Well, slowly but surely I’m catching up on my viewing of Joss Whedon’s latest enterprise, Dollhouse [note: I’ve two episodes left to catch up on]. Underlying the Dollhouse plot-line is the of course the ethical (and pragmatic) questions underlying the actual running of an enterprise as suggested. Dolls, are people, who (we are led to believe) knowledgeably contract for a 5 year term during which their minds and memory (self) is (mostly) erased and reprogrammed during the term of tenure for whatever purposes the house might desire.  For the following assume contract is not forced and the terms of the contract are made clear. That is the contractee (doll) enters into the contract with full knowledge of what it entails and voluntarily submits.

So, the question on offer is whether or not a dollhouse contract might be ethical (moral). My take looking across the ideological divide is that a strict contract libertarian cannot argue against it. For a contract libertarian no voluntary contract can be dismissed on ethical grounds. My guess is that the progressive/liberal would argue against it incompletely. That their argument would be on class/power grounds and that this is an abuse of the same … but that the progressive would leave substantial numbers of people undefended, i.e., that recruiting dolls from those suffering irrevocable brain injuries that left the person amenable to the programming process would be eliglble (salvageable as doll) for permanent doll status. Finally, it is my opinion that the conservative view would be that this is immoral under any circumstances for a number of reasons, in human rights terms (which I don’t find persuasive, but can serve here as shorthand) is that we don’t posses the right to give up our autonomy in that way.

However, making assumptions like that is fraught with danger. One cannot and should not ascribe motives an arguments for the others side, they are likely to be wrong. Recently in two discussions on the abortion debate I witnessed, the pro-choice speaker assumed motives of the pro-life side, making the categorical claim that any and all pro-life positions assume a patriarchal viewpoint and wish to oppress women. Now there may in fact be pro-life people who advocate patriarchy and oppression of women, but I’m not one and I’ve never even met one in conversation. So here we have what might be a typical view of the pro-choice left of the conservative pro-life movement which is mostly fictional. It ascribes motives and arguments to the other which, although easy to argue against, are not actually held by any but a tiny minority.

So, with that in mind, I’ll only offer my argument of why the doll process and contract is immoral, and oddly enough, it is lies at the heart of my opposition to abortion. As a defense against the totalitarian excesses of the last century it is essential that we hold to an ontological axiomatic assertion of the dignity of man. The doll process, in that it moves a person to “thing” violates that principle and is therefore immoral.

So what are my gentle reader’s takes on doll ethics? If the dollhouse process is contractually aboveboard and kept that contract is kept faithfully … is it moral?

I haven’t posted as much recently.  I thought summer would slow things down, but apparently not so much around our house.  I’ve been collecting things to write on, but they’re starting to get stale, so before they’re completely irrelevant, here are a few quick hits to start the week.

Economy: Never mind whether or not you got TARP funds, the Obama administration may be looking to cap your executive’s pay.

Gene Sperling, a top counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, conceded to a congressional committee that imposing compensation caps on companies could lead to a flight of talent.

“I can say with certainty that nobody in the Obama administration is proposing such a thing,” he said.

Yet, at the same time, he and officials with the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a case for how payment structures rewarded short-term gains at the expense of long-term performance and contributed to the nation’s financial crisis.

The administration plans to seek legislation that would try to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions.

No mention of how incentivizing the giving loans to people who couldn’t afford them contributed to the nation’s financial crisis, nor any talk of reining that in.

Abortion: Warner Todd Hudson asks and answers, “Why is Killing Abortionists Wrong? Because it is Un-Christian, That’s Why!” He uses logic and scripture to back up his position.  The key paragraphs:

The final word here is that a Christian ethic posits that men are subject to man’s laws and willfully violating them is not a Christian thing to do — but for extreme cases, and then in a more passive manner than not. Additionally man’s duly constituted law is the sword of punishment and punishment should not be carried out by the individual going off on his own hook. Christians do not take the law into their own hands.

So, in answer to Jacob Sullum’s tough question, killing abortionists IS wrong. It is also quite in keeping with Christian practice to suffer under pro-abortion laws without taking the law into one’s own hands to end the life of a doctor committing abortions. The law says that abortion is legal, only the law may impose the sentence of death, and the individual is bound by those facts under a Christian worldview.

Definitely worth a read.

Health Care: So will all those saving we’re supposed to come from health care reform going to come after the trillion dollar cost is recouped?

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

And, as we all know, government estimates of the cost of a government program are a low end guess.  Somehow, I think that net tax decrease that Obama promised was never going to materialize anyway.

Recently I had noted earlier, following my reading of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, that between the Galilean/Copernican period and Newton’s Principia no new scientific data (no facts) arose to distinguish between these two theories. Yet by the time of Newton’s writing of the Principia the dispute was settled. This was settled not by facts but by a process that has more in common with religious conversion than than the popular notions of what is comprised by scientific method.

Physics has seen three major revolutions. Following the development or conception of what we in this “late modernity” [aside: more on that later] period call Physics by the Greeks the overriding principles underpinning reality were driven by a belief that the world and cosmic bodies followed geometric and numeric patterns. Observation and insight were interpreted within this framework. During the period noted above, a conversion began to occur. A mechanical constraint arithmetic model replaced the old. This held until the latter part of the 19th to the early 20th century when it too was replaced. Currently the view of how to best understand the universe is one driven by mathematical invariances (symmetries). Data and experiment are not and have not been the driving force in moving persons and communities from one to another underlying model for how to perceive nature. Passion and persuasion and conversion are better descriptions of what occurred.

Yesterday I began to unwind what Polanyi was driving at with his attack on the mechanistic view of nature. He principally objected to the idea that that the all kinds of experience can be understood in terms of atomic data. This is more than just a rejection of reductionist methods of scientific advancement. And it is not something which today is abandoned with the discovery of quantum uncertainty, i.e., the free willed electron. Scientific metaphors have a way of becoming dominant metaphors applied outside of their realm of application. Consider how uncertainty, relativity, and evolution are examples of scientific ideas have been abused when used as metaphor in the social arenas. The scientific community using those ideas has given a strange credence to their application in other arenas. So too has the notion that man and his society is ultimately are just collections of clockwork apparatus. It is the dangers related to those, essentially abuses, of the conception of a comprehensible, mechanistic, deterministic universe applied to social studies (econ and politics) and life sciences that the chief dangers lie.

Consider the following abbreviated example, which I hope to elaborate on later. Man when viewed in a mechanistic way enables one to set aside models of human dignity in favor of man as a consumer. Hedonistic consumerism can replace a more, well, frankly human (and realistic) view of man in society.

The pseudonymous Larry Niven blogging as the <a target=”_blank” href=”http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/”>Rust Belt Philosopher</a> often attacks various defenses of the theodicy problem. I haven’t been reading his blog for much more than a month but it seems possibly he locates the best and most potent objections to Christian belief in the failure, in his view, to solve the theodicy problem adequately. On one former post I had commenting his comments on theodicy he remarked that I’d “offered nothing new.” Well here is something, perhaps, new.
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Theodicy centers on the question of why does the Christian God who has been declared to have significant power in the universe and who is claimed to be Good then allow evil and unearned suffering to be subjected to the innocent. I will now attempt to present what might be considered a narrative defense of this question.

Why is Dicken’s Tiny Tim allowed to suffer, Dickens is writing stories and we will, for now, assume that the story has in mind the furtherance of good and furthermore as author commands complete control over his story. Why does any number of good characters in narratives by any number of authors allow minor characters to suffer undeserved evil? Dickens is not unique. Any number of minor (and major) characters undeserved suffering in novels in which the end of the author was to expose and explore truth and beauty. The crux of the narrative theodicy response that the suffering of the underserved is justified by the demands of the larger narrative. Yet at the same time, unlike in a writers narrative, the protagonists have free will. They can make moral choices and as a result can fail to rise to fulfill the role to which they were fit.

In the book about the life of <i><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881411809?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=pseudopolym05-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0881411809″ id=”static_txt_preview”>Father Arseny, 1893-1973</a></i> toward the end of the book (which contains fragmented stories from people whose lives where touched by Fr Arseny) there is a report of a particular saintly woman, Mother Maria of whom Fr Arseny hears her final confession. The person recounting this story fragment is confused as to why Fr Arseny was so affected by her confession and life’s story for to him here story seemed mundane and ordinary. Fr Arseny explains that at this point in his life, as his own mortality was near, he was so very thankful that God gave to him the chance to hear her story and her example, which was a continual narrative of her putting her own concerns and desires aside for the sake others linked at the same time with a continual turning towards God. My suggestion here is that the suffering of those around her (whom she helped) provided grist for her life’s story <i>for the benefit</i> of Fr Arseny and his story, which being shared helps the rest of us.

Modern materialism rejects the notion that there is purpose in the unfolding of our lives and in history. Dame fortuna for the materialist reigns supreme. So the question of a narrative theodicy requires some justification for rejecting dumb luck as the only meaning for our lives. The question is not to test the narrative model against the materialist model per se (at least to begin) but first to examine if the narrative model is internally consistent.

Judeo-Christian tenents from Genesis and other writings offer that we are both made in God’s image <i>and </i>suggest that narrative is a key feature of both God’s plan and our nature. The notion of God’s unfolding narrative with Israel is not foreign to the text or the interpretative tradition. In the narrative of the man born blind in the Gospel of John the answer to why he might have suffered for decades as a blind man was answered in effect that it was so because he was to take part in <i>this narrative </i>unfolding today, i.e., so that Jesus might heal him. The justification for his being blind was his role in the narrative of Jesus life. Charles Taylor in <i>the Secular Age</i> recounts many of the reasons and mechanisms that arose through the previous four or five centuries that meaning has been leached from our view of history and the world around us.

This is all I have time for tonight, so at this point discussion may be fruitful. Hopefully there may be enough here to chew on.

Commenter Boonton accuses my position on torture as “not clear.” Five or six years ago, if asked impulse would be along the lines of the film Taken, or other revenge oriented narratives if harm had come to my family or more specifically my daughters … torture and taking law into my own hands included with that package. But then again, my ethical framework has been turned about since I became Christian and my political thinking as well has, well, sharpened as a result of this exercise known as blogging came into my life. Since that time my notions of political ethics vs personal ethics have diverged … but not in the strictly simplistic fashion that one might imagine. Politically speaking I am influence by a number of sources, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn influence (in contrast to the more traditional influences along the lines of Hobbes, Locke, and the founders). For what follows I am going to try to establish what I see as the political ethical situation vis a vis torture.

Regarding torture. I find childish and simplistic the ordinary narrative we find so often arising from the left. That torture is well defined and clear cut. That it the consequential argument is all that is required to oppose it. That numbers do not matter, i.e., that the torture of 10 or 100 men (illegal combatants at that) is the same thing for a regime, for a people and ethically speaking as the torture of millions of innocents. That a good man cannot find himself driven to choose it as the lesser of evils (see again the movie noted above). All of these points are repeatedly made by the left and the critics of recent activities of the past (and it seems likely the current) Administration(s). Unfortunately, that these things are all wrong and in error is not the same as taking a position that torture should not be the policy taken by and on behalf of our country.

And it should be repeated that these combatants which are in custody, almost certainly to a man, are guilty of heinous war crimes. They themselves torture, drug, and abuse their enemy. They fight without regard to civilian or military personel as target, in fact more often than not they specifically target civilians. In prior ages, and rightfully so, their combat would be regarded as unspeakable and they would be summarily executed when apprehended. The only argument against doing just that as far as I have understood or heard is that is tactically unwise, i.e., a foe who knows he faces death on capture will fight to the last.

Torture is not well defined. There are large and relevant cultural and personal elements which need to be taken into account when considering what constitutes torture. This cannot be waved away as irrelevant. Seemingly this should be clearer to the “side” of the debate that scoffs at the failure to define pornography but that “one knows it when one sees it.” This is not in and of itself problematic. Torture has been used for two distinct purposes by regimes in the past (and likely in the present). One is to inculcate fear and terror in a populus. Consider again the (excellent) fim Das Leben der Anderen, it is true that the regime was venal and corrupt. It is also true that torture, fear, and terror “worked” in the purely consequential sense. Intimidation with the force of the state … is highly intimidating, especially if you have friends or family. It takes a heroic stance to be able to withstand such force and heroes are rare. Torture to obtain information also can be effective. It also can be not be effective if used poorly. For that matter, modern guns and weaponry and trained soldiers can be not be used effectively. Pointing that in a specific instance that torture was ineffectively used is not proof that it cannot be used effectively. Information gathering and analysis is a difficult task. Heisenberg and the quantum theorists of the early 20th century identified the notion that the observer and the observed are not two independent entities. An analogous thing operates in the gathering of information. One has to be careful that prejudices of the observer do not influence the data being sought, always a problem in high noise to signal environments. But I digress. The point is that any sort of interrogation is a flawed source of information. If a intelligence agency or community finds itself with a extreme dearth of information and feels that information is crucial at a juncture in a conflict … the desire and need to turn to alternate means, knowing that there is a price, i.e., that this is the least worst alternative, makes the turn to methods to extract information that are considered in the drawing room as torture is understandable.

However, torture is not consistent with the American way. We do not systematically speaking condone torture. This authority, to borrow from Jouvenel, has not been granted by the people. Furthermore, this conflict in which we find ourselves is highly asymmetric. We can and should claim that we will in fact not avail ourselves of these methods not because they are not useful, because if used intelligently they can be, but because we don’t need them to beat our enemies. We should make a stern point to highlight the difference between legal and illegal combatants and our treatment of the same. Sticking to our principles may have material and tangible costs. We should acknowledge that up front and accept. Or if we are unwilling to do so, we should be honest about our failing to do so and strive to come to a place were we do not have to sacrifice our principles to acheive those necessary ends.

One thing that comes to mind when issues regarding increased influence by the government in healthcare. Today there are no public hayrides. Why? Because somewhere someone decided they could sue if some rambunctious teenage got hurt during the ride … which mean insurance was required … which meant no more hayrides. How much public interest in health care of this sort not give increased impetus to control risk or other behavior deemed not necessary if that activity has but the smallest negative impact on public health and subsequently public insurance rates. Hayrides are harmless romantic fun that were once common in the New England autumn. Now they are only a private affair hidden from any organized groups that might be subject to suit.

There is a notion among so many today, and my impression is that this idea is found more on the left than the right, that if someone is injured especially badly then there is necessarily another at fault. Actual accidents do not exist in their world. And that it is right to use legal proceedings after any substantial injury to redress the wrong and to locate (or invent) a guilty party and get them to pay. This is, I think, quite a childish impulse. I don’t understand how an adult can act on such an idea in the absence of evidence or any suggestion of malfeasance or malice.

Negligence is often cited as a cause for accidents and used as a proxy for fault. Tiger Woods occasionally misses a nominally routine putt. Jose Calderon has an 2008/9 NBA free shooting percentage of 98.052%. Why not 100%? After all free throws are routine. The point is that humans performing any routine activities will occasionally fail or introduce a mistake. Accidents can occur which are not intentional and are not actionable. All too often an error is cause for suit even when it is an “honest” mistake. An obvious rejoinder is that this is what courts are for, to distinguish between honest mistakes and ones which arise from malice, greed, or other intentional errors. And yes, that is the case. But the courts should not be the place where this issue is explored, but the place where evidence of error is tried.

I brought this thought up in a comment on Mark’s post on torture; it’s fine to be against torture, but what do you consider torture?  John McCain, having endured the Hanoi Hilton, might have one definition.  Abu Zubaydah’s definition is to be in a cell with a stinging insect.  What about tickle torture?

Danny Carlton presents some food for thought on this subject.  I’m open to your comments on this because this really made me stop and think.

Waterboarding does no permanent, physical damage. It makes one think they are drowning, which I would imagine is an incredibly unpleasant feeling. Another unpleasant feeling–the fear that your children will be taken away from you, and you’ll never see them again. This is done daily across the US by overzealous social workers attempting to force "confessions" from parents suspected of abuse or neglect. Given the choice I think I’d prefer waterboarding.

The logic behind the Fifth Amendment is that when faced with fear, a person may very well lie about their guilt or innocence choosing imprisonment over torture or death. The result is not the truth or justice. But when the goal isn’t a guilty verdict but information needed to save lives the equation changes.

The question then becomes, is it fair or just to put a person through a mentally unpleasant event in order to extract information which can save lives? Ironically those who scream loudest against waterboarding would be those most adamantly in favor of allowing social workers unfettered power in using just as merciless and cruel techniques against parents suspected of abuse or neglect, most often based solely on an anonymous tip.

Whether we as a "civilized society" can tolerate torture has been answered by how we allow social workers and police to use mental torture on those suspected of a crime. Since waterboarding results in no actual physical harm to the person the difference then is whether we will tolerate what we allow on US citizens barely suspected of a crime to be used on known terrorists who have information that could save lives. 

Why is this even a debate?

Is torture wrong?  Seems pretty clear cut that Americans believe it is, which is good to hear.  But those on the Left berating the Bush administration then go beyond the poll results and say that Americans are against waterboarding specifically.  No, they said they were against torture, and again, it all depends on what you mean by that. 

Are you against putting a caterpillar into Zubaydah’s cell and telling him it’s a wasp?  Or are you against hanging someone by meat hooks for 3 days?  Is there a difference in those techniques?  I think there is.  Are they both torture?  Depends on your definition, I suppose.

What’s your definition, and what is it based on?

One point here I’d like to make clear. I am firmly against institutional support for torture. I have no qualms stating that and think that torture at best should have institutional guards against its use. It is not clear that it is ever necessary to use it and there are reasons not to. However, I don’t think the utilitarian case can be effectively made against it, that is, that I think the historical record clearly shows that torture can be used to extract information. Blog neighbor Mr Kuznicki accuses me of not carefully reading his point of view on torture when I describe it as “ineffective”. His actual words (from a later post):

Along the way, Dr. Arrigo also supports the independent argument that I’ve been making, namely that torture tends to reveal a great deal more false but convincing information in addition to whatever truth happens to come out, and that, for this reason, it’s a bad informational bargain. [note: emphasis mine]

That’s a bit more nuanced objection than one normally finds, my characterization as “ineffective” is wrong where “a bad informational bargain”, oh no that’s just way way different. A complete misreading … or not. For to me that reads a lot like “ineffective”, doesn’t it? Alas, I’m a little unclear on the difference.

There are remain two problems here. One is that resistance movements in general have always reacted to capture of one of their members in a regime in which torture is utilized by quickly moving safehouses and scrubbing all contact with the captured member. Why? The most likely reason they do that is experience in the organization shows that if they don’t move quickly the captured person will “break” under “enhanced interrogation” and they and those to whom he/she was in contact are now at extreme risk. As a odd side note, I’d add that a book The Quiller Memorandum from my childhood, err, mispent youth of cold-war spy vs spy genre (except agent was deemed “reliable under torture” instead of “licensed to kill”) was quite interesting and psychological was quite good even if the later books in the series suffered for moving to the action side and away from the thoughtful end of the storyline arc. The point is if it was true that torture was so bad at giving information then such organizations, which do learn from experience, would stop moving after capture. They didn’t so it seems highly probable that torture from an experimental viewpoint on the victims side … works. So, to put it bluntly: If you think torture is ineffective, why do organizations when facing an opponent who uses torture in an assymmetric struggle always have to quickly move to cut ties and move safehouses when someone is being tortured and interrogated if the claim (of its bad information content) is true?

Why is that? Well, here is my guess. The problem located likely at the the phrase supplied by Mr Kuznicki, that is “bad information.” Almost all information from intelligence sources in a conflict are “bad” in the same way that confessions under duress are. The signal to noise ratio is horrible in all but ideal situations … and ideal situations are very very rare. The best information in a semi-static situation is obtained by a good cultivated relationship with a snitch, just as was found to be the case in Iraq. But from an intelligence gathering point of view, most of the intelligence gained is bad. This, in the crime fighting genre, leads to the “chasing down leads” side of the equation. Snitches, double agents, satellites, drones, phone taps, cell phone monitoring, radio spectrum analysis, internet/switch monitoring, bribed, interrogation, and “enhanced interrogation” are all bad sources of intelligence when you get down to it. The signal to noise ratio of all of these methods is horrible. Correlation between intelligence leads to higher probability of fact. In the absence of good leads, agents and people chase down every available lead, again from the crime drama world … leads have to be chased down with footwork. The point being while torture is indeed “bad information.” The problem real problem arises that so are all the other sources of information. When all information is bad, more bad information which can lead to correlation with other information is in itself entirely useless. When the gestapo or whatever agency got 75 names from torture. They chased down all those leads. Perhaps many were bad. But they had resources and the time and if 5 of the 75 led to a little evidence then they have 5 more people with which to have an enhanced chat. And that led to more names that lead to further connections. That was worth the payoff (for them).

There is another issue regarding torture I’d raised years ago which is the culturally relative problem in defining torture. The colonial era trans-Atlantic voyage, not to speak of the Darwin/Cook trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic voyages, today would be regard as cruel and inhumane punishment. The quantity of pain regularly indured by NFL, professional cyclists, and many other professional atheletes is astounding to the uninitiated and likely exceeds that delivered to those under many forms of “enhanced interrogation.” The sleep deprivation noted in some of the accounts compare that to the Shackleton’s amazing journey or those who race sailboats around the world and around the horn. Read the beginning of this book (The Soul Of A New Machine) for the geek variant on sleep deprivation. There is an old joke which goes something like this.

Joe Frazier is in a bar drinking and one surly drunk stumbles up to him and starts swearing about the money he lost betting on him. The drunk is ignored by Joe which just bugs the drunk and spurs him to exclaim how he’s going to haul off and wing Joe but good. Joe finally ever so slowly turns to him and says, “If you hit me, and I happen to find out about it ….. “

The point is what is torture to one person in one time and era is making an ordinary living to another.

Torture seems to the be the hot topic of discussion today.

• Ms McArdle offers an interesting alternative way to object to the notion torture even granting its effectiveness.
• Mr Kuznicki continues to hold on the notion, which seems more and more likely to be incorrect, that torture is actually ineffective.
• And … Mr Fernandez points out a big reason why it is likely that torture works and that those who think it isn’t actually effective live in ivory towers wearing rose tinted glasses. It has to effects, it can extract information and it can terrorize a population. Both work, i.e., torture can get information and can terrorize a population.

Torture is almost certainly effective. To isolate the one of the points Mr Fernandez raises:

But I didn’t need Mr. Cheney to tell me that. When I ran safehouses in the anti-Marcos days the first order of business whenever a cell member was captured by the police was to alert the surviving members, move the safehouse and destroy all links to the captured person. That’s because everyone knew that there was a great probability that the captive would talk under duress, however great his bravery and resistance. Nobody I know, or have heard of who has had experience in real-life situations has ever said, “our cell should continue as usual and the safehouse should remain open, despite the fact that one of our own is being tortured by the secret police, because I read in the New York Times that coercion never works.” The probability is that torture works and for that reason its use constitutes a moral dilemma; and the reason why Jacoby believes he is expressing a noble sentiment when he forswears it even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on Terror.

This is not a isolated reaction of a resistance movement in the Philippines … resistance in France in WWII and elsewhere in modern and ancient eras had to react quickly after one of their companions was captured. Why? Because under torture, the threat that the person held would talk was more likely than not. Mr Kuznicki would have it that the notion that the gestapo and/or the Marcos regime might extract under duress valuable information is not likely. He would not (apparently) “alert the surviving members, move the safehouse and destroy all links to the captured person”. Doing those things takes effort and entails risk. According to the “torture doesn’t work” theory that would be counter-productive, expensive, and risky. According, alas, to the real world … it may be expensive and risky … but it is also necessary. And the reason why it is necessary is the erroneous assumption that torture doesn’t work. Torture it seems in the real world, doesn’t always work … but very often does.

However that being said, Ms McArdle’s proposed argument has merit. We are not and have not been a people that condones torture. My contention is that torture and methods of torture should be known and understood by our state agents. But that when and if they use it, they should understand that it is illegal. We ask our soldiers to lay their lives down for the benefit of their country. The existence of effective torture techniques means that we may also ask our operatives and agents to lay down their career and possibly their freedom and good name for the benefit of the country. To put in in the parlance of popular theater, Mr Baur may use torture (effectively even) to save (many?) American lives … but in the aftermath he should go to jail for it … absent a (rare) Presidential pardon. We should remain a people and an nation that never systematically employs torture as a method. It may be that making it illegal is a way to do that. It may also be that there are other, just as effective ways of doing that.

I am no lawyer and I have no idea how the law stood and the law stands now. Apparently waterboarding and similar techniques as were used recently has been used on occaission as a method of extracting information in times of need for over 50 years by our country. If Mr Bush and Mr Cheney and their administration is to be now tried for the methods they employed should not the previous 6-8 administrations be vetted and tried too?

Today’s links started a short discussion on healthcare. The Liberal/Progressive left see universal health insurance (one insurance provider) as a way to ensure the “right” that they believe every American has to good healthcare. Now, I don’t think healthcare is a “right” but then again I’m admittedly quite shaky when it comes what the word “right” (with or without scare quotes) might mean and think that by and large think that we don’t have what is meant commonly by that word, especially for healthcare. But I digress, for the point of this essay is to establish a few “talking points” regarding healthcare from a policy standpoint.

I’ll begin with noting a few flaws with universal coverage.

• One of the primary problems with universal coverage/one provider for insurance is structural. Representational government, involving elected officials, is particularly poorly suited to handle actuarial matters. Politicians like to promise, and very often promise short term gains ignoring long term costs, e.g., flood insurance rates set by the State is traditionally far below what reasonable actuarial calculations will provide. The representitive banks on the “payback” or disaster which is being insured against will not occur in his/her lifetime.
• Good actuarial calculations demand an eye to the cost, to the bottom line. That future cost is the future of the company and cannot be overlooked, unlike it can in a politician’s rhetoric.
• Insurance-as-business has a short term interest in cutting costs, but a long term interest in them going up. That is to say, in the short term a medical insurance provider benefits from cutting health care costs. If a medical procedure costs less, it costs them less and they don’t have to pay as much to provide a given benefit. On the other hand in the long term, their rates and profit are based on a percentage of average costs … which if they go up, then aggregate profits go up as well. One might suspect that the cost/benefit analysis works differently for a government run agency, but this is not likely the case as power as well as profit goes into the government’s payback.

Now some thoughts on healthcare in general.

• Why is healthcare expensive today? The reason shirts, food, shoes, and toasters are cheap today is because of two factors. Mechanization allows for multiplication of human labor involved in their production and the availability of cheap power. If a skilled or unskilled laborer can produce 10,000 widgets a day with a machine where he can only make one per day by hand, then the price of the widget being sold can drop by orders of magnitude. Unless we increase greatly the number of health care workers and pay them slave wages the price of healthcare is going to stay prohibitively high. Humans, especially skilled humans, cost money (they need to get paid). Ultimately the only way to make healthcare available and cheap for everyone is to get the humans efforts multiplied by technological means. If a doctor today sees 40 patients a day, the only way to reduce health care costs by orders of magnitude is to increase the number of patients he can minister to in a day the same orders of magnitude. This is not as impossible as it sounds. The average village pediatrician sees childhood diseases in waves. When a flu sweeps through the town, he gets hit with hundreds of kids with identical symptoms. Does he need to give the same diagnostic care to all? Couldn’t some intelligent automation and cheap intelligent diagnostic tools multiply his effectiveness?
• Another reason is regulation. FDA regulation is very expensive, and largely useless from the point of view of the manufacturer. FDA approval does not indemnify a manufacturer from fault. After going through extensive and expensive tests a drug is approved. If later it is found harmful, the manufacturer is still liable even though they got certification. FDA approval is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has cost. That cost should be an option not a requirement and should indemnify the manufacturer from fault. If the FDA approves thalidomide for pre-natal maternal care then there should be no way to bring suit in case harmful effects are discovered later unless the manufacturer fudged or falsified the certification procedure. Requiring FDA approval is likely the single biggest roadblock to innovation in the healthcare industry in the US today. I’m not suggesting it be eliminated, in fact by indemnifying a manufacturer upon gaining FDA certification it is instead strengthened. The other side of that coin is that FDA approval for drugs and health care products should be optional.
• Univeral/single payer plans miss out on the goal. The goal for government policy should not be to bring equal health care to everyone but to provide a path to better, cheaper, and more effective future health care for all of us. Government driven policy and insurance is not the way to innovate.

Look at an example noted in Monday’s highlight’s comments:

A down to earth example might be the law student whose letter Andrew Sullivan published recently. He has asthma but no coverage since he is in school. He has to basically get his friends mom to swipe samples of the drug he needs. He was jogging on a treadmill and got a sudden pain in his foot. He stayed off of it for several months. In the meantime someone with good coverage will get regular checkups for a $20 co-pay and maybe spend $100 for an emergancy x-ray if they got that mysterious pain in their foot. This type of ‘rationing’ does not seem very efficient or fair.

How might this end up in a “mechanized” health care environment? Today we have many categories of “prescription” drugs and over the counter drug and as well we have protected and generic drugs. My suggestions would severely limit the first category opening up the number of drugs available over the counter, which would almost certainly include asthma inhalants. And as well to the “protected” and “generic” classifications of drugs, other approval schemes would be available besides FDA approved medications. Other independent certifications (or no certification at all) would be available to drug manufacturers. That would leave a larger array of price points for the albuterol this young student needs. In the second case, the student could go to a semi-automated (think Kinko’s) medical diagnostic clinic, rent some scan time with a automated scanner (x-ray or ultra-sound likely) and have the pain in his foot examined. He could have an automated result from an expert system tell him what therapeutic options would be best in his case and the an estimate of accuracy of diagnoses which he could use to decide if he needed his pictures to be examined by a human expert. The clinic would be making money by providing this machine for likely less than that $20 co-pay. Note that in my “plan” anti-plan no insurance is needed. In fact, the existence of insurance would mean that the things needed to give control back to the patient and provide for more health care “product” to be consumed by the population would not be occuring. Single payer or universal health care is exactly the wrong way to get to where we need to go. It is moving to a more covered, more controlled and less effective health care industry, which gets it exactly backwards.

Consider 400 years ago, I’d bet that over 60% of the population farmed. Consider food as analogous to health care. Single payer is a plan to provide “fairer distribution” (an arguable point) and redistribute and control what food is produced. That sounds like a move to the collective farming of peasants who stay with non-mechanized labor for production. But history has shown, a more effective way to provide inexpensive food is to bring in harvesters, trucks, fertilizer, refrigeration, super-markets, and other (farmers, ethnic, health) markets into the equation. Single payer supporters are the ones fighting for staying with the horse drawn solutions on collectivized farms at the same time as a better solution. Today a small fraction of the population farms … and obesity because, in part, of cheap available food is the problem.

So essentially the single-payer supporter is campaigning for the five-year plans of the Soviet era and the failed farm collectivization projects of Lenin and Stalin which caused mass starvation and shortages. So when looked at from a practical standpoint, single-payer healthcare might have pretty poetic stories and market jingles to push its agenda forward. But to put it bluntly, one might ask the supporters single payer, “So which is it are you stupid or evil?” ‘Cause it seems like those are only the two alternatives that remain.

Considering the amount of discussion that an offhand comment on fidelity and monogamy stirred up, I’m considering returning to a chapter by chapter overview/discussion of what I feel is the hands down best book on the subject of relationships, dating, and marriage. Namely the compilation by Amy and Leon Kass entitled Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying.

This book is not polemical or one which takes any position in particular. The purpose of the collection is not to drive the reader to any particular conclusion but instead provide a resource of thoughtful discourse on the insights of the great thinkers of the past on the subject. In that vein, it follows more in the line of a Great Books approach, and comprises with a few exceptions a fairly complete series of excerpts collected from the Western Canon which deal specifically with courtship, romance, and marriage. Each excerpt includes a brief half page to one page introduction describing the piece, providing some thoughts to motivate the reader, and in some cases assist the reader to penetrate the stylistic methods employed by the author. Contributors include Rousseau, Aquinas, Darwin, Shakespeare, and many more.

I began that endeavor a year or more ago but set it aside, should I return to it? Would that be interesting?

Early next week, I’m going to blog about the contents of this paper, via slashdot.

Your (optional) “homework” is to read through it … so our possible discussions might be all that more fruitful.

In an number of previous essays the notions of Bertrand de Jouvenel regarding political theory have been utilized. One of these ideas in particular is that government is rightly formed for a particular society and culture when its authority is freely granted by the people, that is it utilizes the authority granted to it by the people and does not have to resort to coercion. This idea of government does not stem from rights or freedoms and the “standard” contract terminology stemming from Hobbes/Lockean political philosophies. Limitations on government stems from both the withholding of authority and that what actions and freedoms state may grant to a person, does not by that granting make that action ethical or moral. For example, the Roman state (and in fact many states) granted the power of life and death to the state over individual citizens. For over 200 years, Christians were put to death for their faith under this power granted. That however, did not make it ethical or moral for a particular Roman to do put a Christian to death. Or more plainly, it was within the boundaries of Roman rule to put a Christian to death but it was unethical for individual Roman to do so. Nero as Emperor could execute Christians as such but it was unethical for Nero the man to do so.

Christians for just slightly under two thousand years have opposed abortion. A statement regarding abortion made today of and by those against abortion that fixes the idea that the act of abortion is a equivalent to murder and the actor be it the mother or the doctor, is equivalent to a murderer is not unheard of in pro-life circles. Some pro-life activists “go this far” and those criticizing the pro-life Christian position remark that this should be a logical consequence of ascribing personhood to the fetus. It is not necessary to ascribe full or even partial “personhood” to a fetus in order to oppose abortion. But even granting that, a view of government as expressed above combined with Christian ethics does not necessitate that step of equivicating abortion with murder. Read the rest of this entry

President Obama, demonstrating another example of what Jim called an "incomplete life ethic", rescinded Bush’s executive order, reversing the ban on most federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.  Bush’s restrictions were informed by his moral beliefs, but Obama will have none of that.

Aides to Obama told reporters in a phone conference Sunday that the new administration intends to be led by a “responsible practice of science and evidence instead of dogma.” Harold Varmus of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said, “We view what happened with stem cell research in the last administration as one manifestation of failure to think carefully about how federal support of science and the use of scientific advice occurs.”

He once said that determining when a baby gets human rights was "above my pay grade".  Apparently, deciding when to destroy them isn’t. 

This, then, is apparently the "rightful place" that he promised to restore science to.  It doesn’t sound like morals and ethics are part of the equation anymore. 

Ryan Anderson, writing in the Weekly Standard, brings this point home (as well as noting a "big lie" that Obama continues to perpetuate).

During the ceremony this morning, Obama announced that by signing this executive order "we will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research." Of course there never was a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. President Bush was, in fact, the first president in history to fund embryonic stem cell research. The compromise Bush reached, however, put restrictions in place that prevented the further destruction of human embryos. It is these restrictions protecting human life that Obama has lifted.

Anderson notes that, while Obama did appeal to "moral values", he set up a straw man that he could easily knock down and brush aside, supposedly taking the issue off the table.  Anderson’s article covers this and a number of other objections that Obama’s decision simply ignores.  Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post headlined their article, "Obama Aims to Shield Science From Politics".  It not only touches on the signing of the EO, but notes how this value system will affect us going forward.  A memorandum was issued along with this signing.

The memorandum will ensure that "people who are appointed to federal positions in science have strong credentials and that the vetting process for evaluating scientific information doesn’t lead to any undermining of the scientific opinion," he said.

That is to say, Obama wishes to shield science from similar ethical concerns, or indeed any debate, during his administration.  Heck, his spokesmen injected politics into the debate by trash-talking "the last administration as one  manifestation of failure to think carefully."  One wonders how the WaPo headline writer actually came up with that summary of the story.

And finally, Scott Ott satirizes this whole situation, such that it can be, with this:

As he signs an executive order Monday lifting limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, President Barack Obama said he intends to make the wealthiest Americans “bear their fair share of the burden.”

Following through on his inaugural promise “to restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost“, the president will order the National Institutes of Health to extract stem cells from embryos whose parents earn more than $250,000 per year, and to inject them into “the sick and crippled middle class.”

“Let me be perfectly clear,” Mr. Obama said, “if your family earns less than $250,000 per year, the federal government will not harvest one single stem cell from your embryos…not one single cell. In fact, for 95 percent of working families, my stem cell plan contains nothing but miraculous healing. That’s right, the cures are on the way.”

Again, read the whole thing, and get a good chuckle.

Jason Kuznicki has some remarks spinning from a previous post of mine on Jim Anderson extended blog-based discussions on the ethics of vigilante activity. Here is Mr Kuznicki’s post. Here’s the post of Mr Anderson’s to which he refers and the original proposition and … for completeness my first post on this matter.

Mr Kuznicki offers:

To the extent that there must be laws (and only to that extent), the laws should be clearly expressed and regularly enforced. Laws that are unclear in their expression or irregular in their enforcement allow the legislators and law enforcement agents too much leeway. They give the state too much power. They also sap private initiative, because it’s important for private actors to have some reasonable expectations of how the state will behave in the future.

What this leaves out, and what one might have expected to have been the case in part in the Western folkway, is what is the case (even in the idealized “paradise” situation) in which the state has laws which it expects citizens to enforce. Consider the example of personal assaults in an idealization of the Western folkway. In the first case, of personal assaults such as battery or rape, the statutes and penalties against such things were minimal. A likely reason for this is that it was expected that individuals and their families would “take care” of such insults themselves. Now this led on occasion of course to the much celebrated mountain feuds between Western folkway clans in which the insult to one family matter would be “handed” in a way that the original injured party found excessive and responded in kind … leading to a never ending chain of responses. However, my guess would be, not having studied the matter, that feuds of that type were the exception not the rule. That most of the time the culture/society had a shared understanding within the society of a reasonable response and meeting that was the norm. Read the rest of this entry