Politics – Page 213 – a sibilant intake of breath

Moral justifications for foreign aid

The secular moral justifications for giving aid seems to be divided between two strains: one focusing on payments being made in compensation for past or present harmful activity on the part of the giver (somewhat akin to domestic tort law) and one focusing on redistribution for reasons unrelated to any harm done by the giver to the receiver.

Note that this listing is meant to cover moral justifications only: self-interested rational calculations, like the prospect of creating new markets, are not being considered. The listing is meant to include justifications both for development aid used to build economic and social capacity over time and humanitarian aid used to help address immediate crises. I am not considering religious forms of morality.

Retributive:

Compensation for past colonialism (including past support for repugnant but allied regimes during the Cold War and similar periods)
Partial or complete redress for ongoing harmful activities (economic policies harmful to poor countries, exploitative international labour practices, arms sales, providing markets for illegal drugs and other problematic commodities, CO2 emissions, etc)

Redistributive:

Providing funds and resources required to attain a basic standard of living, predicated on a notion of essential human rights
Paying to reduce total human suffering, especially among the innocent
Transferring wealth from those who already have a large amount, and thus derive less utility from each additional dollar, to those who have a small amount and thus gain more utility at the margin
Giving aid based on a Rawlsian conception of hypothetical contract based on a veil of ignorance
Compensating for the fact that some are poor and some are rich for arbitrary reasons, such as where they were born (See prior discussion about the morality of inequality)
Giving aid based on the idea that the capacity to give charity and the existence of a world where it is required makes doing so obligatory for the giver

I am writing a paper for my developing world seminar on: “What is the moral case for wealthy countries to give aid to poorer countries? What kind of aid (if any) is justified?” and trying to come up with a comprehensive list of general reasons. Can anyone add to the list above?

Thinking about social roles

While sitting in Starbucks and walking home – the cold seems to have frozen my bicycle lock – I have been thinking about three social roles relevant to my thesis; I shall call them the ‘Pure Advocate’, the ‘Pure Expert’, and the ‘Hybrid’ roles. Each type of actor has an important part to play, in the determination of policy, and each treats information and preferences in ways conditioned by their social role. For the purposes of this discussion, they are ideal characters who reflect only their assumed or assigned roles and not their own interests in any other way.

Continue reading “Thinking about social roles”

Ethical consumerism: worthwhile or harmful?

In the December 9th issue of The Economist, which I am just starting today, they come out against organic food, Fair Trade, and the idea that buying locally grown food is superior to relying on big retailers and large commercial farms (Leader and article). Organic food means producing lower yields for the same area of land: a big problem when you have a growing population and a desire to preserve wilderness. Fair Trade keeps farmers in poverty by encouraging farmers to keep growing commodities with volatile prices and low margins; moreover, most of the premium consumers pay goes to the retailer, rather than the farmer. As for local food, they say that large scale farming and food retailing produce food using less energy and resources (sheep are cheaper to farm in New Zealand and ship to the UK than to farm here). The solutions to problems like poverty and climate change, therefore, lie in carbon taxes, reform of agricultural trade policy, and the like.

Fair trade has always been a somewhat problematic concept, in my eyes. The whole basis for the legitimacy of exchange is in the process: the voluntary nature of the agreement means that both people who engage in it must perceive themselves to benefit. Now, there can be problems with this:

The people may be wrong about what is in their interests
Third parties may be affected
The choice to trade may not be voluntary

All of these are real problems in many economic circumstances, but it is not clear why paying more for a label alleviates any of them. If we abandon the idea that the legitimacy of exchange is confirmed through its voluntarism, then we are left with the task of developing a comprehensive framework based on a teleological conception of justice (what people end up with, as opposed to how they get it). Even if that is desirable, achieving it is not simply a matter of paying a few more dollars a week for coffee or bananas.

As for the problems with local and organic food, the issues there are primarily empirical and thus hard for me to evaluate. If the price of carbon emissions was included in that of food (and all other products), I would see little problem in eating tomatoes from Guatemala or apples from New Zealand. Similar criticisms are leveled in Michael F. Maniates’ interesting article Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?. Maniates’ major point is that you will never get anywhere with a few token individual gestures. What is necessary is the widespread alteration of the incentives presented to individuals. Otherwise, you have a few people who salve their consciences by walking to work and buying from a farmers’ market, while not actually doing anything to address the problems with which they are supposedly concerned.

While the position taken by both The Economist and Maniates may overstate the point, both are worth reading for those who have accepted uncritically the idea that important change can be brought about through such ethical purchasing.

PS. Unfortunately, Oxford doesn’t have full text access to the journal Global Environmental Politics. If someone at UBC or another school could email me the PDF, it will save me a trip to the library and some photocopying costs, not to mention the integrity of the spine of their August 2001 issue. Here is a link to the page on their site for this article and another to a Google Scholar search that has it as the top hit.

[Update: 1:10am] A friend has sent me a much appreciated copy of the above requested PDF.

Madness and unlikely meetings

Aside from the man at the tourist information booth where we left our bags, the first person who we met in Goreme was Harun: a 24 year old banker from Istanbul off on a vacation in Cappadocia with his friend for a few days. During our time there, we saw them constantly. We got onto a tour bus and there they were. We stepped into a restaurant or walked down a street and his distictiely dyed grey hair would appear.

This evening, my father and I took a ferry across the Bosphorus to Kadikoy on the Asian side. At a Red Crescent blood donation centre, my father met a huge and friendly officer in the Turkish naval special forces who gave us a tour of the area. We visited his favourite nut shop and had tea. Shortly after leaving him so that he could go to his Aikido practice, my father and I were astonished to see Harun. In a city of fifteen million, we ran into the same guy who we saw constantly in a small town 800km away.

We shared our astonishment, then got coffee in an area that could have been transplanted anywhere from Helsinki to Robson Street in Vancouver. There was a Starbucks that could have been shrink-wrapped and shipped from Seattle. In the coffee shop we visited, everything was equally familiar, barring the photo of Ataturk on the wall.

This morning, we took a much more thorough tour of the Topkapi Palace, former seat of the Ottoman Empire. One notable feature, in the harem, is “The Cage.” Hoping to avoid the need to commit fratricide, a sultan decided to simply imprison all relatives with a claim to the throne along with food, opium, and concubines. To prevent the generation of any additional claimants, any women impregnated by those in the cage would be swiftly drowned. Unfortunately, those who emerged after decades in the cage, after a previous sultan died, were often mad. One had the grand vizier executed after a complaint that the harem was too cold one day; he also had all 280 palace concubines drowned in the Bosphorus (though one did escape from her weighted sack and get taken to Paris by a passing French merchant vessel). I joked to my father that prime ministers in Westminster style democracies might see merit in such a cage for finance ministers.

Tomorrow may well involve an expedition across the Sea of Marmara, but that remains to be planned over a few glasses of apple tea.

Gay marriage back under debate

Most annoyingly, it seems that Canada’s Conservative Party is trotting out gay marriage, which is presently legal in Canada, for new Parliamentary debate.

As I have written before, Parliament does not have the right to stop gay people from getting married. The right to not suffer discrimination supersedes the authority of Parliament to legislate, by virtue of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not a right that can be restricted in keeping with “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” While the Notwithstanding Clause could be used to nullify that legality, doing so would be profoundly illiberal.

The whole thing is likely to be a vote-loser for the Tories, since even Canadians who have problems with gay marriage now generally consider the matter settled. Hopefully, the Tories will take some well-deserved flak for this political theatre and all parties will realize that they should leave the matter as it stands in the future.

My previous entries on this are here: 1 February 2006 and 3 June 2006.

Liberal conference concluded

So, Ignatieff is out. I knew nothing about the other candidates, so I cannot really say anything worthwhile. He may have made debate more interesting, but turning the Federal Liberal Party into a group that can win the next election is obviously foremost in the minds of supporters. Given the egregious environmental policies of the Harper government, I wish more power to them.

Taylor Owen knows more. So do Tim and Tristan. Doubtless, many more politically minded Canadian blogging friends of mine will weigh in soon. Who would have expected that to be such a substantial group?

I am off to bed, but please link additional relevant items in comments.

The Devil Wears Prada

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.
-Edmund Burke

Through a combination of circumstances that was rather unusual, I ended up watching The Devil Wears Prada with my father at the Phoenix Cinema around midnight.

Prior to seeing the film, I never really understood the virulence with which some people and groups reject the superficiality and extravagance of capitalism. As a result of the film, I now feel more as though I understand the various revolutionaries of the twentieth century and before who sought to smash this wasteful and myopic parasite within society.

Thankfully, the film itself was probably a misrepresentation. In reality, those people with intelligence and resources must be concerned with the millions dying of AIDS, the dangers of nuclear war, increasing authoritarianism in Russia, climate change, and all the rest. Mustn’t they?

Live-blogging Keohane

Anyone interested in reading about Robert Keohane’s presentation to the Global Economic Governance Seminar can do so on my wiki. There is still nearly an hour in the session, so if someone posts a clever question as a comment, I will try to ask it. I doubt anyone will do so in time, but it would be a neat demonstration of the emerging capabilities of internet technology in education.

Since this is a publicly held lecture, I don’t see any reason whatsoever for which the notes should not be available. Those who don’t know who Robert Keohane is may want to have a look at the Wikipedia entry on him.

[Update: 7:30pm] Robert Keohane’s second presentation, given at Nuffield on anti-Americanism, was well argued but not too far off the conventional wisdom. I am here taking “the conventional wisdom” to be that in a survey on Anti-Americanism that I am almost sure ran in The Economist during the last couple of years.

Basically: it does exist, more so in the Middle East than anywhere else. The Iraq war has exacerbated it almost everywhere, but the biggest turn for the worse has been in Europe. The policy impact of Anti-Americanism is not very clear. Finally, lots of what would be taken as a legitimate political stance if expressed by an American at home is taken as Anti-Americanism elsewhere.

Keohane distinguished four sorts of Anti-Americanism, three of which have been expressed on this blog. The first was the kind grounded in the belief that the United States is not living up to its own values: what he called Liberal Anti-Americanism. Guantanamo, and everything that word conjures up, gives you the idea. The second is social Anti-Americanism: for instance, objections to the death penalty of the absence of state funded health care. The third is Anti-Americanism based on fear of encroachment into the domestic jurisdiction of your state, what he called the state sovereignty variety. The last was radical Anti-Americanism, which I would suggest is distinguished more by the language used to express it, the degree to which the positions taken are extreme, and the kind of actions justified using it than by the kind of analysis that underscores the rational components thereof.

Quebec and nationhood

First Ignatieff said it, and now Stephen Harper has: ‘Quebec is a nation.’

The claim is a tricky one, for a number of reasons. ‘Quebec’ is a federal component of Canada: a province granted particular jurisdictions and roles under Canadian law. Like some other parts of the country, it includes a minority population with unique linguistic, educational, and other concerns. While I am perfectly willing to accept that French Canadians may constitute a “large aggregate of communities and individuals united by factors such as common descent, language, culture, history, or occupation of the same territory, so as to form a distinct people,” to take the definition from the OED, it is clear that Quebec is not synonymous with French Canadians.

The French Canadian nation does not occupy Quebec to the exclusion of other groups. There are Anglophone Canadians, recent immigrants, members of the First Nations, and others. Some, like the Cree, have considerable historical precedence over the settlers of New France; other have arrived recently enough to be subject to the special language laws the province has enacted in recent decades. Just as French Canadians must be given appropriate treatment within the wider federation of Canada, so too do other minority groups within Quebec deserve to be treated with fairness and due consideration under the law. Empowering the government of Quebec with special rights to represent the French Canadian nation must not diminish its obligation to honour the rights of other groups within the province.

The French Canadian nation (if it makes sense to treat it monolithically), is also not confined within the borders of the province of Quebec. New Brunswick is officially bilingual, and there are French speakers and people of French descent throughout the entire country. As such, dealing with Quebec and dealing with the full ramifications of that minority issue are not one and the same.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, concrete policy developments will arise as the result of these declarations. I do not think that recognizing French Canada as a nation, in the sense quoted above, is a threat to the integrity of Canada any more than recognizing the rights of First Nations peoples has been. Being able to accommodate different groups with competing claims is, after all, the root purpose of federalism. Given demographic shifts in Quebec, it makes less and less sense to conflate the issue of French Canadian identity with that geographic zone. Hopefully, the declarations from Ignatieff and Harper have just been pragmatic recognitions of the above.

Camera phones and police brutality

One very considerable advantage of the greater dissemination of video phones is increased ability to effectively document police brutality and other abuses of power. A recent example example involves UCLA police officers gratuitously using tazers on students in a library. While that situation cannot be entirely understood from the YouTube video, it supports testimony given elsewhere that the use of force was excessive and inappropriate. Hopefully, these tazer-happy UCLA police officers will end up in jail. At least one other incident filmed with a camera phone and uploaded to YouTube is being investigated by the FBI. That incident is also discussed in this editorial.

As I have said again and again here: protection of the individual from unreasonable or arbitrary power – in the hands of government and its agents – is a crucial part of the individual security of all citizens in democratic states. In a world where normal activities increasingly take place within sight of CCTV cameras, it’s nice to see that recording technology can also work for the protection of individuals or – at least – improve the odds of things being set to rights after abuse takes place.

Just don’t expect for it to be impossible for people to determine whose camera was used to shoot the video. Apparently, output from digital cameras can be linked to the specific unit that produced it.