#50: Cameras, Hypotheses, and Politics

The Leica 35mm still camera was introduced to the world in 1913. Designed by Oskar Barnack and produced by Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany, the camera was simplicity itself. It was, in effect, no more than a tiny metal box holding a strip of the then readily available 35mm movie film; a box with a lens, a simple cloth shutter, a mechanism for advancing the film one frame at a time, and a primitive viewfinder tacked to the top. The lens was a small (f. 3.5) uncoated Elmar (the image doesn't show the Elmar).

While the simplicity of the design accounted for the camera’s rapid acceptance, the simplicity was also experienced by many as an annoying handicap. Leitz addressed the little pocket camera’s shortcomings by designing and producing an ever increasing number of “adapters,” small devices that could be attached to the camera body by various tiny screws. For example, while the original Leica had to be focused by estimating the distance to the object, one could also purchase a range-finder device that could be mounted on the camera. Over time, Leica spawned an awesome number of such auxiliary attachments, some of them being attachments for attachments, until a complete photographer would venture out into nature with his trusty tiny Leica and a large bag filled with all the many expensive little screw-on devices.

The point to notice is the absence of any voices in Wetzlar telling the marketers and designers that they should either abandon their original design for one which accommodated the photographer’s needs in its initial conception or one that integrated the desired functions more naturally into the Leica design. The Wetzlar approach was a case study in the notion of over-engineering.

Over-engineering is the result of an invincible unwillingness to abandon a design whose potential has been exhausted. The German engineers who worked on the Leica and a number of its successors were apparently fatally in the grip of the over-engineering impulse. Psychologically, I suppose this impulse can be described as a kind of “rigidity.” Today, there are people who would describe them as being unable to “think outside the box”; it would be more apt to say that they had a compulsion to add things to the box.

It was not until 1933-36 that a fundamentally new design appeared on the market and, to be fair, it appeared in Germany in the form of the Exakta single lens reflex. While it was a definite success, acquiring a very large following, it still retained, in my opinion, the over-engineering impulse of the Leica. Ohmygawd, did they ever produce screw-on supplementary gadgets for this thing! I was not, however, immune to its allure; I still own a late model Exakta VX1000!

In 1951 the single lens reflex seemed to move one notch higher, and this time the improvement did not come from Germany. The new design was that of the Japanese Asahi Pentax single lens reflex. While the Exakta offered through-the-lens focusing and viewing, which made access to new lenses of varying focal lengths much more accessible, it was still limited to waist-level viewing. The Pentax took the Exakta concept and added a five-faced prism (the "pentaprism") that made eye-level viewing and focusing possible. A huge improvement. The Germans, of course, now also followed suit, but we didn’t see Zeiss’s offering, the superbly machined Contarex, until 1958. I should add that the Contarex weighed probably twice as much as the Pentax. In all of this, I also add as a personal opinion, that the German lenses were throughout unquestionably superior to the Japanese ones. The Germans made really good glass! The only lens I’ve ever come across that could compete with the top Leitz or Zeiss lenses was the ridiculously expensive, rather rare, and comparatively obscure Switar range of apochromatic lenses on the Swiss Alpa. Absolutely beautiful glass!

The single-lens reflex allowed for a number of significant improvements over the original Barnack design, retaining only the 35mm film format. Focusing, and soon after, metering took place directly through the taking lens, eliminating the two most important “gadgets” added to the Leica box: the range-finder and the external light meter.

For most shooting, this was simply a much better design and the Japanese went into it with complete commitment and enthusiasm. The Germans, not so much. They just couldn’t abandon their old good idea for a new, much better idea.

Why, I hear you ask, are you bothering me with such arcane historical trivia? There are two reasons for this. The first is that the patterns of technological development are always inherently interesting; the second is that the compulsion to over-engineer is not limited to the world of machine production.

The terminology is different, but the compulsion is the same. In the softer sciences and some “sciences” that are not sciences at all (such as political “science”), we come across the notion of the “ad hoc” hypothesis. This notion is a kind of abstract equivalent of over-engineering.

The ad hoc hypothesis is a supplementary assumption added to a primary or main hypothesis in order to keep it from failing. Say that your primary hypothesis is A, but that you encounter evidence E that is incompatible with A. Your initial and healthy response is likely that A should be rejected because of E. But it does not have to be. We can modify A, for example, by restricting the cases to which it applies, thus avoiding conflict with E. Or, we could add a supplementary theory that “explains” in some way exactly why E should not be taken to count against A. In general, we tend to count as ad hoc hypotheses only such additions as entail changes to the theory included in the original main hypothesis.

Neither supplementary engineering nor supplementary theorizing are necessarily objectionable. Just adding a range-finder to the first Leica did not count as over-engineering, just a reasonable complement for a nice piece of equipment. Similarly, making a small theoretical modification of, say, a physical hypothesis may be nothing more than an appropriate adjustment to new data. The problem is that there eventually comes a point when both are clearly no longer reasonable adjustments, but that there seems to be no clear dividing line separating the reasonable from the compulsively crazy.

In both cases, the symptom is usually an extreme complexity in the final product. When the original inspiration or “concept” of the Leica was no longer discernible under the mass of screwed-on supplementary junk, it was then that an innocent bystander would have said: it’s time for a new idea.

It was the simplicity of the original Barnack design that made the camera attractive to people. They kept buying it, perhaps out of inertia, even as that original simplicity increasingly disappeared. As soon, however, as a more “powerful” alternative design appeared, they were quick to recognize it and to recognize the shortcomings of the over-engineered Leica.

Attractive hypotheses also owe their seductiveness to their apparent simple explanatory power. Once that apparent simplicity is compromised, so, increasingly, is the hypothesis’s hold on the imagination. Eventually, the beauty of the idea as it was originally conceived is no longer to be found through the mass of overgrowth around it, the multiple qualifications and supplementary assumptions. When that happens, the rational enquirer no longer understands the “scientist’s” unwillingness to relinquish his original idea.

It is at this point that he asks the “scientist”: “Why are you holding on so desperately to your hypothesis? You must know that it’s barely recognizable anymore. It certainly no longer holds any intuitive plausibility”.

This point is politically important and interesting because the Left is characteristically marketing strongly counter-intuitive generalizations. Closer examination of these generalizations inevitably shows them to run afoul of contrary evidence. But when this contrary evidence is brought to the Leftoids’ attention, they introduce ad hoc “explanations” for as long as problematic data are produced; and, further, they do so with no regard to the probabilities associated with their ad hoc theories.

There are many examples of ad hoc-ing among the doctrines of the left, at least one current one is that of Global Warming, but you can find them wherever your instinctual response to a Left based generalization is: hmmm – that sure doesn’t sound true.

Your class assignment for the upcoming part of your life is to identify examples of generalizations presented as confirmed truth by people who will accept no amount of contrary evidence as sufficient to abandon them.

The use of the ad hoc hypothesis to retain a problematic hypothesis should be added now to 1) making one’s hypothesis theoretically unfalsifiable (compatible with any and all empirical findings), and 2) the use of the no-true-Briton move, in which what begins life as an empirical generalization is transformed into stipulative definition. Slowly, slowly catchee Leftie!

#49: The Mind of the Progressive

Though progressives will immediately respond, they do it too, I see a definite difference in the attitude with which their people engage in the political fray and the attitude of grass roots conservatives. Note that I don’t say “republicans.” Progressives exhibit an unconcealed contempt for those who disagree with them that isn’t found among the conservatives. The progressives feel not only free, but entitled, even obliged, to be disgustingly personal in their attacks and to attack people rather than ideas. They also have no limits in what they are willing to do behind the scenes to undermine their opponents. Just a small example is the recent attempt to punish Joe Lieberman by putting behind-the-scenes pressure on a breast cancer charity to remove Hadassah Lieberman, his wife, from the role of representing the organization.

This is not a BIG deal, but it is very illustrative of the mind of the left. The action is low, petty, vindictive, vicious, and small-minded. The action would be at home within Leninist Bolshevism. But the mere fact that the action is small and dirty does not make it “beneath” the leftist, and that is because nothing is beneath him. The Lieberman example can be multiplied endlessly. And what is fascinating in a revolting kind of way is that it is precisely the outfit that claims to “care about people”, the outfit that constantly maligns conservatives (who are also “people,” by the way), and who likes refer to the Republican party as “mean-spirited” that engages naturally and spontaneously in this kind of primitive filth.

The first thing one thinks of when trying to understand this phenomenon is that it reflects a fanatically “religious” sensibility. The only other context in which we find this comfortable abandonment of civilized behavior is that of the Islamic terrorist with his use of mutilations, child and woman suicide bombers, hostage murder, mass killing of civilians. The Islamofascist is not troubled by his own behavior because it has been sanctioned by his god. The same is true, I think, of the modern leftist. For the modern leftist, the achieving of total political power has all the character of a divine mission and there is little to choose between a Lenin (or an Obama), on the one hand, and a Torquemada, on the other.

But there is something else that makes his behavior possible for him. As I have stressed time and again, socialism is and has always been from the time of its earliest formulation, a revolutionary social theory. Not enough attention is paid to what this actually means. The true revolutionary rejects and abandons the society from which he emerges, and that means he abandons all of its traditional rules of behavior, whether they be rules of etiquette, of dispute, or of war. The revolutionary seeks to be sui generis and he wants his brave new world also to be sui generis. In the case of the socialist, his narrative is that in place of all tradition (“bourgeois constraints”), he is placing two things: 1) the happiness of the worker as the goal, and 2) anything without limits that may work as the means.

Once we understand the mind-set of the progressive, a mind set shared by fanatics, on the one hand, and criminals, on the other, we can also understand the progressive’s attitude towards the Constitution and law in general. For the progressive, the Constitution is, at best, a convenient stick with which to beat the opposition and, at worst, an inconvenient obstacle to be ignored or overridden. The same is true of the progressive’s attitude towards the law: use it when it’s convenient, ignore it when it’s not.

Both for progressives and criminals, there are objectives at stake that make the law irrelevant. For the progressive, the goal is the accumulation of centralized power, for the criminal the accumulation of personal wealth. It goes without saying that these two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

And it is this, I think, that differentiates conservatives from progressives. Conservatives govern themselves according to principles, whatever one might want to say about those principles; progressives are, as it is now popular to say, “pragmatic.”

The old-fashioned way of expressing the progressive mind-set is that it is unprincipled. And in the old days, to say of a person that they were unprincipled was to say something critical about them. Nowadays, we avoid this connotation by eschewing the word “unprincipled” in favor of the word “pragmatic,” where the latter has a positive connotation, but actually means the same as the former. It’s really “all about” words in the leftist universe.

Progressives backing Obama during the campaign said of him, as a compliment, “he’s not an ideologue, he’s really pragmatic.” But what does this mean? I think it just means that he’s unprincipled, that we can expect him to do anything “that works.” This is, after all, what “pragmatic” means. And what this further means is that he won't let himself be impeded by any constraints at all, not ones of good taste, of manners, of civilized behavior, not even the constraints of Constitution or law. But that’s exactly how criminals act, which should not surprise us since Obama learned the craft of politics in the crucible of Chicago, the original home of Richard J. Daley as well as Al Capone (and now Rod Blagojevitch).

He made it clear in various interviews that he thought of the constitution as a “living thing” that had to change “with the times” to meet new circumstances; that he thought of the Supreme Court as an instrument for meting out “social justice”; and that laws had to be periodically “re-interpreted.” The world that Obama wants to bring into existence is not a world subject to the rule of law, it’s a world subject to the rule of monarchs who pretend to be constrained by law, but are not. Obama’s world is one in which nothing means what it seems to mean and meanings change from one context to the next, it's a world in which even nuances don’t mean what we think they mean, for they themselves have nuances of their own. Paraphrasing Heinlein’s little poem:

And little nuances have littler nuances

Upon their backs that bite ‘em;

And litter nuances have littler nuances,

And so ad infinitum.

The only positive thing in this god-awful socialist mess is the possibility that now that the American people have gotten this affirmative action experiment out of their system and they see the damage that an ideologically driven, inexperienced, posturing incompetent can do while in office, they will snap out of their momentary liberal narcosis and return to sane and stable government. Not perfect government, just not mind-bogglingly stupid and destructive government.

#48: Why the Left Needs American Exceptionalism Defeated

I don’t know if there is an antecedent to the French Revolution’s radical rejection of the Ancien Regime, but it is one of the most significant features of this defining event in European history. Similar things happened in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the bloodless German Revolution of 1918, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966. Perhaps we could add other smaller instances as well, such as communist takeover of North Korea in the late 1940s. The sequelae of these revolutions were qualitatively different, but almost all of the revolutions still exhibited the common trait that they were either proto-communist or explicitly communist in their platforms and they identified the existing culture as a severe threat to their dominance. The lone possible exception to this rule was the German Revolution which still involved a very influential socialist element.

The lesson to be learned from this is that Socialism/Communism is intent on the removal of culture from the world-historical scene. The reason is very simple. The socialist doctrine is committed to the principle that a just society can only be achieved through total centralized power acting on purely “rational” principles that are utterly unconstrained by any other considerations. Since the actions of such a power may well contravene the moral/cultural values existing cultures, they must be erased. In effect, cultures are simply powerful competitors in the world-domination game.

I should add that there is yet another converging motivation for the expunging of existing cultures, namely that socialism’s imperialist strategy demands it. The socialists want to achieve a whole world dominated by a central power, not just individual nations. In this way, they do not differ from their nationalist cousin, Nazism. But while Hitler wanted to impose his culture (an almost totally invented one, by the way) on the whole world, the socialists want to gain the whole world through the simple expedient of eliminating the cultures that separate national entities from each other. They reason this way: If there are no longer any cultural differences among nations, no reasons will exist for borders, nor for the existence of independent local governments. The European economic union was the camel’s nose of this agenda, but the socialists are finding it increasingly difficult to neutralize nationalist passions. The stupid, stupid, stupid cultures just insist on persisting. But the socialists are still convinced that culture must be destroyed.

The socialist revolutionaries of the past believed that this was best accomplished in their own venues by brutal military and police action, but this does not entail that where such action is absent, there are no other measures being implemented. I think the ongoing effort to indoctrinate Canadians in the desirability of “multi-culturalism” as well as the U.S. efforts 1) to sell “diversity” to the people, 2) to attack expressions of patriotism and Christian faith, and 3) to deny U.S. exceptionalism are all part and parcel of the “peaceful” equivalent of such earlier attempts.

My point is simply this: the emotional and social utility of a culture lies precisely in the members of that culture passionately holding it to be superior to others. Once that passion has been neutralized, so has its ability to strengthen the social unit and make it a cohesive and autonomous unit. Yes, I know, I’m talking nationalism here, and nationalism is the big bogey bear.

But this is a doctrine that has been sold to us by a progressive-liberal academic establishment since the time of Woodrow Wilson (himself a professor), a very unfortunate choice of president for the time. The League of Nations, One-worldism, Esperanto, a whole bag of really bad ideas. These festering progressive ideas thrived after World War II when the socialist “intellectuals” really managed to tie the blame for the war on German nationalism (oooooohhhhh!!).

There was actually “plenty of blame to go around”, as the talking heads like to say. Yes, the Germans did have Hitler and, yes, there was nationalism, but French, U.K., and U.S. policy in 1918 also had a lot to do with there being a second World War.

I would venture to suggest that the second World War had as much to do with Hitler’s socialism as it did with his nationalism. But, since for all intents and purposes, the German defeat left the spoils of war, all of Europe, completely to the internationalist socialists (supported in their post-war ascension to power by the Marshall plan), we should not be surprised that the marketers of socialism should have blamed the war on German nationalism. They sure wouldn’t blame it on German socialism, eh?

Does nationalism cause wars? It surely has been used in wars, the more so the farther back one goes, but the actual causes were almost always for perceived economic objectives. In other words, wealth. This is not to say that the war-mongering powers were always (or even often) correct in what they perceived their own advantages to be, but I would venture to guess that wars caused by nationalism are far fewer than socialist “intellectuals” would care to admit.

The threat of nationalism is a socialist bogeyman distraction from the far more terrifying threat of unconstrained centralized government.

What makes this threat so powerful these days is that the socialists have hugely influential free-enterprise partners, namely in the multi-national corporations. As far as these non-national super-wealthy entities are concerned, the existence of national boundaries is an impediment to their trading and wealth accumulation activities. As far as they are concerned, nothing would be more desirable than to turn the entire world into a single homogeneous consumer base, and this objective overlaps nicely with the socialist objective.

Thus, what is called “globalization” is nothing other than an objective shared by socialists. What is ironic is that the anti-globalization activists believe themselves to be leftists, while they are actually working against the one-world utopia dreamed of by their more theoretically educated co-conspirators. Globalization activists and socialists are actually bed-fellows, albeit very strange ones. Both the globalists and the socialists see nationalism as their enemy, and since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, they should be friends. This means that nationalism has two very powerful enemies.

How can nationalism be attacked in the West? Since the brown and the black shirt technique is frowned upon these days, some other forms of aggression are necessary. We don’t have to look far.

The three arenas in which this war is being fought are 1) our schools, 2) our courts, and 3) the main-stream media. And the battle is over “diversity” or “multi-culturalism” and the biggest prize the existence of "American Exceptionalism." The socialists want to deny it, the nationalists to extol it.

It is no secret that our primary and secondary schools, and universities have been transformed into socialist madrassahs, centers of left-wing indoctrination. The text books now contain re-written leftist history and the lecturers are themselves the products of leftist teacher training camps. A recent news item informed us that the governor of Wisconsin just signed a bill requiring the teaching of “union history” in the schools. Hmm, I wonder whether they will include the history of the Teamster’s Union.

In recent years, case after case concerning “Christian” manifestation in the culture, religious manifestation in the culture, has been brought before the courts, usually by the Jewish socialist ACLU.

And, of course, the main-stream media have shown themselves to no more be impartial reporters of the news (if ever they were!), but to have become, in effect, an arm of the socialist democratic party, sometimes pushing it further to the left than even it wants to go.

The push for “diversity” and the “tolerance for difference” is nothing other than an effort to neutralize nationalism, the passionate preference for one’s own culture.

Acceptance of “diversity” is, for the socialist, just a “stage” on the path to the single, one-world classless, cultureless society.

And this is why American “Exceptionalism” must be defeated!

#47: Morality, Political "Theory," & Social Control

The first thing that ambitious academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences do to get ahead is create a “technical” vocabulary with which to camouflage the banal, dishonest, and just plain indefensible in what they write. Philosophers have been among the worst offenders. In particular, the philosophers marketing specific “moralities” should be approached with the greatest skepticism and caution, whether the “moralities” occur in ethical “theory” or in political “theory.” Neither of these is a “science” in any sense and neither of these needs a technical vocabulary. What is needed, however, by the ordinary man is a critical principle to guide his thinking safely through the barrage of bullshit coming down all around him. Here’s one:

No one wants others to be free (and many don’t even want to be free themselves).

We see this in the ubiquitous effort to subordinate people. Some want to subordinate them because they don’t trust their free judgment and inclinations (perhaps rightly), some want to subordinate them for their own benefits. Some would even say they’re subordinating them for “their own good.” And usually when they say they are “liberating” them, they are actually subordinating them.

I remember (I think) a movie from way back in the 50s called “The Roots of Heaven” in which the ever fascinating Juliette Greco played a French refugee ex-pat bar maid in equatorial Africa. One of the other characters (played, I think, by Errol Flynn) wants to take her away from all that, to “liberate” her. She gives him a wonderfully world-weary look and says something like this: “You want to 'liberate' me? Oh, I have been 'liberated' before. You have no idea how many times I have been 'liberated'.”

That line is surely not as famous as Menjou’s in Casablanca: “Gambling? Gambling? Here? I’m shocked, shocked!”, but it deserves to be.

And when men want to liberate other men (or women), they first sell them a theory.

Now, look, whatever else a moral theory may do, it takes away your freedom. You can parse it this way, you can parse it that way, but the point of a moral theory is to tell you what to do. Kant doesn’t shy away from this, he tells you that morality comes in the form of an absolute imperative. Forget the fancy language: an imperative is an order. And, of course, the Absolute Ruler of the Universe doesn’t shy away from this either; all of his unasked-for advice comes in the form of … what?

Commandments!

Forget the archaism, they are commands.

Morality, then, comes in the form of commands, in the form of orders. YOU may want to do this or that, but you may not do this or that. Rather, thou shalt do THIS.

The orders may be good ones or bad ones, they may be well or ill advised, but they always super-impose themselves on your will.

Kant tries to finesse this brutal fact by trying to convince you that the orders reflect the will and intention of your “true” self, but this is (once again) bullshit. You don’t have a reasoning machine concealed within you that is the true you. Most people don’t even have the reasoning machine of a mentally impaired goat within them, much less a Spock. The very existence of Kantians proves that Kant was wrong on the “concealed reasoner” thesis.

Whatever “we” are, we are the complete package, some reasoning, some inclinations, a lot of randomly assorted preferences. And what are the commandments then?

At best, they express a wish, a nostalgia, a longing on the parts of some that everyone behave in a certain way, a way they like. But when those people get impatient with the level of cooperation they are getting, they up the pressure by means of “theories.” Kant offered the last big shot at a moral “theory.” But the desire to introduce the will of others into each organism (because that is precisely the objective of a moral theory) has remained just as strong as it was in Kant’s own mind. Kant wrote at the end of the 18^th C, when the French Revolution arguably set in motion the ideas that were ultimately to culminate in Marx and Engels’ Manifesto and Marx’s Kapital.

The Socialist theory has exactly the same motivations as moral theories. Socialism does not trust the individual, and for that reason it insists on centralized state control over everything the individual does.

And the reasoning behind this power grab is inherently a moral one: the State has the right (a moral notion) to control all aspects of the individual’s life that have an impact on the lives of the others.

Of course, since everything that an individual does has some kind of impact on his environment, it follows that the State has the right to regulate every aspect of every individual’s life.

We see this occurring right now in the Obama administration’s activities. Health care “reform” is not “reform,” it is take-over and control. Environment protection is not about “environment,” it is about ceding increasing power to the State. In N.Y. state, for example, Bloomberg makes move after move to regulate what it is that people eat, how often they exercise, and so on. The argument is always the same: your behavior has an impact on the lives of those around you, hence the State has the right (nay, the obligation) to control you.

I modestly confess to some prescience on this issue, since I did complain bitterly when seat-belt legislation was passed years ago that it was indefensible. The reason, of course, was that injuries sustained from a lack of restraint affected only the person not strapped in. While such an injury is certainly regrettable, it was not clear to me then and is not clear to me now that the State should have the right to prevent people from injuring themselves. The argument holds mutatis mutandis for suicide.

The camel’s nose in all of these cases lies in the “interpretation” that is given to key notions. As Tom Lehrer (a great philosopher) once wrote: “When correctly viewed, everything is lewd!” Similarly, when correctly viewed, everything affects (NOT “impacts”) everyone else. While I have no dog in the abortion fight, it similarly seemed an extraordinary reach to me when the Supreme Court ruled that a woman’s right to “privacy” included the right to abortion. It’s that kind of reasoning that can give a court a bad name.

I conclude, then, that there are always forces that for one reason or another are interested in subordinating your judgments and inclinations to their own; that they work to accomplish this by various expedients of brain-washing (which they call “education”); that they hope to control you by substituting their own mechanical formulae for your own decision making processes; and that they hope that ultimately you will think that their processes are actually your own.

To the extent that there are liberals and progressives, they have succeeded.

#46: It's Fair! No, it's not! Yes, it is! Isn't!!

“Fairness” is the catch word of the “social justice” types; it’s the word that always crops up when people are arguing for the governmental redistribution of citizen wealth. Taking money from people by force is normally considered theft, so when the government is used to do it, it has to be under the cover of some kind of “moral” narrative: either the people who have the money, really have no “right” to it or the equivalent, the people who do not have the money do have a “right” to it. Just as the French need perfume to conceal the odor of their lackluster grooming, so the “social justice” crowd need a perfume to cover the smell of state-sponsored theft. And the “social justice” perfume is “fairness.” Everyone loves fairness, but what is it?

Fairness is a matter of “distributive” justice. It is a question of who is to get what and how much of it. But what is a “fair” distribution of the goodies?

Our intuitions are actually several and often incompatible. Here are the basic choices:

D1: Fairness, for example, could be giving everyone exactly the same amount, regardless of what they need or deserve (are able to acquire by dint of work and talent).

D2: Or, it could be giving everyone just however much they need.

D3: Or, it could be giving everyone whatever they “deserve”.

I ignore, for simplicity’s sake, the question of what it is that “fairness” demands of each individual.

Deciding among these competing intuitions is a difficult and perhaps impossible task since the decision would seem necessarily to suppose some kind of moral “foundation” or ultimate justification. But if, as I have argued earlier, such a foundation can be no more than a pathetic and fatuous fantasy, that all there is is human preference, then there is little hope of using “morals” to defend the selection of a criterion of “fairness.”

It’s really even worse than this suggests. The “system” of morality that has proven historically to be the most popular, Utilitarianism, is famously and conspicuously lacking a way of deciding “fairness” of distribution. The doctrine originates with the philosopher and legislator Jeremy Bentham, who was looking for a rational method of selecting laws. An heir to the enlightenment, he naturally sought a “scientific” and quantitative method. Noting that everyone quite naturally prefers pleasure over pain, he proposed that those laws should be enacted that maximize the net number of pleasure units (“hedons”) over pain units (“dolors”). He called this decision procedure the “Hedonic Calculus.” Choosing the best law and, by extension, the best act, in the Benthamite universe, is simply a matter of accounting: subtract the negative dolors from the positive hedons for each possible action, and then compare the resulting remainders. The act with the largest positive remainder is the “right” or “good” act. Quite apart from some obvious problems of application, there is the enormous issue of “fairness.” The reason is very simple.

Consider two possible actions for a sample population of 1000 agents, the first of which yields one hedon (and no dolors) to each agent, the second of which yields 1001 hedons (and no dolors) to a single agent (the rest receiving none). Since the second action yields a net number of hedons larger than the first, the second act is the right one, regardless of the fact that it delivers all of the hedons to a single person. Many people find this result to be counter to their intuitions because they feel that any arithmetically unequal distribution is wrong (they cleave to D1). But, lest one think that the calculus is politically skewed because of this example, let me hasten to note that the problem can be made to recur in such a way as to offend the political sensibilities of “the other side.”

Consider the same situation as above, but with the following proviso: all the hedons are being produced by 100 of the 1000 agents. Now consider that one act distributes 1000 hedons among the 100 who produced it, but another act distributes 1001 hedons among the parasitic 900. according to the calculus, it is the second act that is the “right” one, but this outcome clearly will offend the population that cleaves to D3.

What to do? What to do? If you can’t find an acceptable fairness decision procedure in Utilitarianism, where can you go for it?

The only other available moral theory is that of Immanuel Kant, a theory based on the notion of “categorical” obligation. A “categorical” obligation is just one that we have “no matter what,” an obligation without “ifs, ands, or buts.” It is, to put it in plainer English, “unconditional.” How many such obligations does Kant stick us with? It’s hard to say, because while he refers to it in the singular, he gives more than one formulation of it, and the formulations don’t seem to be equivalent. One statement is: “treat every man as an end in himself (not a means to an end)”. Another is: “act only in such a way that you would wish the ‘maxim’ or principle behind your act to be a law of nature.” Perhaps yet another is that one should act as if one did not know how our action would affect ourselves.

And what is it that makes these our categorical imperatives? According to Kant, it is that if we were entirely rational entities (more Mr. Spock-like than Spock himself), we would quite automatically act according to these principles. The reason, he argues, is that the Categorical Imperative actually “flows” from the very nature of Reason itself: moral behavior is nothing other than purely rational behavior. But if this is the case, you might ask, why is it that such rational people as ourselves often have moral quandaries, often do what could be called “evil” acts?

For Kant, the problem lies (as it has for so many figures of the philosophical persuasion) with what the phil establishment has always called “the inclinations.” They haven’t liked “the inclinations”. What are these “inclinations”? They are our emotions and our appetites, but, more to the heart of it, they are what give us individuality, what make one of us different from all the others. For the main-stream-philosophical industry, these “inclinations” are and have been the source of immorality and evil in the world. The inclinations “incline” us away from the purely rational act. Thus, the bad news is that there are inclinations and, therefore, there is evil. The good news, however, according to Kant, is that the inclinations are really not “us” at all.

For each of us, the real “me” is limited to our “reasoning engine.” It’s not difficult to see the implication. In a world inhabited only by agents unencumbered by inclinations, each agent is indistinguishable from every other. In fact, not only are all moral agents identical, there is, in fact, no evil at all. In this world, the “Kingdom of Ends,” as Immy dubs it, there is in a sense no morality at all, either; the reason is that evil simply cannot exist there – morality is the natural law of human behavior in the Kingdom of Ends.

But I digress, this is no place for Kant-bashing!

How can this silly theory help with regard to distributive justice? Well, I don’t know that it can help, but it has been invoked by one of the lead supporters of the social justice crowd, John Rawls. In particular, he has appealed to the Kantian notion of acting from behind the veil of ignorance.

Just as we expect Justice to be “blind” to the identities of the people before it in order that she not be influenced by anything other than the law, so, reasons Kant and Rawls after him, each of us should will a system of distribution without knowing where we ourselves are placed. The reason is that we can’t really rely on being unaffected by the inclinations as long as we know what our “short-term” advantages are. Since we can’t quite literally divest ourselves of our inclinations, the next best thing is to keep them from knowing what the best ways of achieving their disgusting objectives are. If a person doesn’t know Who he is in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that he has revolting inclinations (they won’t know which laws will advantage them!).

Thus, Kant and Rawls proceed this way: What law of distribution would I will, they ask, if I didn’t know whether I was actually a homeless person, a middle class entrepreneur, or a captain of industry? Well, the answer seems to be, I would choose a system of distribution that minimizes the risk to myself, that assures that I would do reasonably ok regardless of where I actually placed.

Sounds good, you say? Sounds reasonable, you say? But is that actually the case, I say.

Whether Kant or Rawls, the reasoning belongs to the same kind: the appeal to the “thought experiment.”

So much of philosophy, especially recent philosophy, has utilized the “thought experiment,” but I think this is a methodology that is highly suspect. If this method is to be used, then it must necessarily be made subject to one important rule: our intuitions with regard to the experiment must be VERY powerful.

I will not digress here to challenge the methodology of the “intuitive counter-example” that has been in general use for so long (though I am very leery of it!). Let’s just have a brief look at the Kant/Rawls use of the trick.

What laws would we pass, they ask, if we didn’t know our place in the society governed by them?

Well, before we can answer that question, we should know exactly what is and what is not being assumed about us in this non-actual world.

Do we know nothing at all about ourselves? Do we know, for example, what our inclinations with respect to fairness are, which of the alternative D1-D3 we prefer? What our political preferences are? Do we know whether we are loners or family people? Do we know what kind of society it is in which we live?

Actually, I think we are assumed to know none of these things at all. In fact, we are asked to assume that we are Kantian purely rational agents being asked a kind of game-theory puzzle. But here is the rub:

If I am assuming that I am a purely rational Kantian agent, I confess that I have not the remotest idea of what I would will or decide under those conditions!

I don’t know what it is like to be a purely rational agent, nor do I have any idea at all what a purely rational agent would or would not do. There are no “purely rational agents,” these are nothing more than philosophical fictions (not unlike the computer model assumptions of some economists).

The Kant-Rawls thought experiment fails the crucial requirement I have set: we must have strong intuitions yielding the experimental outcome (if there is any) before that outcome can be used to determine anything.

The bottom line is this, then:

There are competing and conflicting intuitions about “fairness” of distribution principles or rules AND there is no theoretical/philosophical/conceptual way of deciding among them. These, like all other matters “moral,” are simply matters of psychology, of preference.

And if this is true, the social justice appeal to “fairness” reduces to being the call or demand of one part of a society for a system of distribution it happens to prefer. We must deal with the fact that this preference, just like all preferences, is ultimately arbitrary.

It does not, DOES NOT, follow from this arbitrariness that the social justice engineers are somehow less entitled to agitate, pressure, persuade, or beg for the kind of distributive system that makes them happy. BUT, and this is a big BUT, the very same applies to the groups who prefer the alternative theories of distribution. None of these groups occupies a conceptually privileged, none is more “justified” than the others, but this is not a defect in the theories, it is just the nature of the beast: de gustibus non est disputandum. There is no (rational) way of deciding among theories of “fair” distribution.