2 Argumentative Indians

In an arbitrary and capricious abuse of discretion on the night before my first exam, I decided to go to the NY Public Library to see Salman Rushdie in conversation with Amartya Sen on the topic of Sen's new book, Identity and Violence.

First, the 2 main pieces of the book's argument:

1. Identity is plural. We are a fractured bag of selves. I am an Ohioan, a law student, an economist, a male, a feminist, an American, a friend, a heterosexual, a supporter of gay rights, a human, a son, a brother, etc. Cf. neoclassical econ's homo economicus.

2. Individuals must make choices about the identity groups with which to align themselves.

Sen's conclusion is that singularity (the choice to see one's self as situated in only 1 restrictive identity group) is an (1) epistemic [i.e. descriptively inaccurate] and (2) ethical [i.e. it blinds us to commonalities we have with others and thus obstructs cosmopolitanism] failure.

Rushdie pushed Sen on a few points in the argument:

Rushdie: How much of an individual's choice among identity groups is "free" choice and how much is determined by aleatory factors?

Sen: The ability to think reflectively about ourselves is generic to all human beings. Cf. Chomsky's universal grammar. [WHERE is the evidence for this claim?]

R: Aren't you doing some wishful thinking? In Clash of Civilizations, Sam Huntington argues convincingly that singularity is on the rise globally. Isn't his thesis more descriptively accurate than yours?

S: People increasingly believe in Huntington's singularity, but that belief doesn't make the underlying description of singularity any more accurate.

R: Aren't you whitewashing the failures of Muslims and letting Islam off the hook too easily? (I know, can you believe Salman Rushdie would say something like that?!)

S: Yes, Islamic terrorism is bad, but the history of Muslim peoples has many positive aspects.

Sen mentioned in passing that a major flaw in most lines of communitarian thought is their insistence on seeing individuals as singular, situated in only 1 restrictive identity group. Anyone more familiar with communitarianism want to respond?

Thoughts? The obvious implication of Sen's argument is that if we see ourselves as plural, we'll identify (and empathize) with seemingly dissimilar people. Are there other less obvious implications of his argument?

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Update: [GC] Kenji Yoshino, a YLS professor who will be teaching constitutional law at NYU in the fall, has a review of Sen's book in the May 14 issue of The New York Times.

Tu Quoque

To what extent is a tu quoque argument a fallacy?

Let me explain.

Clearly in the narrow sense of a fallacy it is. An individual who responds to an accusation of immoral behavior by saying: "Well, you aren't so saintly yourself!" is not really responding to the original accusation. And her motive is probably less-than-kosher; she probably wants to distract attention from her moral turpitude.

But can we, with a few intermediate steps, turn this response into a coherent argument? For example, suppose the respondent continues: "Your unsaintliness is evidence of a social (or group) norm that permits such behavior. Thus, my behavior is congruent with the norms of our community."

One of my college professors had a useful distinction for this discussion. He used the term moral to refer to the extent to which a given behavior was consistent with the prevailing community norms. He used ethical to refer to the extent to which those community norms were good ones. (He claims this distinction is ubiquitous. I don't believe him.)

So we might be able to see the tu quoque response as logically coherent if we are content to stop our analysis at the moral character of a given behavior. To get to the ethical aspect of that behavior, however, the argument has to take one more (tenuous) leap: "And our community's norms are good ones."

But if you are a pragmatist, postmodernist, or moral relativist, you are probably quite content to stop before that last leap. So you might see tu quoque as a valid (though not necessarily desirable) form of argument.

Of course, there's a critical sample-size problem with using 2 individuals' behavior as evidence of a group norm. But it works in relationship fights!

Thoughts?

Public Staplers

Is there any better example of the tragedy of the commons than staplers in public places?

People must be thinking: "Hmmm, this seems like an awful lot of pages to staple together. I wouldn't try it with my stapler. But if the stapler jams, somebody else has to deal with it--not me."

Normally, I'd blame the structure of incentives in a case like this one. But library staplers seem ill-suited for well-defined property rights (high transaction costs). So I blame the moral savagery of my fellow law students. Am I right?

The Marketplace of Ideas

Last week the Federalist Society had a fascinating discussion on its listserv about the 9th Circuit's decision to permit a public school to prohibit a student from wearing an anti-gay t-shirt to school. Soon, the discussion turned to the "free market of ideas" issue. A classmate and I were arguing that market logic makes a number of critical and often questionable assumptions (about market structure, rationality, etc.). The rest of the group, predictably, either defended those assumptions or continued to assert their validity ipse dixit.

Then, one of the pro-market guys sent a post that said (paraphrase): "Well, either you have faith in the market of ideas or you don't."

I never responded to his post, but his response flabbergasts me. We were not having a deep disagreement between, for example, the relative epistemological merits of faith and reason--a disagreement no amount of evidence could resolve. On the contrary, my classmate and I were playing ball in the Federalist arena! We're saying: Okay, we accept your position that the most important values in this situation are reaching the "best" views (In other words, we weren't arguing for against the free market of ideas because we were concerned about trammeling the feelings of those with minority viewpoints.). But even under your set of value preferences, might the free market of ideas have structural flaws that prevent it from yielding the "best" ideas?

In other words, invoking "faith" as a trump card seems ridiculously disingenuous because evidence (in whatever form) seems so well-suited to be our arbiter.

Thoughts?

Law, Literature, and Justice Scalia

I wonder whether other law students experience what I've experienced this year. Progressive students entering law school tend to have a preconceived notion of Justice Scalia: a hateful, religious, pro-business, right-wing nut-job with horns and a pitchfork. But, as I described it to my friend Kevin (and he agrees),

[r]eading Scalia's opinions for myself has changed the way I feel about him. I still disagree with him across the board, and I'm enormously distrustful of anyone who sees the world in terms as simple as he does, but when I see the words "Scalia, J., dissenting" on the page, my face lights up. Don't you wish Souter or Breyer or Ginsburg could write like he does?

I feel the same way about Oliver Wendell Holmes ("The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics"; "Eloquence may set fire to reason"; even "Three generations of imbeciles is enough.") and Robert Jackson, too ("Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard"; "Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority."): their prose goes a long way in winning me over to their jurisprudential outlooks.

Any thoughts on this observation? Is it accurate for others? Should it be accurate? [To those of you who shout a resounding "No": What world do you live in?] What effect does Scalia's adroitness with the pen (or, more likely, the word processor) have on the Court's legitimacy? He does, after all, employ his writing skills for evil (i.e. vigorously attacking other Justices' opinions) as well as for good.

The current liberal (and other conservative) Justices are, on the whole, abysmal writers, especially for such bright people. Any ideas why? Roberts may be the exception, but it's a bit early to tell.

7th Circuit Judge (and superb writer himself: "Where powerful moral intuitions or overwhelming public opinion point, notions of fairness, equality, liberty, justice, and so forth, being infinitely malleable, and conclusional rather than analytic, follow.") Richard Posner has a book on this subject: Law and Literature. I believe Holmes and Cardozo are his paradigms. Posner's book is on my summer reading list; stay tuned for feedback.

Metaphors in International Relations

On Monday evening, I heard NRF speak about international relations among Iraq, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. He, like most scholars, talks about nations as if they have a coherent, unified set of interests ("Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons."). In other words, he personifies nations. See Lakoff & Johnson's book with a catchy yet solecistic title, Metaphors We Live By; see also Lakoff's more recent and less scholarly Don't Think of An Elephant!

Clearly this move simplifies discussion, but what do we lose in exchange for this simplification? Is personification the best way to talk about international relations? What are the alternatives?

On a related note, I recently finished Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. He points out that economists have trouble analyzing the field of international relations because that field lacks the (assumed) exogenous political and institutional structure through which economists are accustomed to analyzing situations. In other words, in the market, players resolve conflicts through the price mechanism. But in international relations, players are in a quasi state of nature and hence have many more conflict-resolution mechanisms. Is Bloom right?

Thoughts?

The Market for Blood

On my way home from the library, I passed a Red Cross sign soliciting blood donations in exchange for movie tickets. In the past, I've seen offers of pizza and cookies for donations, but never cash. Why not? Congress banned the sale of organs (see National Organ Transplant Act of 1984), but blood is not an organ under conventional medical taxonomy. And sperm banks regularly pay their donors for specimens.

Some ideas:

• Maybe my description of the law or facts is wrong. Maybe Congress has banned the sale of blood, or maybe blood donation agencies do in fact pay cash for donations.
• The Red Cross believes that offering cash for blood will "commoditize" the donation experience, diluting the altruistic motives of donors and leading to less blood supplied.
• The blood business is not a profitable one. Collecting, testing, and storing blood is, after all, expensive. The Red Cross, a non-profit organization, stays in the market notwithstanding its losses for nonmarket reasons. On this view, the pizza and movie tickets might be donations from altruistic businesses, not the Red Cross's attemt to compensate donors. (The problem with this view is that patient demand for blood is probably enormously inelastic, so if the Red Cross has any market power at all, it can set a high selling price to extract higher profits.)
• The skeptic in me suspects that the structure of the blood market is imperfect, characterized by an economy of scale. As a result, the Red Cross, an oligopsonist, is a price setter; it sets its buying price at 1 movie ticket. Competitors are few and far-between.
• Ultra-cynical view: The Red Cross doesn't want to deal with the homeless. Perhaps the Red Cross believes the homeless are more likely to disrupt their donation centers or are likely to drive away non-homeless donors. Movie tickets are less likely to attract the homeless than cash (plausible assumption?).

Thoughts?