I apologize to all for going AWOL for the last two months; I've been very, very busy with my business. But now I have some thoughts that I'd like to articulate. It occurred to me that one problem with modern political discourse is that it is disconnected. One side makes its statement, and the other side issues its rebuttal, but the two declarations are sufficiently disconnected that neither side needs to be honest about responding to the other's statements. So we get an awful lot of talking past each other, ignoring each other's points. This only adds to the confusion. 

The standard way to handle this is to have a face-to-face debate, but these confrontations never work because the two opponents either talk over each other, or one side hogs all the time. 

I'd like to offer an ancient rhetorical device as an interesting alternative: the dialog. This time-honored technique permits an author to present his own arguments as well as the responses of his opponent. Now, a lousy author will put stupid words into the mouth of his opponent, and any reader can easily see through such inanities. However, a good author can use the dialog form to carry through his arguments in such a way as to expose the fundamental flaws in the opponent's reasoning. 

A dialog is not meant to be even-handed; it is intended to make a case. Its value lies in the fact that, if well-written, it can demonstrate that the best honest rebuttal still fails to rebut the points being made. It does not address the counter-offensive of the other side; it only shows that the other side's defense doesn't work.

With that in mind, I would like to present a dialog about the use of torture. I have been surprised that conservatives have been defending this policy; it's a loser and they really should leave well enough alone. But by aggressively defending this policy, conservatives have made it an important discussion, and so I'd like to present an argument showing just how indefensible torture is as a policy.

My two advocates in this dialog are Libicus and Conicus.

Lib: So, Conicus, you support the use of torture, right?

Con: Indeed I do, Lib.

Lib: I assume that you do not support the arbitrary use of torture.

Con: You assume correctly.

Lib: So you require that torture be used only under a set of rules, correct?

Con: Indeed so.

Lib: What might those rules be? For example, do you have any rules about WHO can be tortured?

Con: Yes, of course.

Lib: Would you permit women to be tortured?

Con: Um... no, I don't think so.

Lib: So if al-Qaeda were to recruit women for its tasks, our nation would have no defense against them?

Con: You're right. I suppose we would have to permit the torture of women.

Lib: Would rape be an acceptable form of torture for women?

Con: No, of course not!

Lib: Why not? 

Con: Because it's uncivilized!

Lib: I see. So you would permit only civilized forms of torture, correct?

Con: Yes, only civilized forms of torture.

Lib: And can you tell me what forms of torture are civilized?

Con: I'm not sure what you mean.

Lib: Is waterboarding civilized?

Con: I suppose so.

Lib: What is it about rape that makes it uncivilized while waterboarding is civilized?

Con: Well, rape is nasty...

Lib: So waterboarding isn't nasty?

Con: Rape is very ugly.

Lib: Waterboarding isn't ugly?

Con: OK, here's the answer: the rapist enjoys it, but the waterboarder doesn't.

Lib: So your rule is that torture is civilized when the torturer doesn't enjoy doing it?

Con: Yes, that's the rule.

Lib: So rape would be civilized if it were carried out by a gay man?

Con: Well, no, but that's because we can't be certain that the gay man won't enjoy raping a woman.

Lib: Can we be certain that a waterboarder isn't a sadist?

Con: We can have psychological tests to insure that sadists are not permitted to become torturers.

Lib: So couldn't we have psychological tests to insure that gay rapist-torturers don't enjoy raping women?

Con: I suppose so...

Lib: Ergo, rape is a civilized form of torture so long as we use rapists who are guaranteed not to enjoy the experience?

Con: That doesn't seem right...

Lib: If you find people who truly don't enjoy torturing other people, won't they refuse to do it?

Con: I suppose so...

Lib: Isn't this a Catch-22: the only people whom you can trust to torture in a civilized fashion are the people who refuse to do it?

Con: Yes, I suppose so. I think I need a different rule for keeping the torture civilized.

Lib: Can you think of any other possible rules?

Con: What if we make the distinction based on long-term harm to the victim? 

Lib: So, if it doesn't permanently injure the victim, it's not torture?

Con: Yes, that was essentially the argument of Mr. Yoo.

Lib: So rape is back on the table because rape doesn't permanently harm the victim.

Con: No, not at all. Studies have shown that rape inflicts permanent psychological harm on its victims.

Lib: What have studies shown about the use of waterboarding?

Con: We don't have any scientific studies on waterboarding.

Lib: So we don't know if waterboarding inflicts permanent psychological harm.

Con: True.

Lib: So how can you say that waterboarding is civilized torture? You don't know!

Con: Well, OK, but surely there are techniques known not to cause long-term harm.

Lib: Can you name any? 

Con: No, I can't.

Lib: So this rule doesn't solve your problem, does it?

Con: No, I suppose not.

Lib: So can you think of any other rules we might use?

Con: We could differentiate based on citizenship: you can't torture Americans, but you can torture foreigners.

Lib: Because foreigners don't enjoy the Constitutional protections afforded to Americans?

Con: Yes.

Lib: But the Constitution doesn't talk about citizens when listing rights. It doesn't say WHOM the government can't do things to, it says WHAT the government cannot do. 

Con: But still, it's obvious that the Constitution applies only to Americans.

Lib: Really? So a foreigner on our soil has absolutely no rights? I can shoot any foreigner I please and nobody can do anything about it?

Con: No, that's ridiculous!

Lib: So do foreigners have rights?

Con: Of course they do! They just have different rights.

Lib: And where are the differences spelled out?

Con: I don't know.

Lib: Can we torture British citizens? Germans? French? Canadians? Australians?

Con: That would never happen!

Lib: Why not? What would prevent it from happening?

Con: Because they're not terrorists!

Lib: Some of the 9/11 hijackers came here from Germany.

Con: Yes, but they were still Arabs.

Lib: So the rule is that we can torture Arabs, but not Europeans?

Con: No, we can only torture terrorists. 

Lib: How do we know who is a terrorist?

Con: The President decides.

Lib: You mean the people that the President appoints to do the job?

Con: Yes.

Lib: What if they're wrong?

Con: They won't be wrong.

Lib: How do you know?

Con: Because the President doesn't make mistakes.

Lib: But you said it's the people whom the President appoints.

Con: Yes, yes, it's the same thing.

Lib: Who are they?

Con: I don't know.

Lib: You don't know who they are but you're certain that they won't make mistakes?

Con: They won't make mistakes because they follow rules.

Lib: What rules?

Con: The rules that the President sets down.

Lib: Where are those rules?

Con: They're secret. 

Lib: Why do they need to be secret?

Con: So the terrorists don't take advantage of them.

Lib: So it's possible to be a terrorist but not fit the rules?

Con: Yes.

Lib: But that would lead to mistakes, wouldn't it?

Con: Sometimes.

Lib: But you said that the President doesn't make mistakes.

Con: You're impossible!

Capitalism just doesn't work

For years, people have characterized socialism as a noble concept ruined by the evils of human nature. Sure, it would be wonderful if everybody pulled together, working as hard as they could for public benefit, but the sad truth is that people are selfish and lazy. In a socialist system, hard-working people won't work hard because the fruits of their labors are given to others. Capitalism is the superior system because it provides a better match to human greed and selfishness.

I think that's a myth. Not the part about socialism -- I agree that people are selfish and greedy and will not work hard for the public good. But I reject the claim that capitalism is founded on a flawless model of human behavior; indeed, I think that the personality model underlying capitalism is only effective when applied to individual efforts: one person manufacturing one product. As soon as capitalism is extended to apply to groups of people, interpersonal dynamics begin to intrude into the process; and when we talk about very large corporations with very indirect and abstract economic functions, all of Adam Smith's clear and simple explanations are thrown by the wayside.

Indeed, I claim that the effectiveness of capitalism is inversely proportional to the size of the economic units operating in a capitalistic system. This is easily demonstrated by the same logic that demonstrates the failure of socialism. We all agree that socialism fails because the hard-working people who produce are not fairly rewarded for their efforts. There's no mechanism for engaging their greed and selfishness towards public benefit. The invisible hand is tied behind the invisible back.

It is true that the single proprietor enjoys a direct relationship between the effort they invest and the reward they enjoy. More effort always means more reward. But this does not apply in the corporate environment. If I am one employee among a thousand, then my efforts are averaged with the other employees. If I work twice as hard and am twice as productive, the company as a whole only enjoys a net gain of 0.2% in overall productivity. It's still socialism -- only now I labor for the benefit of the corporation instead of society as a whole. 

Ah, counters the capitalist, that's not quite right: the corporation will recognize my contribution and promote me or give me bonuses. I will be fairly rewarded for my contribution. 

Yeah, sure. The advocate of capitalism knows little of the real corporate world. Advancement and reward in the corporate world are poorly correlated with productivity. Political acumen is always more important than productivity. Kissing up to the boss still works better than just doing your job well. And aggressive greediness is rewarded more than patience. 

Socialism doesn't work because humans are selfish and greedy. And big-organization capitalism doesn't work because humans are scheming social manipulators.

The current brouhaha with AIG illustrates this problem with textbook clarity. The managers at AIG intend to take $450 million dollars of the taxpayers' money and hand it out as bonuses to the same people who bankrupted AIG. They intend to reward AIG managers for their spectacular failure. This is not capitalism -- this is corporate-level socialism. It violates the fundamental principles of capitalism. The irony is that conservatives who scream "socialism" about the policies of the Obama Administration are pointing their fingers at the wrong targets. The real socialists are the people at AIG.

I have profound respect for Christianity as a philosophy; it's Christians that I can't stand. In the same way, I agree that capitalism is the best overall economic system -- it's capitalists that I can't stand. If we can just get rid of all the damn capitalists, maybe we can restore capitalism.

Conservatives and the Truth

American conservatives have been having some major problems with the truth. Let's review just a few illustrative cases:

1. The WMD falsehoods in the run up to the attack on Iraq.

2. The continuing belief among some conservatives (including Ari Fleischer) that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

3. Global warming denialism. It's ALL based on lies.

4. Creationism. Same story.

5. Fox News on earmarks. They had a big story a few days ago that Mr. Obama had violated his campaign pledge to slash earmarks. Mr. Obama made no such pledge. He pledged to look at them closely and cut any that made no economic sense. Daily Kos TV had a wonderful compilation of video clips from the debates showing Mr. Obama repeating that promise, in the same words, over and over.

6. Bobby Jindahl on "the $8 billion train from Disneyland to Las Vegas". He claimed that the Democrats had inserted this boondoggle into the budget. Later on, reporters at Fox News extended the train line from Las Vegas to a Nevada brothel 400 miles north of Las Vegas. No such train line appears or has ever appeared in the budget.

7. Socialism. It is now a commonplace among conservatives that Mr. Obama is dragging this great country into socialism. Why? Because he's raising the top income tax rate for wealthy people to 39%. Under that staunch believer in capitalism, Mr. Reagan, the top income tax rate was 50%. Under Mr. Eisenhower, another presumably anti-socialist Republican, it was 90%.

I could go on and on -- the list of untruths embraced by modern conservatives seems endless. And this, I think, deserves serious consideration. Why have conservatives treated the truth with such disdain? There's nothing intrinsic to conservatism that demands abuse of the truth. Indeed, the intellectual integrity of conservatism right up until 1992 was no less than that of liberalism. I disagreed heartily with Mr. Reagan, but I did not consider him a liar. Conservative loyalty to the truth seems to have begun its erosion in the late 1990s and is now nonexistent. Conservatives don't even blink when their lies are disproven -- they simply re-assert them more loudly. 

I am sensitive to the criticism that I might be extrapolating the claims of a few extremists to the entire conservative camp. It's a common ploy used to discredit one's political opponents. But look again at the list of falsehoods I offered above. The sources of these falsehoods -- Bobby Jindahl, Ari Fleischer, FOX News -- are not the raving fringe of conservatism; they're dead center in the conservative movement.

I have a possible explanation for this phenomenon, and I hope that this hypothesis will stand up to criticism more successfully than my previous one about population densities. I believe that the conservative loss of contact with the truth arises from the unfortunate combination of two phenomena. 

The first of these phenomena is the proliferation of special interest media. It's most obvious with television. Back in the 60s, 70s, and well into the 80s, there were just four television networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Each had to reach the American audience as a single bloc, and so each presented the news in what it felt was the closest approximation to the middle of the road. The network's news programs were editorially indistinguishable; nobody could claim back then that any network was further to the right or to the left than any other. But with the proliferation of cable channels, the audiences could fragment and comparative advantage could be gained by zeroing in on a specific audience. Such was certainly the case with Fox News, which is undoubtedly the most politically biased news channel. 

But it wasn't just television that developed special-interest channels. Radio also developed plenty of sources of special-interest news, most notably Rush Limbaugh. The demographics of radio made this medium strongly conservative in its biases. And then there is the Web. We have seen a huge explosion of political material on the Web. This medium favors the liberals, and so we see a greater leftward bias on the Web. (Oh, and if you're wondering about "the eastern liberal media", such as the New York Times -- you've been watching too much Fox News).

The end result of all this is that the modern consumer of news has a gigantic array of sources of information from which to choose -- far more than could possibly be digested. Hence, that consumer must carefully pick and choose their sources of information.

Here's where the second phenomenon comes into play. Conservatives value loyalty. (See my earlier comment on this phenomenon: http://civildiscussonbetween.blogspot.com/2008/10/conservatives-and-loyalty.html)

Indeed, they value loyalty more than integrity. And when you combine loyalty with the ability to choose whatever source of information you desire, the result is predictable: everybody getting the same narrow supply of information. If that information contains falsehoods, there's nobody to correct them. The falsehoods are blindly accepted as truth.

The Founding Fathers valued freedom of speech and of the press not because they saw some sort of inherent, God-given right to speak one's mind, but because they knew that the only way to keep the Republic honest was to insure a broad supply of ideas and opinions. We have no sure way of ascertaining the truth; therefore, rather than attempt to censor falsehood, we must rely on a flood of opinion, a competitive marketplace of ideas in which only the most truthful ideas prosper. But conservative loyalty drives conservatives out of the competitive marketplace of ideas and into a small, uncompetitive corner, where falsehoods can go unchallenged. 

What can be done about this? I counsel sage patience: this problem is self-correcting. Conservatives are so completely out of touch with reality that they will continue to lose credibility and hence political power. Every day the evidence in favor of global warming rises, and their deceitful denial of AGW only exposes them as liars. Every day the mounting evidence of the financial crimes enabled by the unregulated capitalism of the Bush Administration makes the screams of "Socialism!" look ever more out of touch. Just about everything that the Bush Administration did was wrong, and the undying loyalty of 20% of Americans to those policies only serves to convince the other 80% that the Bush-lovers are insane.

Conservatism is in for a rough future. After the November election, I thought that there would be a battle royale within the Republican Party, with the moderates ultimately ejecting the crazy 20% and beginning the long road to recovery. However, I now believe that the lying conservatives have a death-grip on the Republican Party, and their loyalty to the cause will prevent them from seeing the truth. There is a very real possibility that the conservative cause has been dealt a death-blow from which it will take a generation to recover. If conservatives respond to electoral failure by circling the wagons and redoubling their tribal loyalty, then they will remain out of touch with reality indefinitely, and their political fortunes will continue to sink. 

I would not be happy with such an outcome. I believe in the First Amendment because I know that truth is best achieved by vigorous debate; if the only serious debate is that which is done inside the Democratic Party, I don't think it will be robust enough to serve us well. We need a healthy, robust conservative element in American politics to keep the government honest. The sickly, rabid conservatism we now have is feckless; it serves no end other than to advance the vanity of people like Rush Limbaugh. 

So we're probably looking at a generation of Democratic dominance in the government. It will probably take that long to fix the mess that Mr. Bush has gotten us into. But I fear that, along the way, we'll see increasing problems from some of the Democrats' bad habits: protectionism, expanding government spending, etc.

Population density and politics

I wish to argue an odd hypothesis today: that higher population densities tend to push societies further to the left.

A simple statistical analysis of existing societies lends some support to the hypothesis. The urban societies of Western Europe are definitely more liberal than others, and the high-density societies of India, China, and Southeast Asia seem to lean more towards liberalism. But urbanization muddies the issue. The USA, Australia, and Canada all have areas with very low population densities as well as densely populated urban areas. Yet in all three of these countries, the urban regions are more liberal than the rural areas. So I think that there is some empirical support for the hypothesis.

But the stronger case, I think, is the analytical one. Let's compare two extremes: the farmer in Nebraska in 1880 and the apartment dweller in Manhattan today. The farmer is living very much in a YOYO situation. There is no police protection, so he must carry a gun. The apartment dweller, by contrast, has little need for a gun because the police force is pretty good at keeping criminals at bay (on a relative, not absolute scale). The farmer is almost entirely self-reliant for everything, excepting the metal tools he uses; to purchase those, he sells a portion of his produce, reserving the bulk for his own family's consumption. The apartment dweller, by contrast, is entirely dependent upon millions of other people for his needs: food, water, police and fire protection, health care, sewage, clothing -- everything. 

If we think about these two extremes in terms of their connectedness with other people, we see that the Nebraska farmer has just a few links to the rest of humanity, while the Manhattan apartment dweller is connected to millions of people all over the world. His food supply includes components from every continent except Antarctica; the petroleum products he uses could have come from any continent save Australia and Antarctica. He uses products whose parts were manufactured in China, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mexico, Europe, South America, and the USA. The raw materials for the things he consumes come from just about everywhere. The Nebraska farmer, by contrast, has most of his links to the closest town, and maybe a few links to Chicago -- that's it.

The Nebraska farmer can pee anywhere he wants; not so the Manhattanite. The Nebraskan can shoot his gun at anything and at anytime; such behavior would rightly land the Manhattanite in jail. The farmer can make as much noise or sewage stink as he wants; the city dweller has no such freedom. The farmer can get on his horse and ride anywhere he pleases, at any time he pleases, by any route he pleases. The Manhattanite must follow an intricate set of rules when he drives his car: stopping when required, going when required, driving at the required speed, not blocking traffic -- he has very little freedom. 

The basic principle here is simple: your freedom ends where my nose begins. If the nearest nose is 20 miles away, you have a lot of freedom. If the nearest nose is 20 feet away, you freedom is necessarily more constrained. 

Populations are increasing and noses are getting crowded more tightly together; that necessarily means that individual freedoms must be eroded. Americans tried to evade this squeeze by creating expansive suburbs that gave each person his own plot of land and private home. But the rising price of oil is pricing this strategy out of reach of the middle class, forcing people to accept higher density living -- and with it, the conservative fantasy of the rugged individualist taking care of himself. 

The American frontier closed in 1890, over a hundred years ago, yet conservatives today still dream of the good old days when men were men and freedom was preserved with firepower. The problems of the 21st century are all problems arising from more and more people crowding together. This will necessarily drive our society further and further to the left. In this narrow sense, liberalism is the wave of the future and conservatism is the flicker of the past. 

I hope our conservative readers will step forward with a robust attack on my thesis.

YOYO vs WITT

A new meme bouncing around the blogosphere is "YOYO vs WITT". It's meant to be a summary (from the liberal's point of view) of the difference between conservatives & liberals. The first acronym stands for "You're On Your Own", and reflects the conservative notion that the state should not redistribute wealth to support the unfortunate. The second acronym stands for "We're In This Together" and reflects the liberal notion that all of us, rich and poor, have a responsibility to each other. 

I won't argue from any fundamental grounds that WITT is intrinsically superior to YOYO. But I would like to nibble around the edges of this distinction with a few thoughts.

My first thought really doesn't take us very far: why are conservatives so selfish? Their biggest, most important gripe is that the government is taking away too much of their hard-earned money. Well, OK, I can understand the basic desire to keep the fruits of one's labor. Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder how people can be so selfish as to deny basic care to another human being in need.

Let's move on with an observation that, in effect, shatters the underlying principle on which conservatives base their position. Let's ask the conservative, would you refuse to share some of your wealth to feed a starving child? Of course, nobody is monster enough to insist that property rights are more important than the life of an innocent child. And that admission pulls the rug out from underneath the conservative's claim that property rights are sacred. This example establishes that property rights must be subordinated to some sense of basic human decency. 

So the issue here is not any sacred principle, but drawing a line between two principles. Where should we draw that line? How much money should a wealthy person surrender to provide food, clothing, shelter, and education to a poor person? We have already established that the answer is not "zero". And since the idea of taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor constitutes socialism, we come to the conclusion that all non-monstrous conservatives have already accepted the principle of socialism. "Garsh, I thought I was just writin' stuff, but now it turns out that I've been writing prose all my life!" Yes, even Rush Limbaugh, I would guess, is a socialist.

So having dispensed with the black and white nonsense, let's zero in on the numeric decision: how much wealth should be transferred from the rich to the poor? I don't think that any of us can provide a clear answer to that question. We end up duking it out in the political arena, and if a conservative wants to argue for less, and a liberal for more, I don't think any of us can find a fundamental principle to gainsay either. Ultimately, it boils down to a simple question: 

How selfish are you?

On Growth and Change in Government

Let us begin by thinking of government as a regulatory system for society. At one extreme, where a society consists only of one person, there is no need for any government. However, as soon as you add a second person to that society, you have need for some system to regulate the interaction between the two people, lest they destroy each other in conflict. The complexity of that regulatory system must be proportionate to the complexity of the interactions between the members of society. Those interactions grow more complex in two ways: with size and with the intrinsic complexity of the interactions.

The size effect is well-known and often referred to as "the network effect". There is only one possible pairing between two people; three pairings between three people; six between four people; ten between five; and so on in a steep growth curve. In a society with a million people, adding one more person adds a million new pairings. The complexity really takes off when you get big. 

But the complexity can also grow intrinsically. In an economy with just a handful of people, barter is the easiest form of economic transaction. A larger economy creates a demand for a standardized unit of exchange -- money -- to facilitate transactions. An even larger economy requires indirect forms of money -- bills of exchange, or checks -- to handle more complicated transactions. From there, as the economy grows more complex, we add all sorts of financial instruments: credit cards, stocks, bonds, T-bills, CDs, and so on. Size demands complexity.

Thus, as a society grows, so too must its government. The government must grow not only in absolute terms, but in relative terms. In other words, the government must, by necessity, consume an ever-greater share of the GDP in order to fulfill its function of regulating an ever more complex society.

This does not mean that a government must eventually reach the size where it crushes the economy under its weight. If government increases the productivity of the citizens, then some portion of that excess productivity can be diverted to the government, and the citizens will still grow wealthier. 

At this point, I must refute a common misunderstanding about government: that it produces nothing, and only consumes wealth. This is not correct; government increases the productivity of the citizens. It does so by increasing social capital, the lubricant that enables the engine of the economy to run smoothly.

A simple example of government's role in increasing productivity is the security it provides its citizens. If there were no criminal law and no police forces, each citizen would be responsible for their own safety. We'd have to carry guns, double-padlock our doors, armor our cars, and put bars on our windows. The costs of all this personal security would surely be greater than the costs of the criminal justice system; government saves money for more productive uses.

At the other extreme, I am able to invest in stocks because I am confident that I will not be swindled. Without the SEC, no sane person would invest in stock, and our whole system of capital formation would not exist, and new companies would not be created. Our economy would be much smaller than it is. Again, the miniscule cost of the government regulation provides us with gigantic increases in economic productivity.

So we conclude that government must grow as society grows. But how is that growth to be managed? I shall have to defer that discussion to another topic. 

Morality is an intellectual middleman

I find myself increasingly impatient with arguments that are founded upon morals. Not because I am amoral, but because I find such arguments intellectually vapid. We have too many moral principles, and this inevitably leads to conflicting moral standards. For example, let's take one of the most obvious moral precepts: thou shalt not kill. That's something we can all agree upon, right? But wait a minute -- there are exceptions. It's OK to kill the enemy if you're a soldier. It's OK for a police officer to kill somebody according to some standard rules. It's OK for me to kill in self-defense.

The same thing goes for every other moral precept. Don't rob or steal? Well, yes, that's a good one -- except that we've riddled the definitions of robbery and theft with so many exceptions that the concept loses its universality. It's OK to steal (we admit) to feed your baby. And what about all those horrible gray areas where somebody uses the law to acquire property that might or might not truly belong to them? How do we even know who's right in such disputes? And if we can't say for sure who's right, how can we say that somebody's stealing?

How about lying? It's always wrong to lie, isn't it? Well, we all agree that there are white lies. And sometimes a doctor will lie to a patient for his own good. It's even possible to tell a noble lie that causes harm to yourself but spares another person pain. Is that wrong?

 If something has exceptions, it's not a principle: it's a guideline. So how can we argue from moral principles if we don't have any?

Actually, I think that there is a fundamental moral principle that has no exceptions: the Golden Rule. I can't think of a single act that I would call moral that violates the Golden Rule. However, we need a slightly extended version of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do IF YOU WERE IN THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES. If I see an injured person by the roadside, I could argue that I myself have no reason to go to the hospital, so why should I take him to the hospital?

I confess that there remain lots of deep philosophical arguments that can be used to muddy the waters here. I won't really claim that the Golden Rule is in fact the one absolute principle of morality. My point is that all the normal moral precepts such as those against killing and stealing are derived from deeper moral principles. These explicit moral concepts are middlemen in the flow of reasoning from morality to policy. The fact that we admit to exceptions clearly shows that they are not, in fact, moral principles. So it's rather pointless to use them in political discussions. If you want to bring morality into it, keep to the basics where you're on solid ground. Cut out the middlemen.

Let's take the case of Hiroshima as a particularly extreme example. The USA killed something like 100,000+ people in order to win the war. There were very few military personnel in that city: most of the victims were old men, women, and children. Clearly this has to be chalked up as a hugely evil act. But war kills people; the goal in war is not to avoid killing people, but to minimize the amount of killing necessary to get the job done. The worst possible kind of war is a war of attrition, where people die in a diffuse and regular manner, day in and day out, until it becomes so routine as to escape the notice of the opposing government. If you want to use violence to win your war, then you want big, showy, dramatic violence, violence that grabs people's attention, violence that terrifies and disgusts and demoralizes. It's better to broil 100,000 people than to starve a million people to death, because the horror of the 100,000 deaths is so much greater than the horror of the million deaths. And in fact, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did exactly what they were intended to do: they so shocked the Japanese Emperor that he told his government to surrender. Ultimately, fewer people died because of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I was inspired to write this item by a comment in a previous discussion during which one of our correspondents wrote about the importance of morality in policymaking. My point here can be boiled down to asking "What morality?" There is no fundamental moral principle that one man's property is his to dispose as he pleases. There's a secondary moral precept to that effect, but we all know that there are exceptions to that precept -- so what's the point of citing it as a principle when it is in fact only a precept?

My claim here is that we cannot use moral precepts as fundamental principles that brook no contradiction. Pro-life people claim that the sanctity of life is absolute -- but most of them have no objection to violating the sanctity of Islamic lives. Advocates of small government try to apply grand principles to show that government should not tax the people. I'm reminded here of the classic tale of Winston Churchill offering an English aristocratic woman 5 millions pounds to sleep with him. When she expressed a willingness to contemplate the idea, he then asked if she would be willing to sleep with him for 5 pounds. She responded rather huffily "What kind of woman do you think I am?" To which Mr. Churchill answered "We've already established that, now we're merely determining the price." Advocates of small government have already conceded the principle that government is necessary and desirable; beyond that, it's only a matter of determining the price.

We cannot dodge the complexities of policymaking by taking refuge in absolute moral principles, because there aren't any absolute moral principles beyond the Golden Rule. Whenever we consider tax policy, legislation, public spending, or anything else that government does, we must rummage through all the implications and give each of them due consideration. There's no shortcut to these answers.