The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

¡Hola! Everybody...
Contrary to what many many right wing bloggers and would-be pundits would have you think as foregone conclusions (a priori), very little is clearly self-evident...

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-=[ The Good: Justice ]=-

“Take, then, your paltry Christ, your gentleman God. We want the carpenter’s son, with his saw and hod.”

-- Upton Sinclair, quoted in The Cry for Justice

The idea that justice is more than a virtue that a good government should possess is something most people take for granted. Justice is fundamental to the institutions that transform a simple mass of individuals into a political community in the first place. Justice binds citizens to one another, and then all of them together to government. Justice, as long-standing tradition has it, is central to the justification of political authority. To paraphrase, what are kingdoms without justice but great gangs of thugs?

Saying that justice is central to good government is one thing; attempting to define justice is quite another, and that is what this post will attempt to address. Also, I am jumping to social justice rather quickly, and my starting off point will suffer somewhat; but how can I address the whole issue of justice in a one or two-page Word document?

My father used to like to say that Justice was blind, that if you took her blindfold off, you would see she had dollar signs for eyes... LOL

Let’s start with the basics. My father’s characterization notwithstanding, justice, we might all agree, has something to do with punishment and reward, and something to do with equality, but how to define it? Let’s start with an old definition, by the roman Emperor Justinian, who stated that justice “is the constant and perpetual will to render each his due.”

I know: Whoop-dee-doo!

Taken by itself, this definition doesn’t take us very far, but perhaps it points us the right direction -- a gopod place to start. First, it stresses that justice is a matter of each individual person being treated in the right way; it’s not a matter of whether society in general is rich or poor, culturally rich or culturally barren, and so forth. This doesn’t mean that the idea of justice for groups can be dismissed -- I will look more in depth at that aspect in a later post -- but the primary concern of justice is with how individuals are treated (and yes, this is a cultural bias). Secondly, the “constant and perpetual will” part of the definition reminds us that a central idea of justice is that people must be treated in an evenhanded way (“justice is blind”). There must be consistency in how an individual is treated over time, and there must also be consistency between people, so that if my friend and I have the same qualities, we should receive the same benefits, or the same punishment, depending on the situation.

Consistency explains why acting justly is often a matter of following rules or applying laws, since these guarantee consistency. However, consistency alone is not enough for justice: imagine a law that required that all white people be considered three-fifths of a human being, or that all people of color should be put to death. These examples show that justice also requires relevance; if people are going to be treated differently from one another, it must be predicated on grounds that are relevant to the question of justice. This also shows that where there are no relevant grounds on which to discriminate, justice requires equality: everyone should be treated the same way. This gives us a second requirement beyond mere consistency: justice demands that people should be treated equally unless there are relevant reasons for treating them differently.

One final caveat to my definition: the idea of proportion. This tells us that when people are treated differently for relevant reasons, the treatment they receive should be proportionate to whatever they have done that justifies the inequality. Many would agree, for example, that if people work hard at their jobs that is a relevant reason for paying them more. But, for the sake of justice, there must be proportionality: if Yippie works twice as hard as Yappie, he should be paid twice as much, but not ten times as much.

As you see, I have squeezed a fair amount of mileage from Justinian’s take, but I have not been able to say what it is that people are owed as a matter of justice, nor on what grounds we are justified in treating them differently. In fact, there are no easy answers to these questions. This is in part because people will disagree about what justice requires and because the answer given will depend largely on who is applying the treatment, what treatment is prescribed, and under what circumstances. To a great extent, our ideas of justice are contextual, meaning that before we can decide what is fair we have to know about the situation in which it is being applied. Allow me some room here...

Let’s suppose that I have been given $500 to distribute between five people. What does justice tell me to do? So far, very little. It tells me that I should treat them consistently, that if I treat them differently, that this should be for relevant reasons and that my allocations should be proportionate. Now, let’s fill in some details in different ways and see what distributions suggest themselves. The five people might be my employees, and the $500 might be the bonus they have earned this week, in which case I should consider each individual’s contribution and reward them proportionately. Or, I might be I might be an aid worker charged with distributing the cash to allow people to buy food, in which case I should try to surmise the relative needs of the five and give more to those in greater need. Or perhaps the $500 is a small lottery windfall, and the five people and I are a syndicate, in which case the money should be distributed evenly.

Most here would find my decisions on how to allocate the money under the varying circumstances self-evident, and it shows that though justice is a complicated affair we already have a grasp of what it involves in practice. Justice is not so much a way to measure than a box of tools. Faced with a decision, we know in most cases which tool to use. What is harder to express is a theory of justice. But we need to create a theory because there are going to be cases in which our intuitions will conflict, in which the decisions will not be so clear-cut. This is more so the case when it involves social justice -- justice not only between individuals, but also across a whole society. I shall explore this idea in a later post, but I first need to explore the general principles of justice.

Justice often has more to do with process than actual treatment. Let’s look at criminal justice before I end this post. It matters, of course, that guilty people are punished in proportion to their crime, and that innocent people go free but it is also important that proper procedures (process) are followed in arriving at a verdict. For instance, it matters that both sides are allowed to state their case, that the judge has no stake that would impede his impartiality. This process is important not only because it tends to ensure the right verdicts, but because it affords individuals the respect and right to be heard properly. The main dynamic in the OJ Simpson trial fallout wasn’t so much that he was black (though race certainly was a factor in how people reacted to his case), but that he could afford to rely on resources not often available to the less privileged. For blacks and other people of color, this wasn’t something new: criminal justice has often been an injustice. My father’s admonition is relevant here. For whites, who often experience social institutions from a more advantaged or benevolent position, the OJ case was a travesty of justice.

The above is a poor substitute for beginning a substantive discussion on social justice, but I’m already at one page, so I must move on and hope this suffices for the rest of the discussion.

Paz, Amor y Dinero,

Eddie

Freedom Fries

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m utterly amazed there are goobers out there defending the administration of Bush Junior! LMAOOO! Reminds me of the cynical maxim that it’s a sin to allow a fool to keep his money...

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-=[ Redefining Freedom]=-

Would you like fries with that... ?

When I was growing up, reading Alisa Zino’yevna (aka Ayn Rand) was a family tradition. It was required reading in the Rosario household. My father would often give each one of us something to read and then we would have to discuss it critically. He also made us read Walt Whitman and other American transcendentalists -- which was probably the antithesis of Rand’s “objectivism.” Looking back, I see he was trying to show me how to think critically -- how to hold two opposing ideas at once and come away with something of value and original.

I think Rand appeals to young people because it is a juvenile and self-contradictory philosophy. In fact, previous posts of mine have been a refutation of Rand’s “philosophy.” Her epistemology has been taken apart by others, no need to revisit that here. I mention Rand today because she connects to the first part of my series on the history of humankind’s struggle to define freedom.

By the 1950s, fascism and its antithesis, communism, had redefined freedom, but largely failed to deliver anything resembling freedom when implemented by the likes of Stalin and Mussolini. A ramped up Cold War with the Soviet Union was being waged and the biggest thing then was the Red Scare and the threat of nuclear war. Unbelievably, people were actually buying “bunkers” to protect themselves from radioactive fallout in those days. LOL

In the 1950s, both Rand and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek proposed a new vision of freedom. Their freedom was more a negative type freedom. They asserted that self-interest controlled all human behavior, and the only true measure of what was best for individuals were their belongings or what they were attempting to accumulate. This “market” of getting and hoarding, acted out simultaneously by millions of people in a society as complex and huge as the United States, for example, produced hundreds of millions of individual “decisions” every moment. Hayek suggested there existed a force of nature, the product and consequences of all these individual buying and selling behaviors, which he called the “free market.” At the same time, Ayn Rand’s hugely popular novels, the Fountainhead and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, championed a philosophy of an enlightened self-interest similar to von Hayek’s.

Freedom was being redefined.

Instead of being a collaborative effort, the result of society working together to provide for the basic needs of the individual, the family, and society, freedom was now being refashioned as the individual’s ability and right to act in his or her total freedom for selfish self fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations). Freedom was a negative force in the worldview of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the Chicago School of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand’s objectivism. This freedom was more of a freedom “from” than a freedom “to”: freedom from social obligation, freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection (now perceived as “interference”); freedom to consider one’s needs and wants, because if each individual followed his selfish desires, the mass of individuals acting in concert in a “free market” would result in a utopia.

Yes! The world is flat, burn the fuckin’ olive tree and hock the Lexus!

This vision claims to be the true vision of a free world. Its creators claimed that a world where government limited nothing but violence and all markets were free -- market here meaning the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations) -- had never before been attempted. Their opponents, progressives and liberals, pointed out that their system had in fact been tried many times throughout history, and was the history of every civilization of the most chaotic eras. Lacking a true social contract and interdependence, these societies were characterized by physical and economic violence. In this social schematic, those most willing and able to plunder would rise to the top of the economic heap. In the past, they were rightfully called robber barons.

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, think tanks funded by wealthy individuals and multinational corporations joined forces with obedient politicians to win the “battle of ideas.” Greed, combined with a blind belief in free markets, was their dogma. This movement brought into power both the feeble-minded Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Reagan would oversee the greatest exchange of wealth and the destruction of Labor. Both Thatcher and Reagan would turn government into a force against labor, both busting powerful unions in their respective countries. Both “freed” markets by dropping tariffs and undoing regulations. In both instances, industry fled both countries, to wherever labor was cheapest, and the middle class was fucked without so much as a kiss.

This new economic religion would be used in Chile with disastrous results. Poverty and wealth gaps would increase dramatically and the privatization of the social security system threw even more people into abject poverty. Of course, a few bankers, industrialists, and politicians became wealthy.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” not satisfied with the failures their policies created in Chile, would apply this system with equally disastrous results in Russia. Undaunted and in need of a new country to experiment on, they found an ally with George W. Bush, whose entire cabinet was made up of people who shared the von Hayek/ Rand worldview. The result, as we all have seen, has been a failure of historic proportions. Well-paying jobs were replaced with jobs that demanded workers ask the question, “Do you want fries with that?” with social mobility dropping and wealth gaps increasing to levels not seen for over a hundred years.

This is where we are living today and there are people still demanding we continue on this road. Next: my review of Michael Moore’s film...

Eddie

The Good, The Bad &The Ugly, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
As promised, the follow-up to yesterday’s post. Again, it’s a little long, but that can’t be avoided considering the topic. I guess this will help in contextualizing my critique on conservatives of all types.

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-=[ The Bad: Social Justice ]=-

“We were taught... that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle... Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago, the question was asked, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?”

-- Eugene V. Debs, 1908 speech

So far, I have looked at justice in general terms, not the role that governments play in promoting it. For the rest of this post, I will explore the idea of social justice -- the idea that we can create a set of social and political institutions that ensures the just distribution of benefits and costs throughout a society.

The idea first emerged in the late 19^th century, and stood at the heart of political debate throughout the 20^th. It requires that the state become much more involved in justice than earlier times. It was also a controversial idea: whereas only a few extremists have attacked the idea of justice, social justice has been ridiculed, mainly by critics from the libertarian right, who view it as a transgression against personal freedom, especially the economic freedom they feel a market economy requires.

Let’s look at these attacks more closely. Critics such as the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued that there was a fundamental error involved in talking (!) about social justice in the first place. According to Hayek (and many self-loathing neocons that call themselves “libertarians” LOL!), justice is a consequence of individual actions. An action is unjust when it violates a general societal rule that allows members of a society to interact with one another. For example, theft is unjust because it violates a rule protecting property. If we look at how resources -- money, property, employment opportunities, and so forth -- are distributed across a society, we cannot describe this as either just or unjust, since it is a consequence not from the actions of a single mediator, but from the actions and decisions of millions of separate individuals, none of whom intended to create this or any other outcome in particular.

To be fair, Hayek is right to point out that “social distribution” cannot be attributed to any single distributing agency or entity, given the complexity of any contemporary society in the postmodern world. But Hayek’s fundamental error -- what he overlooks -- is that the distributive pattern we observe around us does, generally speaking, depends on the institutions we have created , consciously or not. For example, the rules governing property and contracts, the system of taxation, the level of public expenditure on health care, education, housing, and employment policies, etc. -- these are all institutions that have been shaped and can be changed by political decision, and so if we leave things as they are, that is the same as accepting the existing distribution of resources. In addition (let’s not get all new), we can certainly understand what the effect of proposed institutional change would be.

To that extent, the distribution of resources across society -- who gets what benefits, how wide the spread of incomes will be, etc. -- is something that, at least in a democracy, is under our collective control. It is perfectly reasonable, then, to ask what social justice would ask us to do.

But Hayek isn’t done yet. His criticism begs the question of whether social justice is something we should pursue. Hayek’s second claim is that, in attempting to make the distribution of resources match up to justice, we would destroy economic freedom and in that way kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. For the sake of argument, let’s assume Hayek is right when he claims that a market economy is the most effective way of organizing production and trade (this is not an a priori), and that any alternative would involve a reduction of the living standards in economically advanced societies. The question then is whether striving for social justice means turning our back on the market economy, or whether it’s possible to pursue social justice through a market economy, one shaped in the right way and that has other social institutions working alongside it.

These questions, my friends, and how they have been answered, are at the core of today’s “financial meltdown.”

In this respect, we need to look at different ways of interpreting the idea of social justice. The most radical version, touted by Marxists and some communitarian anarchists, reduces social justice to the principles of equality and need. A just society, in this view, is one in which each member contributes to the best of his or her ability, but resources are distributed according to need, with any resulting surplus distributed evenly. There is no consideration here for the idea that people need incentives, or deserve material rewards for making their contribution.

The question here becomes, could such a society exist?

On a small scale, it undoubtedly has. In addition, China has definitely put a crimp on the notion that communism has died. Still, the question remains whether a large society could successfully practice social justice in this form.

There is, however, a less radical view of social justice which has been embraced by many democratic socialists and contemporary liberals. From this point of view, social justice requires the equal distribution of some social benefits -- especially equal rights of citizenship such as voting and freedom of speech. It requires that some benefits be distributed on the basis of need, so that everyone is guaranteed an adequate income, access to health care and housing, etc. However, it also allows for other resources to be distributed unequally, so long as there is equal opportunity for people trying to acquire a larger share. These inequalities may be justified on the grounds of merit (“desert”), or on the grounds that by giving people material incentives to work hard and produce goods that other people want, all of society benefits.

Arguably, the most influential interpretation of this form of social justice was developed by John Rawls (Lou Rawls’ lighter-skinned step-brother *grin*) who argued in his Theory of Justice that a just society must fulfill three conditions. First, it must give each member the most extensive of basic liberties that is consistent with the same liberty for everyone else. Second, social positions possessing greater advantages, higher paying jobs, for example, must be open to everyone on the basis of equality of opportunity. Third, inequalities of income and wealth are justified when they can be shown to benefit the least advantaged members of society -- in other words when they provide incentives that raise society’s productivity and in that way allow more resources to be channeled to those at the bottom of the heap.

Rawls’s theory of justice obviously makes room for a market economy. Rawls’s third principle allows for the possibility for people to keep at least part of the gain they make through producing goods and services for the market if they are going to be sufficiently motivated to work hard and use their talents in the most productive way. This demolishes Hayek’s claim that social justice and market freedom are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, a market economy governed by Rawlsian principles would look completely different from from the economic systems of modern liberal democracies.

For one, Rawls’ idea of equality of opportunity is radical. It is not enough that positions of advantage should be given to those who can be shown to be better qualified to hold them. It must also be true that applicants have had an equal opportunity to become qualified. What this means is that from the moment of birth, people of equal talent and motivation should be afforded the same opportunities in education and elsewhere.

Obviously, this is not the case in any existing society. Furthermore, Rawls’ third principle, often called the difference principle, allows inequalities only when they can be shown to benefit the worst off of society. In actual practice this would mean that governments would set tax rates so that benefits were continually redistributed to benefit all of society. Although most democratic societies have so-called progressive tax structures, they fall far short of Rawls’ requirement.

My own view is that a theory of social justice should retain Rawls’ first two principles -- equal liberty and equality of opportunity -- but replace the difference principle with two others. The first is that of a guaranteed social minimum, understood as a set of needs that must be met in order to assure every citizen a decent life. This minimum is not fixed, but changes over time and within different societies. In a debate during the last presidential election, it was asked if each candidate considered health care a right or a privilege. Their respective answers were telling... The second is one of merit (desert). Inequalities of income and wealth should be proportional, measured by their success in producing goods and services other people need and want.

Like Rawls’ theory, these principles don’t conflict with a market economy -- at least not in the sense that it entails getting rid of it. However, they do require the construction and maintenance of an extensive web of interlocking social safety nets, as well as a flexible legal system within which the market economy works so that there is a real link between what people contribute and what they receive as compensation for that contribution.

Much of the economic turmoil we face today is a directr result of decades of lax governmental oversight combined with an almost slavish devtion toward free market principles. Therefore, it is important for people to think about these matters, to question the validity of ther apostles of the market.

Of course this would require a real change to the way capitalist countries operate, since the existing rules of property and inheritance allow people to reap huge rewards by virtue of luck, inherited wealth, corporate position, etc. -- factors all unrelated to their contribution to society. What most conservatives and libertarians alike all fear is that the pursuit of social justice will take us towards a form of market socialism in which the means are owned by those work in them rather than by outside shareholders, so that the profits can be shared among the actual producers. I don't think this is something to be feared but rather something to be pursued. This is not the communist utopia espoused by Marxists and other radical socialists, since it also allows for harder working and more talented individuals to reap the fruits of their labor. Still, it takes us far away from the failed political agenda of the present, at least as far as liberal democracies are concerned.

Social justice, like democracy, will always be unfinished project. It is up to us to envision what a just society should look like, without losing our pragmatism nor delude ourselves in fantasies. I believe, like many, that the struggle for social justice has been sabotaged by global developments that place the market before the concerns of people -- before the concerns of justice. It strikes me as the ultimate irony to hear others go into the “people are so stupid rants” without paying attention to the larger, more powerful forces at play. What good is intelligence or critical thinking in the face of a global movement in which social justice is scrapped in favor of the bottom line?

Paz y Amor,

Eddie

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, pt. I

¡Hola! Everybody...
I may not be able to finish the following post today, but I think it addresses some key questions. Questions that many bloggers and would-be pundits treat as an a priori in their rants. As you will see, very little is clearly self-evident... I started this as one post, but it quickly grew too large...

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-=[ The Good: Justice ]=-

“Take, then, your paltry Christ, your gentleman God. We want the carpenter’s son, with his saw and hod.”

-- Upton Sinclair, quoted in The Cry for Justice

The idea that justice is more than a virtue that a good government should possess is something most people take for granted. Justice is fundamental to the institutions that transform a mass of individuals into a political community in the first place. Justice binds citizens to one another, and then all of them together to government. Justice, as long-standing tradition has it, is central to the justification of political authority. To paraphrase, what are kingdoms without justice but great gangs of thugs?

Saying that justice is central to good government is one thing; attempting to define justice is quite another, and that is what this post will attempt to address. Also, I am jumping to social justice rather quickly, and my starting off point will suffer somewhat; but how can I address the whole issue of justice in a one or two-page Word document?

My father used to like to say that Justice was blind, that if you took her blindfold off, you would see she had dollar signs for eyes... LOL

Let’s start with the basics. My father’s characterization notwithstanding, justice, we might all agree, has something to do with punishment and reward, and something to do with equality, but how to define it? Let’s start with an old definition, by the roman Emperor Justinian, who stated that justice “is the constant and perpetual will to render each his due.”

Whoop-dee-doo! LOL

Taken by itself, this definition doesn’t take us very far, but perhaps it points us the right direction. First, it stresses that justice is a matter of each individual person being treated in the right way; it’s not a matter of whether society in general is rich or poor, culturally rich or culturally barren, and so forth. This doesn’t mean that the idea of justice for groups can be dismissed -- I will look more in depth at that aspect later -- but the primary concern of justice is with how individuals are treated (and yes, this is a cultural bias). Secondly, the “constant and perpetual will” part of the definition reminds us that a central idea of justice is that people must be treated in an evenhanded way (“justice is blind”). There must be consistency in how an individual is treated over time, and there must also be consistency between people, so that if my friend and I have the same qualities, we should receive the same benefits, or the same punishment, depending on the situation.

Consistency explains why acting justly is often a matter of following rules or applying laws, since these guarantee consistency. However, consistency alone is not enough for justice: imagine a law that required that all white people be considered three-fifths of a human being, or that all people of color should be put to death. These examples show that justice also requires relevance; if people are going to be treated differently from one another, it must be predicated on grounds that are relevant to the question of justice. This also shows that where there are no relevant grounds on which to discriminate, justice requires equality: everyone should be treated the same way. This gives us a second requirement beyond mere consistency: justice demands that people should be treated equally unless there are relevant reasons for treating them differently.

One final caveat to my definition: the idea of proportion. This tells us that when people are treated differently for relevant reasons, the treatment they receive should be proportionate to whatever they have done that justifies the inequality. Many would agree, for example, that if people work hard at their jobs that is a relevant reason for paying them more. But, for the sake of justice, there must be proportionality: if Yippie works twice as hard as Yappie, he should be paid twice as much, but not ten times as much.

As you see, I have squeezed a fair amount of mileage from Justinian’s take, but I have not been able to say what it is that people are owed as a matter of justice, nor on what grounds we are justified in treating them differently. In fact, there are no easy answers to these questions. This is in part because people will disagree about what justice requires and because the answer given will depend largely on who is doing the treating, what treatment is given, and under what circumstances. To a great extent, our ideas of justice are contextual, meaning that before we can decide what is fair we have to know about the situation in which it is being applied. Allow me some room here...

Let’s suppose that I have been given $500 to distribute between five people. What does justice tell me to do? So far, very little. It tells me that I should treat them consistently, that if I treat them differently, that this should be for relevant reasons and that my allocations should be proportionate. Now, let’s fill in some details. in different ways and see what distributions suggest themselves. The five people might be my employees, and the $500 might be the bonus they have earned this week, in which case I should consider each individual’s contribution and reward them proportionately. Or, I might be I might be an aid worker charged with distributing the cash to allow people to buy food, in which case I should try to surmise the relative needs of the five and give more to those in greater need. Or perhaps the $500 is a small lottery windfall, and the five people and I are a syndicate, in which case the money should be distributed evenly.

Most here would find my decisions on how to allocate the money under the varying circumstances self-evident, and it shows that, though justice is a complicated affair, we already have a grasp of what it involves in practice. Justice is not so much a way to measure than a box of tools. Faced with a decision, we know in most cases which tool to use. What is harder to express is a theory of justice. But we need to create a theory because there are going to be cases in which our intuitions will conflict, in which the decisions will not be so clear-cut. This is more so the case when it involves social justice -- justice not only between individuals, but also across a whole society. I shall explore this idea in a later post, but I first need to explore the general principles of justice.

Justice often has more to do with process than actual treatment. Let’s look at criminal justice before I end this post. It matters, of course, that guilty people are punished in proportion to their crime, and that innocent people go free but it is also important that proper procedures (process) are followed in arriving at a verdict. For instance, it matters that both sides are allowed to state their case, that the judge has no stake that would impede his impartiality. This process is important not only because it tends to ensure the right verdicts, but because it affords individuals the respect and right to be heard properly. The main dynamic in the OJ Simpson trial fallout wasn’t just that he was black, but that he could afford to rely on resources not often available to the less privileged. For blacks and other people of color, this wasn’t something new: criminal justice has often been an injustice. My father’s admonition is relevant here. For whites, who often experience social institutions from a more advantaged or benevolent position, the OJ case was a travesty of justice.

The above is a poor substitute for beginning a substantive discussion on social justice, but I’m already at one page, so I must move on and hope this suffices for the rest of the discussion.

Love,

Eddie