“Political Philosophy & Taxation” conference

Via Thom Brooks comes news of this conference at UCL (which is free and open to all) in September. The conference description reads:

This conference on Political Philosophy and Taxation will address the issue of how the activities of the state should best be funded. The conference will bring together a number of leading political philosophers, as well as a number of other scholars working at the intersection of political philosophy with economics, law and social policy. It will further the state of current research on taxation within political philosophy, as well as facilitating productive interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic.

Some of the talk topics sound pretty interesting. I reckon I’ll toddle on down to this.

A worry of mine (democracy, procedural fairness and vote-selling)

Right, I’m sure there’s a pretty simple solution to this, but I just can’t think of it. By way of background, a student in Canada has been charged with trying to sell his vote on eBay. It was discussion of this news story on a forum I read that prompted this worry.

Basically, I assume that selling (or trying to sell) your vote is wrong and should not be permitted. But I was thinking about this, and following a discussion with some libertarian-minded types I’m not sure if there’s a principled way of ruling out the selling of one’s vote. For the purposes of this problem, I take democracy to be characterised by procedural fairness in which everyone’s preference is weighted equally, and there being a formal link between people’s preferences and the decision enacted (this is Brian Barry’s minimalist definition of democracy in his ‘Is Democracy Special?’, printed in his Democracy and Power).

Anyway, my initial thought was something like “if A buy’s B’s vote, then A has twice as many votes as C.  Therefore, preferences are not being weighted equally so there’s no longer procedural fairness”.  But a libertarian-minded poster pointed out that if the selling of votes doesn’t necessarily seem to violate this.  For, B could say “our preferences are weighted the same.  It’s simply the case that I prefer whomever A prefers, provided A pays me $50″.

Anyway, that’s basically the problem.  I’m sure I’m being stupid and missing some obvious way out of this predicament though.  So yeah … if we have a minimalist understanding of democracy, can we prohibit the selling of votes in a principled way without appealing to a richer understanding of democracy?

Bang on the money

“Now Labour plans to bar white men from jobs” – just one of the recent screaming tabloid headlines about the Equality Bill.

[...]

I’m not sure what is worse – believing that the person who wrote the headline was so ignorant of the story they thought it was true – or so cynical they were happy to write it knowing it wasn’t.

That’s Lynne Featherstone MP (Lib-Dem, Hornsey & Wood Green) on tabloid coverage on th new Equality Bill, over at Liberal Conspiracy.

Wow!

This is seriously cool. It’s a knife that can inject compressed gas into your target.

The manufacturers are mainly aiming it at hunters and divers (ie. to fend off sharks etc), as they claim it can drop many pretty large predators. Not sure how much use it’d be against a big land predator - no matter how cool your knife is, I reckon if a bear jumps out at you you’re pretty damn dead.

As for sharks, this double hard bastard doesn’t need no fancy knife.

Hat-tip: LPUK

Ho ho ho …

Over at CT, John Holbo writes:

But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.

Shame on the BBC

This report says that:

the think-tank The Fabian Society says it [the word 'chav' - Peter] is sneering and patronising, and should be banned

Now, it’s the “should be banned bit” I’m interested in, because it seems fairly obvious that banning the use of the word ‘chav’ would be a stupid policy move. And unless the Fabians have suddenly turned into colossal idiots, it’d be very surprising if they suggested such a measure. Does the Beeb offer us any evidence in favour of the claim that the Fabians think the word ‘chav’ ought be banned? Nope - none of the quotes in the rest of the report support such a claim. Why then has such misinformation been able to get into the report?

You expect this sort of distortion from sectors of the printed press, but not from the Beeb.

Thankfully, the mendacious claim seems not to have made it into this report. Clearly whoever edited that second one is able to do their job. For what the Fabians actually say, see here.

EDIT: Leading Conservative blogger Iain Dale seems to think that similar thoughts apply to using the word ‘toff’. I’m quite open to that line of thought actually.

EDIT2: In another piece, the normally excellent Dale makes the same stupid error that the Beeb does. This is despite the fact he’s clearly read (or at least skim-read) what the Fabians actually released, or else he wouldn’t be able to satirise it (see my first Edit). Poor form Iain.

What is an atheist?

Jean Kazez tries to define ‘atheism’ over at TPM blog.  As her draft definition, she takes it to be:

Atheism is the belief that there is no god (and there are no gods). The belief can be held explicitly and expressed; the atheist may think and say “God does not exist.” Or the belief can be merely implicit and dispositional. A thoroughgoing materialist is an atheist, but possibly only implicitly; she may never have confronted the question, but if asked whether there’s a god (or gods), she would respond negatively. An atheist can be certain there is no god or merely consider the thesis very probable. Well-known atheist Richard Dawkins assigns the non-existence of God a probability of 6 out of 7. Thus, atheism encompasses a range of attitudes, some overt and firm, some not. But to be an atheist it’s not enough merely to lack a belief in God. Agnostics, babies, and dogs satisfy that description, and none are atheists. Implicitly or explicitly, with certainty or without, an atheist has a view: that God does not exist.

That sounds absolutely fine to me.  Can anyone think of any problems with that?  I can’t.

Religious Discrimination, Again

This is an interesting story - one on which I’m not sure of my opinion.

A marriage registrar was harassed for refusing to conduct same-sex ceremonies, a tribunal has ruled.

Lillian Ladele, who said the civil partnership ceremonies went against her Christian faith, hailed the decision as a “victory for religious liberty”.

Brett over at Harry’s Place thinks this is a stupid decision, which sets a dangerous precedent. For an opposing view look to His Grace. For Stonewall’s response, see here.

As I said above, I’m not sure of my view on this. Whilst I disagree with Ladele’s beliefs that civil partnerships are ’sinful’, that’s not the relevant issue. The more important issue is whether the employment tribunal ruled correctly - is it reasonable for us to make these sort of provisions for people’s sincerely held religious beliefs?

If it is reasonable, then it’s important to make it clear that these are not distinctly religious ’special privileges’. If it’s reasonable for us to make provisions for religious people’s sincerely held ethical beliefs, then we ought also make provisions for non-religious people’s sincerely held ethical beliefs. So, if an atheist or agnostic didn’t want to perform civil partnerships, if we allow Ladele to not perform them, I can’t see a good reason to not give the hypothetical atheist or agnostic the same treatment. If that’s right, then this isn’t a case of giving the religious ’special privileges’ or anything like that. Instead, it’s taking people’s sincere (if misguided) ethical beliefs seriously and making provisions for them. I would tentatively say that that’s a good thing.

Of course, in some situations there may be excellent reasons why we should not make special provisions. Imagine if the council in question only hired one registrar (Ladele), and Ladele refused to perform civil partnership ceremonies. In that situation, accomating Ladele’s ethical beliefs would amount to an effective prohibition in that area on civil partnerships, and clearly that would be wrong. Or, suppose that whilst there are multiple registrars, finding a different one would be very costly to the council. If the cost were sufficiently high, then this would make accomodating Ladele unreasonable. I stress though, that these are tentative judgements of mine.

One of the arguments offered against this ruling is that it sets a dangerous precedent. Take Brett’s hypothethical race example.

The woman above is facing a dilemma. She went with her partner, who is white, to be married in a civil ceremony by a registrar employed by her local council.

The problem was that the registrar was a deeply religious man and, while he was happy to marry two black people, or two white people, believed that inter-racial marriage was forbidden by the Bible. (I’d like to avoid a theological discussion about whether this is or isn’t the case, since it isn’t the point.)

If we think that Ladele has been treated rightly, then I don’t think that there’s a relevant distinction between the Ladele case and Brett’s hypothetical one. As such, my thought on Brett’s case is broadly similar to the actual Ladele one. As I say in the comments over at Harry’s Place (7th comment):

If his (ridiculous in my view) beliefs can be accomodated reasonable (ie. finding another registrar doesn’t cost the council a lot of money, or any other important consideration) I think it’s probably a good thing that his beliefs can be respected. I imagine there probably is a cost consideration though. [...]

So yeah … I don’t take the race example as a decisive counterexample.

I think my tentative view that we should try and accomodate people’s sincerely held ethical beliefs (though there may be reasons that tell against this in particular circumstances) get round some of the criticisms. For example, Stonewall Chief Executive Ben Summerskill rightly says that:

It is clearly humiliating for a gay couple if they have an appointment with a registrar and halfway through the meeting she announces she is not going to preside over their special day because of her personal prejudice

But clearly, provided those who organise marriages aren’t complete idiots it isn’t necessary to have this sort of humiliating display. Any remotely competent bureaucrat would see that if there’s a civil partnership being asked for, you don’t assign the person who objects to civil partnerships to that particular task (if that’s possible). Nothing humiliating about that - the gay couple wouldn’t even have to know.

A stronger criticism (if successful) would be that of hero Peter Tatchell. He takes it that this ruling involves “a violation of human rights”. Clearly, human rights are of sufficient importance to tell against attempts to accommodate people’s sincere ethical beliefs. Tatchell’s criticism is clearly the right sort of criticism. Now, I’m no lawyer, so if this does in fact violate what the laws says our human rights are, then it does. I don’t know whether it does or not. But if we think not about what the law says our human rights are, but what they (morally) ought to be, I’m not sure that there is a human rights violation. If there is a human rights violation, which right is being violated? The gay couple would (rightly) still be able to get their civil partnership, so that can’t be the rights violation. Nor would they be subject to humiliation or anything like that.

Ought political liberals applaud this decision to accomodate someone’s sincerely held conception of the good? I’d very, very tentatively say yes.

(Isaiah) Berlin and the Blogosphere

Some of my readers might be interested in this. Johann Hari wrote a piece on the negative/positive liberty debate, and Conservative blogger Dizzy takes it that Hari hasn’t read Berlin closely enough.

Is Dizzy right? What say you?

For those unfamiliar, Berlin’s famous essay can be found over here (WARNING - .pdf):

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/twoconcepts.pdf

Preferred Blogs and Political Preferences

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides are in the process of finishing a (WARNING - .pdf) paper on blogging, investigating whether political blogs help or hinder political participation and deliberation, according to Henry’s post over at CT. Descriptive political science isn’t really my thing, but it’s a pretty interesting paper - so check it out!

Anyway, they claim that as you’d expect, readership of political blogs is self-selecting. That is, people tend to read the blogs with which they agree, in much the same way that people tend to read newspapers that reflect their own ideological stance. From the paper’s Abstract:

We find that, as existing theories might predict, blog readers tend to read blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Cross-cutting readership of blogs on both the left and right ends of the spectrum is relatively rare.

As you’d expect, this claim is made more precise in the paper. On page 16 (I don’t think I break any referencing rules by quoting from non-Abstract parts of the paper - if I am, let me know and I’ll remove the quote) they claim that:

About 94% of political blog readers consume only blogs from one side of the ideological spectrum. The remaining 6% read blogs from both sides.

So Apology Readers - do you only read political blogs that accord with your own point of view? I’d be interested to know. As for me, if you looked at my blogroll you’d see that most of the sites are left-wing (though there are some right-wing sites, eg. Devil’s Kitchen). Though, my blogroll is but a subset of the political blogs I read. Having a quick flick through my subscribed blogs on Google Reader, I guess that about two thirds of the blogs I read are left-wing, and about a third right-wing.