very common, and in many cases different desires can lead to common interests (in the way that the different desires above all lend themselves to an interest in relative silence on the bus). I am not saying that everybody has these interests, because they do not. However, when we look at a population, we can make certain claims about what is generally true among the people in that population.

Does this mean that desirism is a theory that says that the majority always wins? No, it does not. To see that, refer back to my discussion on "many and strong" where it is possible that a few strong desires can outweigh many weaker desires. The majority is not always right.

"Tend to". This pays attention to the fact that desires are persistent entities. We have no capacity to turn them on and off. Consequently, a desire that is active at in a particular set if circumstances will be active through a large set of circumstances - some common and some uncommon. To evaluate a desire we would be foolish to look only at the role it plays in this one circumstance. We must look at the role it plays in the wide variety of circumstances in which it will come into play.

Furthermore, these possible circumstances must be weighed by the likelihood that they would actually occur. Extremely unlikely circumstances (e.g., pulling a switch on a trolley that will send it off a track where it will certainly kill five people and onto a track where it will certainly kill one) do not count at all - because they will never happen. Likely and frequent occurances count a great deal.

The phrase "tend to" respects the fact that a desire can, for example, objectively satisfy other desires in 95 percent of the circumstances in which it comes into play. Yet, even in that 5 percent, people have many and strong reasons to promote it using praise or to condemn its absence - in oder to harvest the benefits from the other 95 percent.

Or, a desire might conflict with other desires a little bit 95 percent of the time. However, in the other 5 percent they produce exceptional benefits that objectively satisfy other desires. Cautious anxiety may cause a person to double-check a latch 19 times to discover it was still latched, and to double-check it once to discover it has become unlatched.

These, then, are some of the common phrases that I use in applying desirism and what they mean when I use them.

Morality and Questions Belonging to Science

Tracking visits to my blog back to their origin, I often find things that cause me a bit of . . . well . . . frustration?

Baggini vs Krauss on Science, Philosophy, and Morality

In concerns the question of whether all answerable questions belong to science or whether some questions - exemplified in this case by moral questions - belong to the realm of science.

In this field, among these people, it would seem that somebody would start weeding out the nonsense claims. Yet, I continue to find statements that would embarrass a student in Philosophy 121: Introduction to Ethics. If there is going to be progress made in this field, then those who dedicate themselves to talking about this subject need to make some minimal effort to clear out the junk so that the questions can focus on what remains.

On this dispute, I hold that (1) there is at least one question whose answer belongs to philosophy and not science, and (2) moral questions belong to science and not philosophy.

I hold that moral questions concern the acts that would fulfill desires - including those malleable desires that tend to fulfill other desires (and thus which people have reason to promote or inhibit through praise and condemnation). It is entirely an empirical question.

It is a DIFFICULT empirical question in many cases. However, questions that are difficult to answer (e.g., How many protons are there in a human body?) are not, by that fact alone, unscientific.

There are three speakers in this debate. Julian Baggini - the defender of philosophy; Lawrence Krauss - the defender of science; and Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True who wrote about the debate and injected his own comments.

From Coyne:

People's view of what is "moral" ultimately must rest on one or more of three things: an appeal to the consequences, an appeal to some authority (like Scripture), or some innate feeling instilled by our genes in combination with our environment (in other words, morality lies in our neurons).

Clearly, one must recognize a distinction between "People's view of what is 'moral'" from "What is moral" in the same way one must distinguish between "People's view of what is 'true'" from "What is true." The question, "What is true about people's beliefs about the origin of life?" is one question. The question, "What is true about the origin of life?" is a different question. There is a relation - an attempt at least on the part of some to match their beliefs to what is true. However, these are still two different subjects of investigation.

Yet, in morality, people often confuse them. They routinely study and investigate one, while writing as if they are studying and investigating the other. A person writing on this subject should start by being clear as to which question they are trying to answer. "Am I going to write about what is right and wrong? Or am I going to write about people's beliefs about right and wrong?"

As it turns out, I do not think that any of these three options accurately accounts for what is true about morality. They do not even exhaust the options of what people "must rest" or even do rest their opinions on. They represent three theories about the nature of morality. But they do not exhaust the possibilities.

You can have three theories about the origin of the moon (the co-formation theory, the capture theory, and the division theory) without exhausting all of the options available (the collision theory). If you fixate on the first three, declaring that it MUST be one of these three, you blind yourself to other options. Coyne does not present us a mutually exhaustive set. They do not even have the structure of a mutually exhaustive set (e.g., "A", "B", and "Not A or B"). Therefore, Coyne must be careful on his use of the word "must".

I hold that what people are doing when they make moral judgments is determining whether the desires that motivated an action are desires that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote or inhibit using social tools such as praise or condemnation. There is an element here of evaluating the action. However, this action is only one of many that a particular set of desires can motivate and counts only as one among many in calculating the merit of those desires.

Our feelings count. However, our feelings are as relevant to what is right and wrong as they are to what is true and false. There is a reason for this. Moral claims are capable of being true and false; therefore, basing moral claims on feeling is the same as basing claims about what is true and false on feelings. People have a habit of calling "true" what they want to be true - what they 'feel' is true, and false what they want to be false. However, this is considered a poor justification for a proposition to actually be true or false. The fact that it is commonly done does not make it right.

Here is a fourth thing that can matter in making moral judgments. Even if I am wrong about desirism, it is still a forth option - no worse than the scripture and divine revelation option and perhaps better. Why only three?

From Coyne:

In the end, then, it is possible, though not yet feasible, for science to determine what is moral, simply by investigating the neurological and evolutionary bases of our value judgments.

This does not work.

This is comparable to saying that it is possible, though not yet feasible, for science to determine the chemical structure of Pluto by investigating the neurological and evolutionary basis of those who have beliefs about Pluto.

One cound argue that our beliefs about what is right and wrong are different than our beliefs about Pluto. However, this is an assumption - an assumption that Coyne has not justified and which I hold to be false. Even if it is true, why are we assuming that this is the case without argument? In fact, if there were a burden of proof argument in play here, it would argue for taking claims about right and wrong to be like claims about Pluto as an original assumption. This assumption can be overridden by evidence that they are not alike. There is no such evidence.

Another way of reporting this distinction - and one that philosophers have known about since Hume in the 1700s - is that there is a distinction between the values we have, and the values we should have. It is a distinction repeated in G.E. Moore's criticism of John Stuart Mill - where Moore accuses Mill of failing to distinguish between what we desire and what we should desire - the latter being the concern of morality.

Coyne is providing us a biological account of what values we have. However, he is completely avoiding the question of "What values should we have?

This is what I mean when I write about clearing away the junk. I am not reporting a problem that I have discovered. I am reporting a mistaken inference that has been known in moral philosophy for over 200 years. It is as clear as the distinction between what we DO believe (something we answer by looking at the neurological and evolutionary basis for our beliefs) and what we SHOULD believe.

Krauss has a different view of what matters for morality. Speaking about homosexuality, Krauss wrote:

. . . scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".

Baggini counters this.

There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right - efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviours informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this.

Let us not forget that nature invented the predator and the parasite - the killer whale versus the seal cub, the lion that slaughters its step-children, the preying mantis that kills and eats her mate, and the tarantula hawk - a wasp that lays its young on living tarantulas, which the larvae eat from the inside out keeping the spider alive as long as possible.

However, Baggini's response does not handle the harm issue and sidesteps the proposal that, while rape may provide some evolutionary advantage, a visceral reaction to rape may do so as well. These are not mutually exclusive.

There is more that can be said about each of Krauss' criteria for morality.

To begin with, Krauss provides no criteria for something being innately wrong (whatever that means). All of his criteria are extrinsic to homosexuality - evolutionary impacts, harm, commonality among populations. None of these are properties that you can discover about homosexuality independent of its relationship to other things. They describe no innate properties.

Furthermore, none of these effects define morality.

Let us assume that some alien species comes along with an intent to wipe out the whole human race if one homosexual exists. Homosexuality, now, would have negative evolutionary impacts. That would make it wrong, right? Or, let us assume that a segment of the population wants to kill all homosexuals. Again, this would provide a negative evolutionary impact among those discovered to be homosxual. Would such an interest in killing all homosexuals be self-justifying?

On the issue of harm - punishment is harmful. Fines, imprisonment, and execution all deliver harms to other people. Yet, they are not wrong - or they are not wrong simply on that fact alone. A person opens a new store in the neighborhood driving a competitor out of business. That is a type of harm, but not one that identifies the act as immoral. Exposing a lie may bring harm to the liar (e.g., he loses his job). However, it is not wrong.

And there is commonality among populations. Does this imply that if there was only one homosexual in only one species, that this would constitute immorality? It appears to be the case that we are all the descendants of a single mitochondrial "Eve". Meaning, at one time, the qualities that this person had were unique. For several generations, they were rare - found nowhere else in nature. Were they immoral, up to the point where they became sufficiently common?

Let me repeat, I agree with Krauss that moral properties are subject to scientific investigation. However, Krauss is looking at the wrong set of facts. He is looking at evolved dispositions, rather than at the relationship between malleable desires that can be influenced by praise and condemnation and other desires.

More importantly, he is looking at facts that a moment's reflection should tell him do not work as a standard for morality.

Coyne wants to get rid of morality entirely and talk only about consequences since morality requires free will and free will does not exist.

Desirism, actually, does not require free will. It requires determinism. Desires cause actions and, in turn, some desires can be modified by environmental factors such as praise and condemnation. This deterministic ethics accounts for everything from excuses to mens rea to non-obligatory permissions to negligence and so on.

"Free will" entered into the debate as a mistake. People were looking at the fact that praise and condemnation are not reasonably applied where desires are not malleable or where malleable desires did not play a role in the outcome. Primative thinkers dreamed up the entity "free will" to account for these facts. We have been stuck with that mistake ever since.

Still, this dispute between Coyle and myself is a language dispute. If Coyne wants to eliminate moral terms and talk only about using social tools such as praise and condemnation to mold desires through their effect on the reward system so as to promote desires people generally have many and strong reasons to promote and inhibit desires people have many and strong reasons to inhibit, he may do so. I find this option extremely awkward.

Furthermore, getting rid of morality not only requires getting rid of "right" and "wrong". It requires getting rid of all of those elements mentioned above and then some - excuses, apologies, obligation, non-obligatory permission, prohibition, just versus unjust law, mens rea, consent, and the like. It is a massive project that we have reason to avoid if we can. Because desirism provides an account of all of these practices in a determined world, eliminating morality is a project we can avoid.

Coyne writes, "But in the end, we aren't responsible for our actions in the way most people think, for they stem from aspects of our biology that we don't understand and can't control."

Perhaps, but we are not responsible for our actions the way most people think we are, but we are responsible for our actions in the way that our moral practices requires us to be, and that is what counts.

Finally, I want to address the overall question - whether all answerable questions belong to science, or whether there is room for philosophy.

I invite you to look at the question itself - the question "Do all answerable questions belong to science, or is there room for philosophy?"

THAT question does not belong to science. To hand that question to science would be to beg the question. It would require assuming the truth of the conclusion as one of the premises.

This implies that the question is an answerable question that belongs to philosophy, or it is not an answerable question. If it is the former, then Krauss is wrong. If it is the latter, then Krauss is wrong. Either way, Krauss is wrong.

More importantly, this answer - "It is either an answerable question that belongs to philosophy, or an unanswerable question" - is an answer provided by philosophy, not by science.

It is also the case that the answer, "Morality belongs in the realm of science," which I hold to be true, is a question whose answer belongs in the realm of philosophy - not to science.

So, yes, there are answerable questions that belong to philosophy and not to science. However, moral questions are not among them.