Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Preventing accidental nuclear war

One of my biggest fears is that a nuclear war could start by accident, or as the result of a miscalculation. Some national leader could push a threat too far, an exercise could be misinterpreted, things during a conventional war could get out of control, and cities could suddenly get incinerated.

It seems quite likely that Canada’s major cities are the targets of ex-Soviet missiles spread around Russian subs and silos. We may be the targets of Chinese bombs, as well.

Two important policy objectives seem to be (a) keeping additional countries from developing nuclear weapons (b) reducing the stockpile of weapons possessed by existing nuclear weapon states and (c) building systems that reduce the chances of accidents, including permissive action links to prevent unauthorized use of bombs and delays in hair-trigger systems.

Disaggregated data

About a week ago, I attended a discussion session and social event on ‘data journalism’. To a large degree, it was about converting datasets, many of them collected from governments, into news stories of interest to the general public. You can take crime data, for instance, and process it into a form with a lot of general appeal. The same goes for education, transport, and other topics.

One general point that the discussion reminded me of is the importance of aggregated versus disaggregated data. For example, saying that the average income in Happytown is $75,000 is quite different from providing the individual data points for every person in the town. If you give someone the first piece of data, all they can really do is report it and compare it with similar statistics. If you give them the disaggregated data, they can do all sorts of their own analysis. What do the top and bottom 10% of the population earn? Are there any high or low outsiders?

If the data is embedded in a database with other types of information, you can do even more fancy stuff. Which are the richest neighbourhoods in town? What level of education does the average person earning more than $100,000 possess? If you can link databases together, you can do even more. What kinds of crime are committed in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods? How about in the richest?

All this creates privacy risks, particularly given how data from different databases can be meshed together and used to identify individuals. There is also the risk of errors, if data from different sources is incorrectly integrated, or if the methodology of analysis is not sound. All the more reason why basic statistical literacy is an increasingly important piece of education to possess, for those trying to make sense of the world. Otherwise, you may fall victim to deeply faulty claims. The average income of a Happytown resident who owns a monocle may be $500,000, but that doesn’t mean that buying a monocle will make you rich.

Retiring the Shuttle

This year, after 29 years in operation and two catastrophes, the American Space Shuttle program is shutting down. The Shuttle was always a hacked-together prototype vehicle, never the cheap and dependable satellite-launching workhorse that NASA seemed to promise Congress. Lots of effort and brilliance went into the thing – make no mistake – but trips to space have never been safe or routine.

The Wikipedia entry on the Shuttle details just how costly the thing was, as a way of putting objects 300 or so kilometres above the Earth:

When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or whopping $60,000/kg to LEO [low Earth orbit]

There are things that are worth putting into orbit at those prices – chiefly communication satellites and others designed to observe our planet and the wider universe. Human beings probably aren’t worth it, for now at least. The process of getting out of the atmosphere is perilous and costly, and there is nowhere remotely habitable to go, once you get up there.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Recently, I found John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to be an entertaining distraction from less accessible books I am working on. A couple of days ago, driven by the desire to read something a bit zippier than my many books on environmental economics, I picked up Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. All told, I would say it is a somewhat better book than the one I read before. It includes a few interesting bits of tradecraft, and somewhat more commentary on the business of espionage itself. Le Carré has a talent for writing plausible observations on human character, and expressing them well. This is also clearly a fairly personal book for him.

It’s a decent choice for a summer read, especially if you are a politics and/or security nerd. As a tract on the amorality of the intelligence services, it is also a potentially useful counter to their moral glamorous portrayal in other fiction.

What bears rights?

Arguably, the fundamental right of any entity that has rights is the right to have its interests taken into consideration. That is the rational basis for the Harm Principle (described recently). Entities with interests that we consider morally irrelevant do not have any other rights. For instance, we don’t feel the need to take the interests of a hammer or a clump of dirt seriously when making moral choices. At the same time, it is the right to consideration borne by some entities that forms the foundation upon which claims to any other rights (rights of free speech, to possess property, etc) are based. In order to treat an entity according to a higher-level moral principle such as fairness, it is necessary first to recognize that they bear the right to have their interests considered at all.

Humans as rights-bearers

Generally speaking, humanity grants the right to consideration to all humans. Exactly what that consideration requires can be hotly contested. For instance, someone who is unable to communicate but suffering terribly from a terminal illness might be granted consideration in radically different ways – some people would advocate doing everything possible to keep them alive, despite their suffering. Others might say that the way their interests can be best served is to let them die. Either way, the interests of the person themselves are part of the discussion.

It is also possible that there are objects that are human beings in a certain technical sense, but which do not deserve to have their interests taken into consideration. For instance, this category could include embryos at an early stage of development (or even perhaps at any stage), living bodies that have had their brains completely destroyed, or even frozen corpses at some future time when their re-animation is technically possible.

Non-humans as rights-bearers

We do not apply such a right of consideration to all living things. Rather, we treat many of them simply as means for serving the ends of entities that we do consider to be bearers of rights. In some cases, that is unobjectionable. Nobody can reasonably object to a person shaping a piece of stone into an axe head, without giving any consideration to the piece of stone. Similarly, we have no reason to think that people are unethical when they fail to take the interests of carrots or lettuce into consideration when deciding how to treat them.

When it comes to animals with rich mental lives, however, I think it is quite possible that human beings have inappropriately ignored the right they have to consideration. In slaughtering whales or putting gorillas into cruel circuses, we are behaving extremely callously toward animals that quite possibly have mental lives that possess a similar richness to our own. Arguably, we are also failing to recognize a legitimate right to consideration on the part of animals like pigs, when we pack them together into astonishingly cruel factory farms.

Being a rights-bearer just starts the moral discussion

To be a bearer of rights is to have a claim to consideration recognized by the entities around you that undertake moral reasoning. As such, the question of which entities rights are accorded to says more about the level of ethical conduct of the reasoners than of the subjects. We can choose to ignore what we know about the common characteristics of physical and mental life among animals, and thus treat pigs and gorillas and whales like we treat carrots or stones. In so doing, however, we might be revealing ourselves to be seriously lacking in moral character.

The science fiction author Orson Scott Card describes a moral hierarchy that distinguishes between ‘ramen’ with whom communication is possible and ‘varelse’ with whom it is impossible. While it can certainly be questioned whether communication potential is really the most important factor distinguishing between the ethical status of different beings, he does usefully recognize how the level of consideration accorded to a being may reflect the level of ethical sophistication of the being making the choice, rather than the subject of that choice:

The difference between ramen and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be ramen, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

That said, it does not follow that the most ethical course is to grant moral standing to everything in the universe, from dust mites to clouds of interstellar gas. For one thing, there are very often conflicts between the legitimate interests of rights-bearers. If we inappropriately accord a right to consideration to an entity that really doesn’t deserve it, we may force legitimate rights-bearers to needlessly sacrifice their own interests, in order to protect the meaningless or non-existent interests of that entity. That said, we should be cautious in saying that an entity has no rights whatsoever. Acknowledging that an entity is owed a duty of consideration is not the same thing as saying that it deserves any particular form of treatment, or that its interests should always be favoured.

Just as the ethical conclusions flowing from recognizing a human as rights-bearing can be hotly contested, so too are those for animals. It is possible that we can take the interests of animals seriously and still do things like kill them, experiment on them, eat their corpses, and even make them fight one another for our amusement. We take the interests of human beings seriously, but it is nonetheless potentially defensible in some circumstances to do all of these things: kill them, experiment on them, eat their corpses (say, when they have died naturally and as an alternative to death by starvation), and enjoy watching them fight. Whether the subject in question is human or not, recognition that they bear the right to some sort of consideration does not automatically mean that they must be treated in a particular way – it just starts the conversation about what the ethical way to behave toward them is. It establishes them as part of the moral universe, such as we understand it.

Test for a sentient species: can you run a planet?

In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant.

As of today, however, humanity has more pressing problems. Indeed, it is not at all clear that humanity will be able to survive the next few centuries. We continue to abuse the planet – exhausting non-renewable resources and accumulating dangerous wastes. At the same time, the world is still wired up for a Dr. Strangelove-style nuclear war, with thousands of cities incinerated with thermonuclear bombs, followed by nuclear winter.

In a way, perhaps overcoming those challenges and any others that arise in the next few centuries will be an important test for humanity. If we were to spread through the galaxy now, we would arguably be spreading as a malignancy: a species that cannot manage itself, and which brings the risk of ruin to any place it visits. If we can spend the next few centuries producing a global society that is safe and sustainable, perhaps we will have gained the maturity to carry something valuable outwards – something that better represents the potential of humanity, when compared with the messes we have produced for ourselves at this stage in history.

Mega-libertarianism

For me, John Stewart Mill’s Harm Principle is a key element of libertarian philosophy. It holds that a person should be free to do as they like, until they start causing harm to others. If you want to have an avante garde theatre on your land, that is your right and I cannot object unless the noise is keeping me aware at 3:00am or you start dumping toxic paint into the river from which I drink.

At an election party the other night, however, I spoke with someone who has a more expansive libertarian philosophy than I had previously encountered – one that isn’t especially bothered by harm. They thought the important thing was for individuals to be as unrestricted as possible by government, even if their behaviour is causing harm to others. If you really value liberty for its own sake, perhaps it makes sense to adopt a Wild West ethical philosophy, in which individuals are behaving rightly whenever they try to get what they want. That said, I think this philosophy proves lacking very quickly as soon as some questions are asked.

Basically, the underlying ethic is that the strong should feel free to impose themselves on the weak. When you discard the Harm Principle, you leave people to fend for themselves. If my neighbour has guns and goons and I do not, I have no way to personally prevent him from dumping plutonium into my river, stealing my property, or having me beaten up for expressing my political views. In order to live in a decent society, I think we need to constrain the rights of the powerful. Everyone must be subject to the rule of law, and the law must protect important rights such as the freedom of speech.

A mega-libertarian society which discards the Harm Principle seems to me much like the Hobbesian state of nature. It wouldn’t necessary be quite as chaotic and violent as Hobbes believed, but it would certainly be terribly unjust. Without the Harm Principle, there is no moral basis to condemn rape, robbery, or murder. Under mega-libertarianism, a serial killer is just expressing themselves in their preferred manner, and the government really ought to get off their back.

I can appreciate the libertarian impulse to be skeptical about government and other systems of societal organization. At the same time, we must recognize that the whims of the over-mighty are also a major constraint upon liberty. It is much better to live in a democratic society with the rule of law than to live in a feudal society where military strength determines who is in charge and what the rules will be. In order for a society to be truly free, those who live within it need to adopt reasonable limits on their own behaviour.