Tag: philosophy

The Socratic whistleblower

Cybersecurity law expert Joel Brenner says (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan) Eric Snowden is a wimp because he didn’t stay to face the legal consequences of his whistleblowing. In fact, it’s not civil disobedience at all unless you stay and drink the hemlock.

From Socrates through Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, the great theorists and practitioners of this form of resistance to law have told us in words and actions that civil disobedience requires the disobedient citizen to suffer the legal consequences of his or her unlawful act. In Socrates’s case, the consequence was death at the hands of the Athenian authorities. For Thoreau, Ghandi, and King, the consequence was jail. Through their suffering and example, they sought to undermine the moral position of law they found objectionable. Because unless the disobedient citizen takes the legal consequences of his unlawful action – he’s nothing but a criminal or a rebel.

Now, I love Thoreau, and he invented the term “civil disobedience”, but he spent one night in his hometown jail and then let a friend pay his fine. As with his roughing-it-in-the-cabin-but-don’t-miss-Sunday-dinner-with-the-folks stay at Walden, Thoreau knew better than anyone how to leverage a minimum of physical discomfort into a maximum of moral example. It’s hard to compare him to Snowden, who would have to at least take seriously the possibility that falling into the hands of US authorities would result in him being tortured and/or incarcerated permanently without trial.

But this is also completely wrong as regards Socrates, for a different reason: He precisely refused to flee so as not to undermine the moral position of the law. To put it simply, Socrates (as reported in the Crito) imagines the Law addressing him as follows: Continue reading “The Socratic whistleblower”

Intellectual property is theft

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has pointed to this paper by esteemed Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, in which he raises the temperature on the tired old “taxation is theft” thesis. In Bertram’s pithy summary, “Taxing the 1 per cent would be like the state forcibly ripping out their spare internal organs!” This just shows how easy it is to get people to accept almost any moral argument once you frame it to appeal to their squeamishness.

As mathematicians know well, from an inconsistent logical system any proposition may be derived, and human moral calculus is nothing if not inconsistent. Here we see that you can make a perfectly coherent-sounding argument for why taxation is in principle just like forcing people to give up their second kidney to someone who needs it, and that obviously seems wrong, when the alternative might be a situation where people literally need to part with their second kidney in order to eat, or to obtain needed medical treatment for their children.

But I’m interested in another feature of this essay. Mankiw sets the stage as follows:

Imagine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. […] The society enjoys not only perfect equality but also perfect efficiency.

Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies. When the entrepreneur’s product is introduced, everyone in society wants to buy it. They each part with, say, $100. The transaction is a voluntary exchange, so it must make both the buyer and the seller better off. But because there are many buyers and only one seller, the distribution of economic well-being is now vastly unequal. The new product makes the entrepreneur much richer than everyone else.

The society now faces a new set of questions: How should the entrepreneurial disturbance in this formerly egalitarian outcome alter public policy?

The sharp-eyed reader may be wondering, why are these people paying $100 to J.K. Rowling for a pile of paper with printing on it? Why didn’t someone take the first copy, reprint it, and sell copies for $5? Oh yes, because there’s copyright, and the strong arm of the state willing to use force to prevent you from printing certain words on the page. Without that implicit threat of violence, Ms. Rowling’s creation would be worth very little. So what does she owe us in return? A thank-you card? The cost of enforcing her copyright? Or maybe just some constraint on how much of the potential profit she should be allowed to retain, from the monopoly position that wouldn’t exist without the effort and investment of many other people, both living and of prior generations.

The fact that this guy is considered one of the top minds in economics today is sobering…

Who built that? ctd.

The Aeschylean Romney

I commented recently on the Republican obsession with the autogenesis of business founders. It is both insulting and un-American, they say, to suggest that the founder of a business did not actually build that business entirely by himself. And just recently it occurred to me that there is a significant analogy between this belief and the ancient theory of paternity that held sway in Europe for many centuries.

In Aeschylus’s Furies (last part of the Oresteia), Orestes stands accused of murdering his mother, something that he factually did, in revenge for her murdering his father (her husband). He defends himself by arguing that he has shed no “kindred blood”, that only his father is related by blood. The Furies turn to Apollo, outraged. He agrees with Orestes:

Not the true parent is the woman’s womb
That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed
New-sown: the male is parent; she for him,
As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ
Of life;

As in the Republican model you have a superficial, directly observable truth (women build babies; workers build buildings and enterprises) — if it’s a company that makes automobiles, every piece was connected to every other piece in every automobile by a worker, not by a “founder”, that’s just something you can see with your eyes — confronted by a determination to submerge this tangible truth in a theoretical framework that makes the father or the executive not just a “half-worker” (to quote Posthumus Leonatus in Cymbelline), but the only worker. In Apollo’s framing, the female is a passive vessel, flowerpot in which the male plants his seed. And in the Republican economy, the worker is simply a raw material, shaped by the vision of a job-creator.

The Aeschylean vision was formalised in the “one-seed theory” of Aristotle, and dominated medical thinking in Europe through the Middle Ages. This opens up a whole new realm of philosophical inquiry, updating classical theological and philosophical conundra for modern business. Do entrepreneurs have navels? Could Bill Gates write a cheque so large that a computer running Microsoft Windows can’t process it? If a stock market collapses in off-hours trading, does it make a crash? How many angels can dance on the margin of a call option?

On a side-note, I was impressed in 2008 with Obama’s application of Bob the Builder’s anthem:

Bob the Builder
Can we fix it?
Bob the Builder
Yes we can!

Perhaps the Republicans are subtly responding in kind: Maybe Bob the Builder can fix it, but only Mitt the MBA can build something new.