Portmore & the Morally overriding anal leprechaun.

Prof. Douglas Portmore asks if 

Moral Reasons (are) Morally Overriding?

If reasons of a certain sort can be partially ordered, then we may say that they can override those ranked below themselves. But only a well defined set has this property. If morality is 'epistemic' (i.e. depends on our knowledge base) then impredicativity is likely to arise. Still, the axiom of regularity is satisfied if there is one disjoint element in the set. But 'pairing' would also be required- i.e. there has to be some unique (by 'extentionality)  set which contains it & one and only one of every other element. It is certainly possible to arbitrarily construct a disjoint element & pairing principle. But there is a moral reason to reject arbitrariness & hope for 'naturality'. That is why, save by some arbitrary 'buck stopping' mechanism (as happens where you have a Supreme Court or Supreme Pontiff or sovereign Legislature) , the answer to Portmore's question must be negative. 

IN THIS PAPER, I present an argument that poses the following dilemma for moral theorists: either (a) reject at least one of three of our most firmly held moral convictions

in which case there is no partial ordering. 'Overriding' is arbitrary 

or (b) reject the view that moral reasons are morally overriding,

i.e. there is no partial ordering 

that is, reject the view that moral reasons always defeat non-moral reasons in the determination of an act’s deontic status (e.g., morally permissible or impermissible).

This is unnecessary. Morality can admit some realm higher than itself- e.g. doing what God tells you to do even if seems immoral (like sacrifice your first born).  

 I then argue that we should opt for the second horn of this dilemma.

Which is what we actually do. What is permitted is one thing. What is commanded is another.  

If I’m right, if non-moral reasons are relevant to determining what is and isn’t morally permissible, then it would seem that moral theorists have their work cut out for them.

Just accept that law can be positive- i.e. a command which creates a superior duty or obligation.  

Not only will they need to determine what the fundamental right-making and wrong-making features of actions are, but they will also need to determine what non-moral reasons are relevant to determining an act’s deontic status.

This isn't particularly hard. Just say 'God' or 'Necessity' or whatever.  

And moral theorists will have to account for how these two very different sorts of reasons (moral and nonmoral) “come together” to determine an act’s deontic status.

Again, this is easily done. The trouble is that there is an arbitrary element to it.  

 By the term “reasons,” I’ll mean “practical reasons,” i.e., reasons for action. As I see it, reasons for action are considerations that can count in favor or against performing an action. Such considerations are not always decisive, as countervailing reasons can defeat them, but in the absence of an undefeated countervailing reason, they are decisive.

Which is fine if menu choice is exogenous. The problem is that what we chose to do, more often than not, is what we think will have some particular effect. In other words, something epistemic interposes itself between the reason and the action.  

Second, I’ll use the phrase “undefeated reason” such that: if a person, P, has an undefeated reason to perform an act, x, it follows that P does not have better reason to perform some other available act.

Which would only be the case if there is a partial ordering. But there isn't really. So, this is 'ex falso quodlibet'. Asserting something false & then logically deducing any old cobblers from it.  

Note that this allows that there are various ways in which a reason can be defeated.

No. There is only one. It is arbitrarily downgraded. This is convenient but not compelling. 

For instance, a reason can be defeated because it is overridden by some other weightier reason,

by an arbitrary action 

and a reason can be defeated because it is trumped, silenced, undermined, excluded, or bracketed by some other reason.

it can also be slut shamed even if it is actually a virgin . Arbitrary actions are like that only.  

3 Note also that I’ve said, “does not have better reason” as opposed to “has as good a reason.”4 The former is broader, allowing for the additional possibility that P’s reason to perform x is undefeated because it is incommensurate with P’s reasons to perform some other available alternative such that there is no fact as to whether P has better reason, worse reason, or just as good a reason to perform x than/as to perform this other alternative. In what follows, I’ll want to distinguish an undefeated reason from a morally undefeated reason. Accordingly, I offer the following definitions: D1 A person, P, has a morally undefeated reason to perform an act, x, if and only if P does not have better moral reason to perform some other available act.

But this depends of P's knowledge base & our knowledge base regarding P & maybe that which is 'common knowledge' in the relevant society.  

 With these definitions in hand, I’m now in a position to say what moral reasons are. Moral reasons are, of course, a proper subset of reasons for action;

A subset must have a well defined extension. It frequently happens that something we do as a matter of habit is discovered to us as having a basis in customary or scriptural morality from an earlier period. Equally, a thing which is considered 'moral' may be discovered to have a purely economic explanation from an earlier period. Why do Jews & Muslims avoid pork? Currently, it is a matter of religious commandment. But some suggest that this convention was adopted because pork uses up more water than chicken. Similarly the Hindu prohibition on beef may be for an agronomic reason. (Indeed, that was the argument used at the time when cow protection was made a Directive Principle in the Indian Constitution). The Indian notion of 'untouchability' may arise from primitive pathogen avoidance theory. It is no accident that progress in allopathic medicine is killing the thing off even in the villages. 

specifically, moral reasons are those reasons that can give rise to a moral ought, where “ought” is understood broadly to express either obligation or advisability.

But 'oughts' arise in purely economic contracts or transactions. You ought to buy low & sell high- otherwise you are likely to go bankrupt. But this is a question of commercial good sense- not morality.  

Thus moral reasons are reasons that can give rise to an act’s being either morally obligatory or morally supererogatory.

But morality may have evolved as a set of heuristics which are actually economic in origin.  

But when does a moral reason give rise to a moral ought?

Surely, that depends on the person? Two people may do the same thing- one for an economic, the other for a moral reason. Indeed, they may justify their action differently to different people. Thus a Jain vegetarian may justify vegetarianism for moral reasons to a fellow Jain, but mention ecological or economic reasons when speaking to a person of a different religion.  

This much is clear: absent either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to do something else, there is nothing to prevent the moral reason P has to perform x from being decisive— decisive not only relative to other moral reasons but also relative to reasons generally.

There is a problem of impredicativity here. The antinomian Christian or Malamati Sufi may do the opposite to what is morally right, because transgression causes one to depend more on the gratuitous  grace of God. One may say the higher morality is to defy the lower morality. Obviously, this may cause the more antinomian-than-thou antinomian to become hyper-orthodox so as to show himself higher than the run of the mill antinomian. 

My point is that since there is no 'naturality' in constructing a partially ordered set for deontics, the thing can only be done arbitrarily & in an inconsistent or ad hoc manner. 

And, surely, if P has a morally, and all-things-considered, decisive moral reason to perform x, then P morally ought to perform x—

unless antinomianism is a superior morality.  

that is, P’s performing x is at least morally supererogatory if not morally obligatory. More formally, I offer the following definition: D3 P has a moral reason to perform x if and only if, absent either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to perform some other available act, P’s performing x is either morally obligatory or morally supererogatory.

Provided there is no impredicativity in moral reasons- e.g. thinking it immoral to do what is moral so as to depend more fully on God's grace.  

As D3 implies, not only do facts that give rise to an act’s being morally obligatory constitute moral reasons, but so do facts that give rise to an act’s being morally supererogatory.

This assumes that morality can't restrict admissibility or change the valency of what are considered 'de facti'.  Anglo Saxon jurisdictions, in theory, separate out determinations of fact to Juries and determinations of Law to Judges. But Judges can direct juries to disregard certain facts or to deem them to have a different valency to what they might 'naturally' consider them to be. 

So, for instance, a moral theory that inextricably ties moral obligations to rights will still count the fact that your performing x will benefit someone who has no right to your beneficence as a moral reason for you to perform x if the theory holds that your benefiting someone who has no right to your beneficence is supererogatory (even if not obligatory).

If morality is epistemic- i.e. changes as the knowledge base changes- then what is supererogatory is a movable feast.  

Thus there are two types of facts

by reason of some arbitrary decision re admissibility 

that constitute moral reasons,

Facts don't constitute reasons. We may say 'some facts are relevant (admissible) others aren't'. 

and this implies that there are two types of moral reasons: those that give rise to moral obligations when they are both morally and all-things-considered decisive dont'.

Sadly nobody can attain the 'all-things-considered' (omniscient Benthamite Planner's) perspective. 

(There is a (very real possibility that non-moral reasons might be relevant to the determination of an act’s deontic status. 

If we evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape then it is likely that morality 'evolved'. But, for robustness, it is likely that there will be a non-moral basis on which to come to the same conclusion. Religious thinker have grappled with the conundrum that there is always a just as good non-moral reason to do what morality counsels. 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.'

Note that this allows for the possibility that a moral reason gives rise to a moral ought whenever a morally undefeated reason is absent, for it may be that what one morally ought to do is a function of solely moral reasons.

This would be true of purely ritual actions which are known to have no effect on anything which matters. This is the 'Purva Mimamsa' view. Vedic ritualism is moral precisely because it has not utilitarian value whatsoever. Sadly, saying this, reduces the incentive to stick with orthopraxy.                       

Nevertheless, even if this is the case, it will still be true to say that a moral reason gives rise to a moral ought absent either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to act otherwise.

Who can say such a reason does not exist? The fact that we can't think of it, at this moment, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Under Knightian Uncertainty, we choose a 'regret minimizing' strategy- i.e. err on the side of caution some of the time while also indulging in FOMO (fear of missing out). If everybody is doing it, you may regret not getting with the program. The truth is, a lot of morality & ethics is about Tardean Mimetics- i.e. imitating what the superior does or is supposed to do.  

For if a moral reason to perform x gives rise to x’s being morally obligatory/supererogatory if there isn’t a morally undefeated reason to do something else, then it will also give rise to x’s being morally obligatory/supererogatory if there is neither an undefeated nor a morally undefeated reason to do something else.

Because arbitrary actions have that quality. They lack 'nautrality'- i.e. aren't based on all relevant 'reasons'.  

Note also that D3 is compatible with a particularist conception of moral reasons, where certain facts can be relevant

but are they discoverable in a canonical manner or are they arbitrarily stipulated?  

to how one morally ought to act on one occasion but not another and can even count in favor of performing an action on one occasion but against performing that action on another.

Or just doing what you like. 

Even on this particularist conception, it will still be true to say that some facts are capable of making a difference to how one morally ought to act and that some are not.

Truth does not matter. Informativity does. The sentence given above is non-informative.  

 Accordingly, I offer the following distinction and corresponding definitions: D4 P has a deontic moral reason to perform x if and only if, absent either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to perform some other available act, P’s performing x is morally obligatory.

This begs the question as to whether we can distinguish a 'deontic moral reason' in a canonical or non-arbitrary way. Otherwise D4 is non informative. It is like saying 'we have a leprechaun up our anus if no one can tell what is or isn't a leprechaun. Also, anything at all can be our anus.  

D5 P has a non-deontic moral reason to perform x if and only if, absent either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to perform some other available act, P’s performing x is not morally obligatory, but merely morally supererogatory.

This assumes that actions are dictated by 'reasons' of various sorts. We may make this arbitrary stipulation but we may equally arbitrarily speak of what the invisible leprechaun up our anus is making us do.  

So, on the rights-based theory described above, the fact that your performing x will benefit someone who has no right to your beneficence would constitute a non-deontic moral reason for you to perform x, whereas, on utilitarianism, the fact your performing x will benefit someone (even yourself) constitutes a deontic moral reason for you to perform x.

But what is deontic for you (i.e. what you consider to be your duty) is up to you. You may feel it your duty to attribute all your actions- or that of Donald Trump- to invisible leprechauns lodged in the rectum of Peter Mandelson.  

Lastly, I’ll define a moral option as follows: D6 P has a moral option to perform either x or y if and only if it is both morally permissible for P to perform x and morally permissible for P to perform y. 2.

& if the invisible leprechaun lodged in Mandelson's anus brought about this situation.  

The argument With these definitions in hand, we’re now in a position to consider what I take to be a very troubling argument, which I present in standard form below. Assume that the variable “P” ranges over agents who must choose between acting so as to secure a considerable benefit for themselves and acting so as to secure a slightly more considerable benefit for some stranger.

or because such is the invisible of Mandelson's anal leprechaun.  

Let’s call the former “s” since it’s a self-regarding act and the latter “o” since it’s an other-regarding act.

But it is the self which decides the issue. The fact that I fart noisily so as to show solidarity with Hamas doesn't stop people think I do it because I like stinking up the room.  

Assume that there are no other morally relevant facts. So, for instance, assume that whatever it is that P would be doing were she to perform s, it would not entail breaking a promise, causing someone harm, or anything of the sort.

This is like assuming Mandelson's anal leprechaun is the only efficient cause. It is arbitrary. It is also non-informative. The fact is we can never be sure our actions don't cause harm.  

And assume, for the sake of simplicity, that s and o are the only available options and that they are mutually exclusive.

You are assuming there is no Knightian Uncertainty. All possible states of the world are known. Evolution must be wrong. So must Cosmology & Geology etc. All is as Mandelson's invisible anal leprechaun wills it.  

What is the practical consequence for ethics of Portmore's argument. 

 (We) should be highly suspicious of many people’s untutored intuition that it is permissible for those who enjoy the kind of affluence that is so common in industrialized nations to spend large portions of their surplus income on luxury items

thus creating jobs in the luxury sector. Moreover, as economies of scope & scale become available, luxuries turn into necessities- stuff like tooth paste & soap were once (in India) considered luxuries & subject to heavy taxes. This was not a smart economic policy.  

when there are so many children in developing countries who are dying easily preventable deaths.

They only became preventable because the rich had the luxury of financing expensive medical research which initially was only available to them.  

But the fact that some of our commonsense moral intuitions seem suspect upon careful reflection

Posmore uses the phrase 'careful reflection' in the spirit of pure farce.  

casts no doubt on the idea that our moral theories should comport with the moral convictions we have after careful reflection.

on orders from an invisible anal leprechaun- right?  

Thus it’s important to note that neither Singer’s arguments nor Unger’s arguments speak against our considered moral conviction that forgoing a benefit for oneself in order to provide someone else with an only slightly larger benefit is morally optional, not morally required.

It is irrelevant if we are useless tossers teaching shite to shitheads.  

Up to this point, I’ve merely asserted, not argued, that P2, P4, and P6 represent three of our most firmly held moral convictions.

Only in the sense that faith in an omnipotent invisible anal leprechaun is part & parcel of some nutter's moral convictions.  Indeed to deny such is the case is homophobic & reveals a bigotry against very short Irish people. 

 To illustrate, let’s suppose that the specifics are as follows. P is currently accessing her savings account via the Internet, and she is about to transfer the entire balance to her escrow company so as to purchase her dream home. She can do so by clicking on button A. However, there’s an alternative. By clicking on button B instead, her savings will be transferred not to her escrow company, but to some stranger who will benefit slightly more from the money than she would.

John Maynard Smith showed why 'bourgeois strategies' based on 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. the money in my savings account is mine & is intended to help me) is 'eusocial'- i.e. everybody benefits more if they are followed. The fact is a society where it is normative to click B will be as poor as shit. It won't be using scarce resources efficiently. This doesn't mean that there isn't a collective action problem to do with assisting the worst off. But that is a matter of economics & politics- i.e. 'ways & means'- not morality as such.  

Clearly, given the tremendous sacrifice involved, our considered moral conviction is that P is not morally required to perform o— that is, P is not morally required to click on button B. But it is equally clear that the fact that her doing so would provide the stranger with a considerable benefit constitutes a deontic moral reason for her to click on button B.

It isn't deontic. It is consequentialist.  

Indeed, were it not for the costs involved, she would be required to click on button B.

If she is a consequentialist of a particular sort.  

To see this, consider the following variant on the above case. In this case, P can transfer the money to her escrow company by clicking on either button A or button B, and, in this case, a very rich man has agreed to transfer an equivalent sum of his own money to the stranger if, and only if, she clicks on button B. So, in either case, she’ll get her dream home, but, by clicking on button B, she’ll also secure a considerable benefit for the stranger.

So, this is a 'Newcombe problem'.  Believe some shite if that is helpful to you. 

Assume that there are no other relevant facts.  Assume that in this case she’ll still have the small apartment that she’s been renting to come home to.  Surely, in this case, P is morally required to click on button B, for there is no reason why she shouldn’t do so. By clicking on button B, she can purchase her dream home while also providing a considerable benefit for the stranger, and she can do so at no cost to herself, at minimal cost to the rich man (who, given the diminishing marginal utility of money, has more money than he can effectively use to benefit himself), and at absolutely no cost to anyone else. If you think that beneficence is only required when the would-be beneficiary is below a certain threshold of well-being, then assume that both you and the stranger are below that threshold. Given that we think that the reason P has to click on button B gives rise to a moral requirement in the absence of either an undefeated or a morally undefeated reason to do otherwise, we must conclude that it is a deontic moral reason.

We don't have to conclude shit. Alternatively, we can conclude any old shit if such is the will of our invisible anal leprechaun.  

All moral reasons must be either deontic or non-deontic,

Nonsense! They may be concerned with changing one's own ethos or doing what is pleasing to the invisible anal leprechaun.  

and since this moral reason is the kind of moral reason that can give rise to a moral obligation, it must be the former.

No. The lady may want to change what she is for herself- i.e. to have a different ethos. Thinking she is giving away her hard earned money is her first step to coming out as a Lesbian who wants to live in an agrarian commune rather than work in Corporate Finance.  

If, to the contrary, P’s reason to click on button B were a non-deontic moral reason, it could not generate a moral requirement to do so.

She might disagree. She could say 'Mum, you don't understand. I felt I had to click B. It was like... I'd be killing a baby if I didn't. Morally, I could not do otherwise. Also, I don't like cocks. Vaginas are magical. I shall devote my life to kissing them.'  

Portmore's paper is based on arbitrary ipse dixit assertions or stipulations. But anybody can come up with such things even without appealing to an invisible anal leprechaun. 

... I’ve stipulated from the start that the choice between benefiting oneself and benefiting the stranger is to be a mutually exclusive one.

More importantly, Portmore is assuming no Knightian Uncertainty. All states of the world are distinguishable & known in advance- i.e. Evolution is a lie.  

And, as I’ve stipulated, the choice between s or o is between furthering one’s own interests and sacrificing those interests for the sake of doing more to promote the impersonal good. Therefore, by stipulation, o must be a self-sacrificing act, and so the ethical egoist must consider o to be morally impermissible. 

Nope. There may be a greater reputational benefit. Alternatively, there may be a future state of the world where not having any money is better than being a bougie property owner.     

Portmore's conclusion is

 we must accept, contrary to the philosophical orthodoxy, that moral reasons are not the only reasons relevant to the determination of an acts deontic status.

 Sadly, this conclusion is based on arbitrary & foolish stipulations. Speaking generally, Societies possess Courts of Law (or, at the very least, Public Opinion) which determine deontic status. This may be 'buck-stopped' in the short run, but mutable in the medium to long term. Of course, any one at all can make any type of deontic claim (e.g. my self-imposed obligation to fart noisily to express solidarity with Hamas). One may as well ascribe the thing to the actions of an invisible anal leprechaun as pretend that logical analysis can add informativity to what is merely arbitrary- though, in certain cases, useful enough to solve coordination or discoordination problems encountered in collective action problems. 

One final point. Godel's later work shows (it seems to me) that you have to have an 'absolute proof' or a 'divine axiom' to have an independent logic for a particular discourse. Anal-tickle philosophy failed to monitor developments in mathematical logic over the course of the late Sixties & Seventies with the result that it turned into a cul de sac for credentialized cretins. 

Krugman's interstellar stupidity

Back in 1978, when post-tax real interest rates were negative in many parts of the world, Paul Krugman wrote an paper about the impact of 'time dilation' in near-speed-of-light interstellar trade. Put simply,  calendars on space ships show fewer elapsed years than those not subject to acceleration. In other words, interstellar travel 'fast forwards' Time. 

But this is equivalent to cryonic freezing!

 People who love their families & who want to age at the same pace as them will prefer to avoid both cryonic freezing & interstellar travel. Those who have few friends or other affectionate ties may want to take advantage of the 'magic of compound interest' to make an investment now & 'speed up time' so they get a big reward after very little time has elapsed from their own perspective. 

The net present value of a project differs for different people if they have different opportunity cost/cost of funds & if the 'turnaround time' is different for them or they use techniques with different capital intensity or 'Roundaboutness'. 

I am stupid  & lazy. It would take me 10 years to turn a one K investment into 2 K. But it is the best I can hope for and so I do it. You are smart and industrious. You could turn 1K into 2K, in just one year, producing exactly the same thing. But there's an alternative investment opportunity available to you, but not me, which nets you 3K. So you pass on the project.

What would happen in an economy where time-travel or cryonics freezing were cheap & ubiquitous? The answer is that there would be downward pressure on the real interest rate, assuming it is positive, because 'time preference' is eroded at the margin. The reverse happens if the real interest rate is negative because people would borrow, invest & go to sleep or fly away. Suppose nobody has 'affectionate ties' & thus everybody is prepared to get frozen or shot into space for a near light speed round trip. Then real interest rates would tend to zero.  If some people have 'affectionate ties' but others don't, then, overall, there will still be some 'time preference' & non-zero real interest rate & hence non-zero discounting.

Krugman's paper begins thus-

The total interest payable (or the discount rate applied to a self funded project) is compounded on the length of the project or its 'turnaround'. Thus, if I buy cotton in Surat & send it to Manchester where it is auctioned then, if the average transit time is 5 months, and it takes one month for the money amount to be remitted to Manchester via a Bill of Exchange, then the applicable discount rate is half of the annual interest rate because the 'turnaround was' 6 months. Incidentally, longer 'turnaround' is like increased Austrian 'roundaboutness' in that a capital intensive project which takes 5 years to start producing cotton is more heavily discounted than a labour intensive project which takes 2 years. 

 If the cotton is sent to Alpha Centauri & the voyage takes 50 years then, assuming, the transaction can be notified to Earth in 5 years (since Alpha Centauri is about 4.5 light years away & information (but not goods) can be transmitted at light speed), then the total turnaround time is 55 years.  Suppose there is an equally costly/beneficial 'roundabout' way to produce cotton on Alpha Centauri in 50 years. It would be preferred. 

Krugman was a mathematical economist- i.e. he didn't know how business is done. The fact is, Lombard Merchants in the 13th Century knew the right answer to the question he posed. It is simply a fact that the interest 'clock' stops ticking when the loan is repaid.

 Obviously, if you are using your own funds, then you stop 'discounting' when you get the lump-sum on sale. You don't have to worry about wiring it back to the loan originator because you are he. 

Consider the first theorem of Krugman's

This would make no difference if interest rates go to zero. But they won't if there is preference diversity (e.g. some have affectionate ties which cause them to prefer 'natural' ageing). It may be that 'affectionate ties' is a function of 'synergy'. People who are more productive within a particular group, have stronger bonds & thus greater reluctance to 'fast forward'. If total factor productivity is rising more rapidly on one planet than another, interest rates are likely to be higher in the former. This means that the merchant who arrives in the higher productivity planet will settle- or at least invest- there. 

Krugman's argument relies on the notion that opportunity cost (discount rate) depends on the interest rate on the home planet. Such is not the case. Assuming information can be transmitted at the speed of light, there will be some long enough maturity bond on a different planet which would represent the opportunity cost. 

Obviously, if interest rates everywhere go to zero (which makes sense if 'time-preference' is literally preferring at which future time you want to spend any particular period of your life) then Krugman's theorem is harmless. Otherwise, it is simply wrong. Voyage time plus information transmission time has always been crucial to robust trading networks. The real interest rate (on riskless assets) may be zero or positive or negative. But logistic & arbitrage networks are relatively independent of it. 

This is Krugman's 

Only if they are both zero for endogenous reasons. Otherwise, we could see both transport of goods from low growth (stagnant productivity) planets & capital flight from them. They may have negative real interest rates & depopulation while the high growth (rising productivity) planet has positive real interest rates & demographic growth. The reverse is also possible. A backward planet may get some money from aliens to invest in sweated labour or other extractive projects. Its elite maintain higher real interest rates so as to permit capital inflow. 

Krugman says interest rates will equalise even though simultaneous arbitrage is impossible though he also says that relative prices won't converge. 

Interest costs depend on voyage length. Only if voyage length is zero could they be neglected. But, that means, either we live in an Occasionalist Universe where God is the only efficient cause, or every point in Space-Time is immediately contiguous to every other. We are in a one period economy of a kshanikavada Buddhist type. 

Krugman doesn't say why he thinks relative prices won't converge (he assumes prices remain constant). But that means 'Law of one price' is violated. In that case, arbitrage can't equalise interest rates because there is some commodity outside its charmed circle.

The fact is, if information can be transmitted at light speed, but commodities can only be transported at below light speed, then median  'roundaboutness' converges across planets even though median 'turnaround' increases as more planets come within the ambit of interstellar trade. 

Krugman ends his jeu d'esprit by invoking the Star Trek slogan 'may the Force be with you'. That force, it is now amply apparent, was stupidity. It is with him still. 

Richard Murphy on David Graeber

 Richard Murphy writes-

David Graeber was the anthropologist

i.e. ignorant cretin 

who re-framed economics by showing that its most basic assumptions were myths.

It has no basic assumptions. It has theories which only apply under very restrictive conditions.  

Where conventional economists traced money to barter and exchange,

They didn't. Legal tender is stuff you can pay your taxes with. If you don't pay your taxes, the Government beats or incarcerates you and grabs all your cool shiny stuff.  

Graeber traced it to trust and relationships.

Like that which obtains within a family. Baby trusts Mummy. It pays her some cash so as to suckle at her breast. Mummy trusts Daddy she pays him to put some sperm into her. Sadly, my wife refused to do any such thing. She threw me out of the house.  

He argued that the origins of money lay not in markets but in morality: in obligations, promises, and the human capacity for cooperation.

None of which involve handing over cash. But being mugged does. You hand over your wallet to the guy with the knife and beg him not to stab you.  

But he also showed how those promises were corrupted: how debt, once a symbol of mutual responsibility,

Debt was never any such thing. Where there was mutual responsibility, the burden was shouldered by those better able to do so. That's why though small children may help their parents with the chores, less is expected of them.  

became a mechanism of domination.

Either there was domination based on being able to break the debtor's legs, or else the debt was uncollectable.  

Hence the David Graeber Question: if money began as a promise of mutual trust,

it didn't. You may say 'the State formed the expectation that it could buy what it wanted with 'legal tender'' but an expectation is not a promise. Nor is it based on trust. The State may not trust its people but it expects them to pay their taxes because the people have a well-founded expectation of being sent to jail and having their assets seized if they don't pay.  

when did it become the instrument of control that imprisons us?

Never. This is a fairy story. On the other hand, it is true that language imprisons us. Why are we forced to learn language by Mummy and Daddy? How come we were taught foreign languages in School? The answer is obvious. Shape-shifting, neo-liberal, lizards from Planet X have secretly taken over all the positions of power and influence on this planet. 

The false origin story

Economics, Graeber noted, begins with a fable.

No. It begins with data. It takes off when a theory fits the data and has predictive power.  

The claim is that there were once isolated individuals trading goats for grain.

Grain is traded for grain and goats are traded for goats. There are 'futures markets' in both.  

Then

arbitrageurs (market-makers) appeared. They dealt with each other. They found Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. This involved a range of 'units of account' and 'stores of value' with varying properties. An economic model may simplify things by treating money as homogenous and exogenously determined, but it isn't really. What matters is whether you make better predictions than the other guy.  

money evolved to simplify that exchange, after which states and banks came later. This story, told in some way in almost every economics textbook, is almost entirely untrue.

D'uh!  

Instead, in every known society, people first organised economic life through relationships of credit and trust. “I owe you” came before “I pay you.” Money began as memory and not as a metal coin.

Nonsense! There were plenty of societies with no money. Now they may be fewer. The point about money is that it has no memory. There may be some people with a memory of who a particular piece of money belonged to. Suppose I get a fifty pound note from a client. When I pay it into my Bank Account, the serial number is flagged. It turns out the money was stolen. The police come to question me as to how I got the fifty pound note. I remember it was given to me by Joe Smith in return for some work I did for him. The police question Joe Smith. It turns out he was the robber. 

However, had the serial number not been noted down and if I hadn't remembered who gave it to me, there would have been nothing tying Joe Smith to the crime. 

Money can be 'laundered'. That's why some countries have 'know your customer' rules.  

Graeber's anthropology restored the social dimension that economics had erased: people do not trade because they are selfish, but because they live together.

People who don't live together trade. Even in ancient times, Chinese silks would end up in Imperial Rome. The commodity would have passed through many hands before reaching its destination.  

Debt and domination

Graeber traced the long arc of civilisation through cycles of credit and violence.

Both are based on 'Expectations' not love and mutuality and braiding each other's hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.  

Periods of trust and mutual obligation gave way to eras of hierarchy, slavery, and debt peonage, when the moral logic of reciprocity was replaced by the coercive logic of repayment.

Debt peonage, like slavery, was based on being able to fuck up the peon or slave. The logic of coercion has to do with having a superior threat point. You can kill the other guy. The other guy can't kill you.  

Debt then became a weapon.

I would often ask Graeber to lend me fifty quid. He would then have a weapon which he could use to threaten Amartya Sen. Sadly, Graeber told me fuck the fuck off. Admittedly, I was drunk at the time and may have been talking to some other LSE Professor.  

Kings, priests, and empires used it to bind the powerless to the powerful.

No. Kings killed people who didn't do as they were told. Priests merely threatened them with eternal damnation unless the King, very kindly, leant them some troops to kill heretics, blasphemers, and guys who complained about being sodomized by the Bishop.  

Today, that same dynamic persists: in the relationships between banks and households, creditors and governments, the global north and the global south.

Fuck off! I owed my Bank a lot of money. They sold the debt on and some Debt Recovery firm used to phone me and threaten me with legal proceedings. I laughed so hard I almost shat myself. The global south was equally recalcitrant once the age of gunboat diplomacy ended. If the foreigners can't take over your Custom House, they can whistle for their money. It is a different matter that you might play 'extend and pretend'.  

Debt is not merely financial; it is moralised subordination.

No. There's a good reason no one will lend me any money. It is because I recognize no fucking moral obligation to pay my debts. True, if I were smart and had rational expectations, I would pay my debts so as to be able to borrow and invest more and more money with the result that I wouldn't be as poor as fuck. Sadly, I am not smart at all.  

The moral inversion of obligation

Graeber's greatest moral insight was that those who owe the most are the least blamed, and those who owe the least are shamed most.

This is because I used to follow him around shouting 'Graeber, mate, you got a tiny dick! Take the shame you shithead!'.  

When banks collapse, we bail them out.

Very true. Graeber & Murphy personally leant half a trillion dollars to Citibank. That is why they were constantly subjected to body-shaming.  

When citizens default, we punish them.

Graeber used to kick in the heads of people who couldn't afford their sub-prime mortgages.  

When corporations exploit tax havens, we call them efficient.

Because it helps pass the time. 

When the poor ask for help, we call them lazy.

No. We laugh heartily and then tell them to fuck off.  

He called this moral inversion the defining hypocrisy of capitalism, which is a system that preaches responsibility but rewards irresponsibility at scale.

Fuck are these two nitwits doing other than preaching? Still, if they get to sell a few of their shitty books, good luck to them. That's how the market works.  

Work, bureaucracy, and meaning

In The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber explored how bureaucracy and finance have fused into a single system of control, but I would argue that Debt: The First 5,000 Years is his most important work.

Sadly, it is less important than a cow-pat.  

Capitalism, he argued, now survives not through production but through paperwork, including endless forms, metrics, and managerial hierarchies, that reinforce the entrapment of people that debt creates, with people trapped in jobs that serve no purpose except to sustain debt, discipline, and obedience.

By contrast, Communist countries had no bureaucracies.  

Work has become theatre; labour, a ritual of compliance.

Rather than a ritual featuring sado-masochism and virgin sacrifices to Baphomet.  

This, Graeber wrote, is the real crisis of modernity:

as opposed to those fake crises which have big Instagram followings.  

the loss of meaning disguised as efficiency, but which is actually control.

Especially if you get the sack just because you like to take a nap at work.  

The anthropology of hope

Unlike Marx's determinism or Keynes's pragmatism, Graeber's vision was profoundly humanist.

Then he died. Now his vision is less humanist and more 'food-for-the-worms-ist'  

He believed that because our institutions are human creations, they can be remade.

We can fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit. That's true enough.  

History, he showed, is full of moments when people simply stopped obeying, meaning hierarchies collapsed because they lost legitimacy.

The Soviet Union collapsed. That's true enough.  

His activism, from the Occupy movement to debt strikes,

both were useless 

was a living experiment in alternative economics and in the reconstruction of reciprocity beneath the ruins of neoliberalism.

Graeber's hope was anthropological: he knew that cooperation is as ancient as competition, and that freedom lies in the capacity to imagine something different.

You lose that freedom when you die. Graeber died.  

What answering Graeber requires

To answer the Graeber Question, we must rehumanise money

so that it too can suffer disease and death 

and reclaim the politics of debt.

Write off all loans, not just student loans. Did you know a lot of pensioners are living off interest payments? That's usury! Get rid of it and laugh heartily as pensioners starve to death.  

That means:

Reasserting money as a public good: governments must issue credit for collective purposes, such as housing, care, and the green transition, rather than claiming that they are leaving money creation to private banks is the solution.

Trump should be allowed to print money and send checks to those who vote for him.  

Liberating the indebted, meaning governments must assist in the cancellation of unpayable and unjust debts and end the moral stigmatisation of the poor.

Unpayable debts are written off. Every debt is unjust in the eye of the debtor. It is not enough to destigmatize poverty. We must destigmatize the causes of poverty- e.g. being a drunken, workshy, cretin like yours truly.  

Redefining value because honour, care, creativity, and community are the true measures of wealth.

Tax the creative by all means. Give me the money thus raised. Nobody can deny that I lack honour, care, creativity and community more than anybody else. 

Reclaiming time, freeing people from meaningless labour

like teaching nonsense at the LSE. 

so they can contribute meaningfully to society.

By getting drunk and running naked down Houghton Street with a radish up their bum. I'm not saying that's what I did but I do feel I was wrongly advised by Prof. Amartya Sen that I would get a PhD in Social Choice theory if I did so. Anyway, it turned out, it wasn't Amartya Sen at all. It was Partha Dasgupta. Fuck your Sir Partha! Fuck you very much! 

The moral economy of freedom

Graeber taught that economics is always moral because debt is always a relationship between people.

I have relationships with people. They won't lend me any money. Sad.  

To reform money is to reform power.

But you need power to reform shit. These guys will never have any. Nor will you even if you occupy the shit out of Wall Street.  

Our age of financial abstraction has severed money from morality and replaced promises with punishment.

We don't have prisons for debtors.  

But if debt once enslaved, it can also be redeemed, and not just be forgiven but redefined as a bond of mutual care.

The Bank should come and wipe my bum because it was once foolish enough to lend me money.  

The task is not to abolish obligation, but to turn it back into solidarity.

After which, our species can hand from tree branches by our tails while eating bananas.  

Inference

The Graeber Question is the spiritual twin of the Judt Question. Both ask how a civilisation founded on care and promise lost its moral compass.

but found a safe space on Campus.  

Graeber's answer is that our debt is not financial but ethical: we owe one another the duty to imagine better.

We really don't. I told a girl in my Topology class that I could better imagine her without her clothes on. She slapped me silly. Then it turned out it wasn't a Topology class. It was remedial Arithmetic.  

Money began as trust. It can be trust again.

Politicians can fuck the economy. Smart peeps can form high-trust networks and continue to thrive. Maybe this is also the case with crypto.  

The future will belong to those who

don't drop dead. Graeber dropped dead.  

understand that economics is not about exchange, but about relationship, and not about repayment, but about repair.

and not about productivity but about braiding each others' hair while offering gratuitous rape counselling.  

Michael Fuerstein on compulsory gender reassignment

 Michael Fuersteinis professor of philosophy at St Olaf College in Minnesota, US. He is the author of Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress.

He writes in Aeon-

The transformation of American public opinion on same-sex marriage is

inconsequential. Only 1.2 percent of marriages in the US are same sex. This does not affect anybody else though some people may feel that their Religion forbids them from recognising such marriages. But they may also not recognize all sorts of other things- e.g. the validity of Darwin's theory of Evolution

among the most remarkable and rapid shifts in moral consciousness ever recorded.

In moral matters, as elsewhere, de minimis applies. The thing is inconsequential. I suppose one could 'virtue signal' about this. But one can also 'virtue signal' about 'pro-nouns' or the Dalai Lama or whatever.  

Since the late 1980s, public approval of the practice climbed from 11 per cent to 70 per cent, where it has remained stable since 2021. What explains this?

TV- shows like 'Modern Family' & magazine articles about homosexual Rock Stars and other celebrities getting hitched in glamorous locations. Anyway, given that 40-50 percent of first marriages and 60-67 percent of second marriages end in divorce, it simply isn't the case that matrimony is seen as anything special. 

This is in part a puzzle about democracy.

It really isn't if the democracy in question has 'separation of Church & State'.  

On its face, democracy offers the promise of voice and foment, of revolution without war.

Or Revolution & War.  

And liberal democracies have indeed propelled just about every major social advance over the past 100 years or so:

They have propelled none. It was the Bolshevik Revolution which forced Democracies down the path of expanding freedoms. Interestingly, things like LGBTQ rights were a way of splitting off 'progressives' from an alliance with 'organized labour'. 

not only gay rights, but also labour rights, women’s rights, animal welfare, environmentalism and racial equality.

Identity Politics has been great for 'Globalization'. The problem is that rights without incentive compatible remedies begin by being rationed and end by being wholly unenforceable. Don't forget that the Bolsheviks started off by decriminalizing sodomy. Stalin recriminalized it in 1933.  

The latter notably encompasses the dismantling of formalised racial segregation in the United States, another stunning (if highly imperfect) turn in moral history.

Political history. Morality hadn't changed. Politics had. A curious reversal took place with Republicans pursuing a 'Southern Strategy' & Dems trying to pretend they'd always lurved darkies.  

Democracy isn’t the only factor that explains all this, but it is hard to tell a story about social progress in which it doesn’t play a key role.

Democracy plays a part in democratic politics. Politics is about shifting coalitions & pandering to different interest groups. However, politics has little to do with morality. It is not the case that Austrians are more or less moral than the Hungarians because they have same-sex marriage. It's just that their political trajectories are different.  

At the same time, recent events confirm what a large body of research has long established: democratic publics are largely ignorant and irrational, approaching politics in roughly the same spirit as bare-chested soccer fans contesting a foul.

If Kamala had won, he'd be piping a different tune.  

Most of us – and particularly those of us with broadly liberal intuitions

The fundamental 'liberal intuition' is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We don't think anybody- even the King or the Archbishop or the leader of the Party we vote for- should exercise power save under strict scrutiny and for a limited purpose.  

– carry around these dissonant ideas together: democracy is an open invitation to the ignorant

Which is why 'Classical Liberalism' thought there should be a property and educational qualification for the vote. The Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the project of only very gradually extending the franchise.  

and, at the same time, a vital instrument of social progress.

Governments solve collective action problems. This indeed is vital for society. But Liberals understand perfectly well that a Dictatorship could make more rapid social progress. The problem is that it might do extra stupid shit because there are no checks and balances upon it. That is why 'regret minimization' keeps us content with liberal institutions. 

Social history can help us make better sense of these intuitions.

Only if you actually know it. Not if you just make shit up.  

The case of same-sex marriage, in particular, provides an astonishing example of social progress at scale, propelled by democracy, among a public full of spite and misinformation.

It really doesn't. Nobody gave a fart about this. It's like how, in India, posh cunts speak of the 'landmark' High Court decision which decriminalized sodomy. But nobody had been prosecuted under that act in living memory. The thing was mere 'gesture politics' or 'virtue signalling'.  

Here, democracy’s special virtue was its ability to convert minority grievances into ‘experiments in living’: interventions in social life that gradually reshape core social emotions and identities.

Very true. In each neighbourhood, President Obama constructed a glass- house containing a Homosexual couple. Residents were encouraged to come and view this couple interacting. There were fears that this experiment would backfire. What if those peering through the windows were grossed out by two blokes kissing in between cooking dinner? Thankfully, up and down the land, this was not the case. Thus, thanks to Democracy, Obama was able to change attitudes to Homosexual Marriage.

Sadly, Biden did not undergo gender re-assignment surgery. He did not use Federal funds to cause heterosexual males to experimentally chop off their dicks to see how they liked it. Biden's failure to conduct this 'experiment in living' caused Trump to be elected. Fuck you Biden! Fuck you very much!

That, in turn, enables people to respond to the grievances of groups otherwise marginalised under systemic oppression.

I wish this Professor would respond to the grievance of groups who think he is teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

Democracy thus drives social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition.

There are no such 'background conditions'. Morality is the same regardless of background. Conventions or habits or norms may differ but that's why we don't equate morality with convention. 

Privacy Policy

The American gay rights movement first began to take form in the 1950s,

Why? The War had itself sparked a sexual revolution. By 1947, the use of penicillin to treat syphilis had become standard in the US. This meant the risk factor was reduced. Also, during the War, soldiers had been encouraged to use condoms.  

when hostility to homosexuality was the default, and a suffocating body of laws and norms forced homosexuals into a life of fear and repression.

The police preferred to shakedown Gays rather than go after violent criminals. Thus, the Mafia alone could provide Gay bars.  

The earliest gay rights organisations in the US, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, grew out of

the opportunity they provided to find partners. A lot of political action isn't about policy. It's about affiliation- including fucking.  

homosexuals’ increasing frustration with the status quo and, relatedly, a coalescing sense of homosexual identity itself.

The other side to the story is that the Federal Government realized it needed brainy Gays- like Frank Kameny- just as much as it needed brainy Women and brainy 'Negroes' and so forth. Otherwise, the Soviets would build a better bomb to blow up the Earth.  

The earliest arguments for gay rights centred on the premise of basic equality,

Many Americans had played a great role in the liberation of France. They noticed that the French (and, later on, the Turks!) had decriminalized homosexuality at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. It was absurd that, for religious reasons, the Anglo-Saxon world had not done the same- more particularly in the US where 'separation of Church & State' is a fundamental dogma. 

and drew on parallels with the movement for racial equality that was taking shape.

Civil Rights does not mean 'equality of outcome'.  

Through the 1960s and ’70s, the movement grew into a larger and more vocal social force, achieving a progressive series of important cultural and legal changes: the formal revocation of the government’s ban on homosexual employees,

if you can hire and promote women, why not guys who might use a touch of lipstick or eye-shadow from time to time?  

the election of the first homosexual representative to the Massachusetts state legislature, and dozens of ordinances barring anti-gay discrimination at the county and municipal level.

In many cases, this was advantageous to the business-owner. If his Vicar or Rabbi said 'why are you serving homosexual customers?' you shrug your shoulders and say it is the law.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought greater attention to the movement and catalysed highly effective activism, and this is when public support for gay rights first begins to tick upward.

Gays are smart. Since they have higher motivation to find a cure for this disease which also affects heterosexuals, let's get behind them. Also, by being behind them, there's less chance they can bum you.  

The 2000s saw continued advances as sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality spread more widely through the culture. Hate-crime protections were extended to homosexuals, anti-sodomy laws were struck down, and same-sex marriage was legalised for the first time in several American states. In 2015, the push for same-sex marriage culminated with the landmark Obergefell v Hodges Supreme Court decision, which secured the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of US federal law. Remarkably, in spite of the Donald Trump administration’s reactionary push against transgender rights, there has been no widespread movement to walk back same-sex marriage rights.

SCOTUS may say it is an issue for the States.  Still, the plain fact is- save for religious reasons- few men ever had a problem with homosexuality. Women too couldn't get too worked up about what penises were up to, provided those penises weren't up them. 

The dominant theoretical accounts of democracy don’t offer a good model of this trajectory.

Because they don't bother with trifles. There was and is some religious opposition to homosexuality, but religious people also think poorly of gluttony or sloth. It is not true that Lord Jesus Christ said, in his Sermon on the Mount, 'binge-watch Netflix while working your way through a stack of 15 inch pepperoni pizzas'.  I know it is the sort of thing you'd expect the 'good shepherd' to say. But it wasn't what he actually said. I checked. Anyway, that's the reason I gave up on my dream of becoming Pope. 

Going back (at least) to the fourth US president James Madison, the traditional liberal account of democracy focuses on the idea that, by distributing power widely, it is difficult for any one group to dominate.

With Andrew Jackson, you get the populist account of democracy- which is what actually prevailed till giant post-war bureaucracies spread their tentacles into every facet of social, or, indeed, private, life.  

Beyond the reduction of domination, this thinking goes, power-sharing also tends to encourage compromise as smaller factions seek coalitions to gain power. But the same-sex marriage case illustrates the limitations of this model.

No. The plain fact is local democracy meant that there was wide latitude when it came to which laws were enforced and what illegal practices were allowed to flourish. 

Sometimes the logic of power-sharing favours minority groups, particularly when they provide a ‘tipping point’ vote.

There were places where Gays were an important 'single issue' voting block. But we don't all live in the San Francisco of Harvey Milk.  

But often – as in the case of midcentury homosexuals or African Americans – it entails structural marginalisation from power.

No. People were cool with closeted homosexuals most of the time. Darker complected African-Americans couldn't 'pass'. The 'one drop rule' could become the bane of their lives.  

Majorities thereby become tyrannies, systematically ignoring the concerns of groups perceived to be unnecessary or harmful to the winning coalition.

They may tyrannize over minorities but they aren't tyrannies with regard to the majority. A genuine tyrant might recruit his secret police force from specific minorities.  

In part because of this concern, ‘deliberative democracy’ has been the more influential model for contemporary theorists.

This was cool when candidates for high office did 'debate prep' and pretended to care greatly about all sorts of virtue signalling shite. Trump has upended such ideas.  

This approach envisions democracy, in the ideal, as an inclusive conversation among equals, in which decision-making proceeds based on ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as Jürgen Habermas put it, rather than power alone.

In other words, it was stupid shite which only a fucking German Professor might believe in.  

Here, democracy aspires to an ideal in which the arguments of all are heard and

compulsory rape and bereavement counselling is provided to all- including cats and potted plants

guide the public use of power.

In other words, doing nothing while everybody virtue signals like crazy.  

Political decisions thereby show respect for the will of everyone (even minorities) and resort to coercion only as a necessary fallback.

Just as Jack the Ripper only resorted to slitting his victim's throats as a necessary fallback to their refusal to show respect for his tiny todger.  

As the same-sex marriage case reveals, however, democracy functions through a variety of mechanisms that don’t easily fit the model of ‘deliberation’: voting, protesting, activism, the arts and so on.

So, the thing is useless shite. However, it must be said, in one-party states run by technocrats, the deliberations of the Politburo or the State Planning Commission can be highly consequential. But, the thing isn't Democratic in the slightest. What we have is Plato's Republic run by an erudite 'guardians'.  

This wider spectrum of cultural factors influences moral reasoning, not directly, but instead by reshaping the psychological background of emotions and identities against which reasoning takes place. A large body of social psychology confirms that our attitudes towards other social groups are guided by our tendencies toward in/out-group sorting and, relatedly, a repertoire of identity-linked emotions that determine how we respond to their concerns. The same-sex marriage case nicely illustrates the fact that, if we want to understand changes of moral mind, we need to attend to this wider psychological context as it shifted over a period of decades.

No. This was a case of 'cognitive dissonance'. I like 'Modern Family' and the music of Elton John. I also like weddings. I see people I like having wonderful weddings and decide I am for homosexual marriage because the people involved happen to be homosexual. 

The single most important social change wrought by the gay rights movement was the (open) social presence of homosexuals themselves, both in mass culture and in day-to-day personal interactions.

You may initially get a shock when you find out that Elton John or Freddie Mercury is gay. Will you stop listening to their music? Fuck that! Their music is good. I don't care if you call me a faggot, Mummy.  

The first step occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, as homosexuals gradually made the shift from invisibly to visibly oppressed.

In Britain, a film starring Dirk Bogarde had changed public opinion. But it was an aristocrat in the House of Lords who brought in the private bills which 'stopped the badgering of buggers and the butchery of badgers'.  

Several openly gay candidates ran for local public office, and a number of major protest events – such as the landmark Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969 – drew media coverage and wide public attention.

It created a backlash helpful to the Evangelicals. 

Popular films and fiction, such as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), began to bring homosexual characters and their interior lives into public view. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s provided a turning point, when images of the sick, dying and grieving helped to transform homosexuals from an imagined radical fringe to real human beings with relatable vulnerabilities. The AIDS crisis also organised a highly visible and effective activist campaign by groups such as ACT UP.

Again, this was manna from Heaven for the 'born again' Right Wing. True, your favourite TV evangelist was bound to be caught with a 14 year old rent-boy and a big bag of cocaine- but, obviously, Satan tempted him. We must all 'pray the Gay away' more particularly if we just spent the kid's college fund on a Fire Island orgy. 

That, in turn, helped inspire increasing numbers of homosexuals to come out of the closet, a trend that continued steadily upwards for decades.

Sexuality is income elastic. If you are as poor as shit, you don't have much of it. Rising affluence meant there could be a distinctive 'Gay life-style'. This caught on. Everybody wanted to be 'metro-sexual'. It showed you weren't getting by on Food Stamps.  

In the mid-1980s, polls show that only 5-20 per cent of Americans had a personal acquaintance who they knew to be gay. By the end of the 2000s, that number was about 70 per cent.

In the 1990s, Homosexual couples became the most sought after market segment. In those days, they had the highest disposable income. Everybody tried to jump on the Gay bandwagon. 

Survey research confirms that the single most important factor in causing people to change their mind about same-sex marriage was personal contact.

We want to be in personal contact with people who smell nice, have great clothes, and have high disposable income. We don't want personal contact with smelly homeless peeps regardless of their Harvard degrees and skill in fellatio.  

This rise in personal contact was matched by increasingly sympathetic exposure to homosexuality through mass media. Through the 1990s and 2000s, network television showed growing numbers of sympathetic and/or normalised gay characters. By 2010, the network sitcom Modern Family, whose main characters included a gay couple with an adopted child, was among Republicans’ most popular shows. In 1994, IKEA ran a television ad featuring two men buying a dining table together, marking a new and normalising acceptance of homosexuality among the corporate mainstream. This trend was matched among elites, as increasing numbers of gay politicians and celebrities made their identity known. By the time Pete Buttigieg ran for US president in 2020, his sexuality attracted little attention in major press outlets.

TV matters. We watch a lot of it. 'Deliberation' does not matter. It causes us to fall asleep. The question is why TV started portraying Gays? The answer is advertisers wanted to know that Gays would tune in. That's why 'Will & Grace' & 'Modern Family' portrayed Gay characters not as saintly folk but as bitchy, irresponsible, and endlessly entertaining.  

Overall, we can observe a virtuous feedback loop here: social progress arises through interventions in social norms that, over time, transform the emotions and identities that govern the reception of moral arguments.

Nonsense! Only money matters. Gays had money. Advertisers wanted to use music Gay people listened to and to back shows which Gay people found entertaining. Plenty of heterosexual artistes benefitted by being taking up by the Gays. This was also true of political candidates. 

In turn, this sets the stage for further interventions in practice, which further transforms social experience, which further reshapes the evaluation of arguments for equality, and so forth. The process begins with a small vanguard of the exceptionally prescient and courageous, who are willing to voice their grievances, or their support, at great personal risk.

Does the Professor mean Charlie Kirk? He was killed. What bigger risk can there be?  

As greater numbers add their voice, the costs of joining the movement decline, and previously radical ideas gradually take on a more moderate valence.

Or become more radical. We don't know whether MAGA will decide to strip citizenship from second or even third generation immigrants. Nigel Farage, in England, has raised that possibility. 

The key ingredient in this story is the role of lived experience in moral cognition.

Sadly, it has none. That is why two people with the same 'lived experience' have different 'moral cognition'.  

This idea was central to the political thought of the American philosopher John Dewey.

Within a particular, highly pragmatic, context. Dewey's cohort saw that many Americans' had reduced life-chances because there was no publicly facility for High School education of a type which would make them 'College ready'. Between 1911 and 1938, there was a massive expansion in High School availability. This is why the GI Bill could be so successful. Europe only began playing catch-up in the Fifties and Sixties. Otherwise only about one or two percent of young people attended the type of School which prepared them for University.  

In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey argued that we should think of democracy

if we were White and lived in America 

not just as a framework for decision-making or deliberation

sadly, this is what was lacking. Dewey should have been saying 'we need a strong Federal Government able to use fiscal and monetary policy in an anti-cyclical manner'. Instead, he was talking boring, obsolete, bollocks.  

but as a way of life centred on a particular ideal of community:

one without a strong Central Government able to implement anti-cyclical fiscal and monetary policy was bound to turn to shit. That's what happened after the Wall Street Crash. Dewey was useless. But, to be fair, so was Irving Fischer.  

'Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realisation of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community.

That's what the US had in 1929. Everybody agreed that 'Balanced Budgets' were good. But they weren't. They were a very fucking bad idea.  

The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy' 

Nope. The idea of democracy is that voters act self-interestedly. If they vote for a guy who says 'fuck the deficit! I will create jobs by spending money like a drunken sailor ', then that means there is a mandate for Keynesian policies.  The egg-heads can sweat the details as to how to prevent a 'crowding out' effect on productive investment. But if the country is in the trough of the Business Cycle, they needn't bother. 

Dewey’s key insight was that a

Professor could talk virtue signalling bollocks and not get called on his cretinism.  

democratic public needed, not just an intellectual endorsement of shared principles or formal institutional equality,

nobody needs this.  I have never intellectually endorsed the principle that one should shit in the toilet bowl, not one's own bed. Nevertheless, I do not shit in my bed. As for 'formal institutional equality'- it is meaningless. Formally, the POTUS is equal in dignity to a guy on death-row. But that's no consolation to the guy taking his seat in the electric chair. 

but a sense of common good and an ‘energetic desire’ to sustain it. That depended on the development of pro-social ‘habits’

don't shit on the streets. Kindly intellectually endorse this principle.  

– routine patterns of thought often embedded beneath conscious reflection – that would activate genuine care and concern across social differences. And this, in turn, required the cumulative impact of our day-to-day experience – our way of life – encountering diverse social groups.

like far-right militias or vaccine deniers or the good folk at Hamas HQ? 

When minorities experience profound frustrations that do not arouse the ‘desire and effort’ of others, societies need to experiment with new ways of living together in order to deepen the reservoir of community.

i.e. Socialist politicians should be able to force Christian families with kids to provide lodgings to paedophile Satanists. 

Because there are always new problems and frustrations down the road, Dewey argued that democracy itself required continual experimentation.

E.g. the experimenting of imposing Sharia law on Tuesdays? 

In the mid-20th century, the systematic marginalisation of homosexuals

'open' homosexuals- maybe. 

made it impossible for the average American to generate the kind of sympathy and identification required to address oppression.

The average American did fight in a Civil War which addressed oppression. So not worth it. Lets focus on getting rich. 

The gay rights movement

was a great way for older gays to meet hot young men from small town America 

effected an intervention in social life

no. It improved social life for smart peeps in big cities. Without Gays- more particularly Roy Cohn- Disco would have been confined to working class neighbourhoods. Studio 54 would have featured line dancing. 

that enabled Americans to develop new habits of moral cognition, thereby repairing (though still imperfectly) the democratic community.

Gangsta-Rap did the same thing. Sadly, Kamala did not take the hint and gun down a cop or two.  

We learned from an experiment in living:

we get it. The Professor spent the Seventies shacked up with a Lesbian goat.  

the experience of acting on a novel ideal.

like what? Taking it up the arse from Roy Cohn?  

How exactly should we think about the role of democracy in all this?

The Hindi film 'Disco-dancer' was a big hit behind the Iron curtain. That's why Putin is so democratic.  

The definitive feature of democracy is its radical egalitarianism about power.

No. Its definitive feature is the majority of voters choose the Chief Executive. If he were chosen by lot, we would say there was 'radical egalitarianism'. 

In particular, democracy involves the (nearly) universal distribution of fundamental decision-making powers without regard to merit.

Utterly false. The guy who consistently comes second in election after election has zero decision making powers no matter how smart or popular he is.  

That architecture means that the authority for political power lies with all those subject to it (‘the people’) and should serve ‘the people’ considered as equals.

Architecture doesn't mean shit unless you really are talking of insensate bricks and mortar.  

Egalitarian elections

i.e. one's where all candidates are given the same financial resources and media opportunities.  

are the most readily identifiable marker of the democratic approach,

There is no such 'marker'. Anglo-Saxon countries tend to have a two party system. France never did. A 'Plebiscitary President' militates for different dynamics. 

and this is perhaps why empirical research on democracy so often centres on the inputs, outputs and procedures of elections.

Nonsense! Empirical research relies on opinion polls and game theoretic 'structural causal models'. A good rule of thumb is 'follow the money'.  

But the formal distribution of basic electoral and civil rights is insufficient.

America has lots of very smart and well paid political analysts. A Philosophy Professor is bound to sound utterly retarded if he strays into their territory.  

Democracy thus depends on a wider range of norms and institutions.

No. It depends on the ability to prevent a military coup, a Civil War, or a foreign invasion. But this is true of any type of Government. What matters is whether there is an accessible, non-Democratic, way of doing things better.  Even if there is, Democracy can do the same stuff and thus there is no need to replace it. This is like the folk theorem of repeated games. 

One of these is a wider presumption against hierarchy as a justification for public action and, likewise, the idea that the spaces in which the use of power is being debated, decided and framed should be open and inclusive.

Perhaps the Professor wrote this before DEI was decisively rejected at the ballot box.  

A second and related norm is the presumption in favour of open and reasoned deliberative processes, which provide a critical check on existing hierarchies.

aka the rule of law.  

The battle for gay rights was fought in the public square, in newspaper columns, in scholarly societies, arts institutions and town halls.

It was won in boardrooms. When the Sales Dept says- 'we need Gays to like our product. Otherwise, our rival gains market share and our stock price collapses. That means lower bonuses. This concentrates minds.  

Gay voices were often unwelcome but, without a principled basis for excluding them, they became increasingly difficult to dismiss.

This may be true of principled people. But they are few in number.  

One notable example was the debate about homosexuality within the American Psychiatric Association.

Smart peeps understood John Maynard Smith's theory of evolutionarily stable strategies. It turned out Homosexuality was a prediction of the correct theory. It was a feature, not a bug. Trying to remove it was the medical equivalent of turning lead into gold or inventing a perpetual motion machine. 

In the early 1970s, gay psychiatrists joined activists to argue for removing homosexuality from the profession’s list of disorders. Many dismissed this out of hand,

more particularly if they were getting paid to de-gay patients 

but the opponents struggled to rationalise the existing state of affairs without resorting to brute dogma. The debate spilled over into a series of exchanges in The New York Times, where the old guard was forced into increasingly awkward contortions. Though it was succeeded by ‘sexual orientation disturbance [homosexuality]’, the term itself as a disorder was dropped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the profession’s official handbook) in 1974, a key turning point in the cultural change underway. Dogma gradually sank under the combined weight of open public scrutiny and the presumptive obligation to defend power with reasons.

No. Psychiatry has to pretend to be scientific. That's why they also got rid of 'neurosis' in 1980.  

For the liberal, the appeal of egalitarianism is so deeply ingrained that

liberals frequently join homeless people for dinner. John Rawls prepared a very tasty stew from road-kill. He was very disappointed when his daughter Anne refused to marry a hobo.  

it can be easy at times to forget its costs.

e.g. getting knifed by the hobo you are dumpster diving with.  

In settings where expertise is important, difficult to acquire and relatively straightforward to identify, there are considerable advantages to hierarchy. The community of policy researchers – economists, political scientists, ecologists, urban planners and so on – is to some degree internally democratic.

Nope. It is highly selective. Moreover, a Pareto Power law operates. A small percentage makes most of the important decisions.  

But the threshold for joining this community is extremely high and, without the requisite credentials, there is no prospect of participating in the conversation.

Nonsense! If you are right and people can make a lot of money out of your discovery, the experts are disintermediated or else fall into line.  

The policy world is an elitist institution.

No. It is one where money talks and bullshit walks.  

This is a highly effective strategy so long as (a) insight is highly unlikely from those without expertise and (b) the typical markers of expertise – a PhD and publications in the subject – are reliable and easy to identify.

Till people start to notice that guys with PhDs in useless shite are useless shitheads. Still, they may have important work-skills- like sycophancy.  

Meanwhile, the inefficiency of radical egalitarianism – welcoming everyone into the conversation without regard for any markers of expertise – would be enormously costly.

Not really. It is easy to 'screen' for nutters or virtue signallers.  

Conditions (a) and (b) are reasonable assumptions so long as we stick to technical scientific matters.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Look at RFK.  

But morality is epistemologically different.

It isn't epistemological at all.  

Two things stand out in this respect. The first is that, historically, the individuals and groups who have offered the greatest moral insights have been distributed unpredictably across social categories.

Nonsense! The distribution is highly skewed to people who make a living by preaching or teaching as opposed to working in a factory or coal-mine.  

This makes sense given that our moral outlook is to a large degree shaped by the particularities of our identity and experience. Since moral problems are complex and heterogeneous, moral insights emerge across diverse social strata,

only in so far as those strata have some preachers, teachers, journalists etc.  

and typically only in partial, imperfect ways. Immanuel Kant was a white man who authored both the foundational ideas of modern liberty and equality,

No. He was a Prussian Beamte- i.e. a Civil Servant of a special kind- who believed that private liberties should be heavily circumscribed. If you were a Professor you could say certain things in that capacity to your peers which you would be remis to say to your servant in the privacy of your own home.  

and, at the same time, some of the earliest ideas in scientific racism. Margaret Sanger was a pioneering feminist voice but also, at the same time, harboured crude inclinations towards eugenics.

So did the Myrdals and the other Swedes who turned that country into a Welfare State.  

The second factor that makes morality epistemologically distinct is that there are no reliable credentials available.

Sure they are. If a big bunch of people follow the moral instruction of a particular dude, that dude has the required credential. A moralist whose sole audience is his cat, lacks it even if the cat gives up killing mice. 

If there were PhDs in moral insight, then its wide and unpredictable distribution would be a surmountable problem. But there is no recognisable form of training, education or experience that reliably marks those with most moral insight.

There is no evidence that anybody has more or less of the thing.  

So moral insight is both (i) widely distributed across the public in a way that (ii) is not linked to any reliable marker of its presence.

This is the theory behind the 'lamed wufnik' or the Sufi 'abdal'. There are some people, unknown to all and to each other, who are the hidden pillars upon which the World stands. But for them, God would have destroyed His Creation. These secret Saints justify Man to God.  

These two factors reveal the special advantages of democracy.

Very true. America has the great moral preceptor, Trump, for POTUS thanks to Democracy. He never got a pay-check from the Government till he moved into the White House. This had nothing to do with the success of his TV reality show. It just so happened that the President was going to be a hobo- because he was even more moral than the Donald. Sadly, John Rawls fed him some road-kill stew which gave him the stomach ulcer which finally killed him in 2015. After than, American Democracy had no choice but to elect the Donald.  

Under such circumstances, any practices we might use to filter contributions to public discourse would run too-great a risk of excluding critical insights.

You teach shit to shitheads. There's a critical insight for you, Professor.  

That risk is further heightened by what a number of philosophers have called the ‘epistemology of ignorance’: the perception of credibility on morality and other matters tends to favour the interests of the dominant group,

Diversity hires tend to be 'empty pant-suits' like Kamala. I guess, this favours the vested interests of donors. 

thereby laundering oppression through the operation of ‘reason’.

Why stop there? Why not say that it is the blood of innocent Palestinian homosexuals which is being laundered out of Kamala's hair?  

Under such conditions, we are therefore stuck with the inefficient logic of radical egalitarianism: wilfully ignore presuppositions about merit and hand out decision-making power indiscriminately.

Professors of useless shite may hand out diplomas indiscriminately. But they have no power to hand out.  

If we rewind to the oppressive environment in which the gay rights movement arose, it is easy to appreciate the importance of democracy’s radical egalitarianism.

It is impossible the moment we are reminded that the Ottoman Caliph decriminalized sodomy in 1858.  

Social power was tightly consolidated among a white male elite that was

welcome to sleep in the same bed with a chum as Lincoln was wont to do.  

thoroughly hostile to homosexuality, and the concept of moral merit was, indeed, explicitly framed so as to exclude homosexuals.

They were also supposed to exclude crooks.  

In a peculiar synthesis of bogeymen, the idea of homosexuality as a psychological ‘perversion’ was often closely associated with communism.

Not by Communists who associated it with 'bourgeois decadence'.  

In the McCarthyite fever of the 1950s, homosexuals in the government were seen as ‘moral weaklings’ whose sexual identity made them ‘easy prey for blackmail’ by anti-American elements.

The KGB did indeed invest in gay honey-traps.  

Democratic norms and institutions thus could not prevent the marginalisation of homosexuals’ pleas in the national debate.

Did you know sodomy causes earthquakes? Crack the good Book sometime! Why do you think California is so quake-prone? It's because of all the homos in San Fran bumping uglies incessantly.  

But they did provide enough of an opening to effectively press for social changes that accumulated over time.

What accumulated over time was money in the Bank Accounts of people who didn't have kids. Still, you might want to give a shout-out to Roy Cohn. His daddy was a Judge who got him his start in politics with MacCarthy. Kennedy and Nixon rose the same way. 

The success of the gay rights movement depended on

a change in the underlying Science. Neo-Darwinism prevailed. Lamarckian eugenics bit the bullet. Oddly, a former Communist party member, John Maynard Smith, did most for rehabilitating 'bourgeois strategies' (like deciding who owns what matters. Who deserves what doesn't) are eusocial. Once you have proved homosexuality is 'natural' (i.e. a canonical solution to a game theoretic problem re. evolutionarily stable strategies) the next step is to condone homosexual marriage as the most bourgeois thing possible. Sadly, this meant that homosexuals increasingly ceased to be 'dinks' (dual income no kids). Thus, there was a 'reversion to the mean'. 

a public deliberative culture that would enable its arguments to be heard and received, both on a small scale (within particular businesses and institutions) and by a wider public.

Social Media means any fucking argument whatsoever can get heard.  

It depended on a series of electoral victories.

At the local level, sure. But what was behind those victories? Economic forces- i.e. money.  

It depended on ballot initiatives across multiple jurisdictions.

Which cost money.  

It depended on the power of radical protest and civil disobedience, both of which gain their force, not only from formal rights guarantees, but also from the implicit threat of electoral consequences for officials sitting ‘on the wrong side of history’.

That's an argument which cuts both ways. The crazy guys who stormed Capitol Hill seem to have been on the right side of history.  

And it depended on a variety of court battles that culminated with the landmark Obergefell Supreme Court ruling. Though the US Supreme Court itself is a highly elitist institution, the Obergefell decision was made possible only by

the fact that Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, sided with the majority. Roberts, Thomas & Scalia dissented. The decision may be overturned.  

a decades-long democratic transformation in which arguments for gay rights could be heard, taken seriously, and ultimately enacted without public revolt.

Because nobody gave a flying fart. There is a proposal to let elderly siblings who live together to marry so as to gain financial security in the event that one of them dies. No harm in it at all.  

So there is a close link between the virtue of experiments in living,

like marrying your sister? What about your cat? Immigrants will think twice about eating your pussy if she is married to you.  

and the radically egalitarian architecture of democracy. Experiments in living play a necessary role in transforming our moral sensibilities

hopefully, his students will experiment with the hobo lifestyle.   

so that we are able to respond to the moral concerns of a diverse public.

Unless Trump deports them.  

But this requires a social technology that gives voice to the most aggrieved, and gives them a basis for making interventions in social practices.

DEI. Vote for Kamala. It turns out she had plenty of grievances against mean girls working for the Oval Office.  

Democracy is that technology.

It really isn't. DEI is DEad.  

It sacrifices the efficiency of a more merit-based system in order to maximise the odds that, over time, the complaints of the most aggrieved may get some traction.

The complaint of the most aggrieved is that they are going to die very soon because a homicidal rapist is sawing their fucking head off. Democracy is a technology which must abolish death though it may also legalize rape and decapitation so as to be inclusive towards diverse maniacs. 

The sense of doom that many of us feel right now reflects the unpredictable consequences of a system that refuses to gatekeep decision power. Democracy may have brought us same-sex marriage, but it also brought us Trump.

Virulent wokeness & virtue signalling, like insisting that muscular rapists should be sent to women's prisons because they have decided they are more comfortable in a frock, is what brought us Trump.  

Democracy is a vital source of progress,

Not in China. They may overtake America by 2035. 

yes, but also, as Plato observed, a potential amplifier of division and ignorance.

He was against Democracy.  

There can be no purely philosophical solution to

anything. Philosophy is stupid and useless.  

authoritarian populism. But philosophy can help us to diagnose our current predicament.

Our predicament is that politicians started to virtue signal in the manner of vacuous, woke, academics who teach worthless shite.  

The lesson of the history of same-sex marriage is

that nobody gives a shit about it. The thing isn't a 'wedge issue'. Abortion is. 

not that democracy somehow makes progress inevitable but, instead, to illustrate how it is that democracy might help us to protect and promote it.

Promote progress? That is done by raising productivity not talking bollocks.  

We are living through a moment when Americans seem particularly incomprehensible to one another,

But not to the rest of the world. We understand that America doesn't give a fart about anything save getting more money out of the rest of the world. Also, maybe Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal and Bagram Airbase should be handed over to the US of A.  

when our capacity for sympathy, empathy, mutual care

reciprocal tenderness and egalitarian propensity to go dumpster diving with hobos,  

and a sense of common fate across social differences is depleted. The path forward requires understanding that this is not a narrow problem that can be repaired through policymaking or education.

or anything feasible.  

It requires interventions in social life that allow us to experience one another’s concerns in a new light.

That is infeasible. Still, this is not to say that those who teach stupid shite should desist from demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all practicing heterosexual males. Not till such people have experienced penises entering them will they be able to see the concerns of their alterity in a new light.