We must not stop research on solar geoengineering

Astonishing sanity from the Graun. What has happened? A week ago they published a dumb editorial saying wanky stuff about Africa not wanting SRM; I briefly considered blogging it but realised that wanky Graun editorials are not news. But sanity on SRM, even just as a letter or sequence of letters, is, so hurrah. "We should not stop" is of course a bit underwhelming; we haven't really started, so a better headline would be "We should start". Reflecting Sunlight from 2021 refers; have I really said nothing since then?

That alone would make a thin post; fortunately Auntie steps up with the admirably stupid UK launches taskforce to 'break down barriers' for women in technology for me to take the piss out of. It offers the deliciously stupid idea that women need to "have a seat at the table" which tells you the sort of utterly-pointless-meeting focussed mentality that idiots that write this stuff have, and why the current govt has no idea at all how to garner the growth it so ardently pretends to desire; failing to realise that it itself is the major problem.

Refs

* Book review: Climate Shlock.

* Is it pointless now to fight climate change?

* Happy Saturnalia.

* The Pledge.

The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen

The Introduction refers. Part one, as I suspected, doesn't improve on it. Indeed part one has very litle to add, but attempts to disguise this with repeated repetitious repetition. Nonetheless it is not without virtue; whether that is inborn or only that it sparked thoughts in my mind I suppose I don't mind; the point is to think. I continued on, briefly, into parts two, three and four. I don't recommend you read this book; read The Open Society and Its Enemies instead.

Wiki claims that "The book is principally a critique and revision of John Rawls's basic ideas in A Theory of Justice"; this is kinda true, although I don't see Sen admitting that anywhere since it would be humiliating; but he is deeply in thrall to Rawls³.

Nonetheless Sen's main point remains his desire for a comparative theory of justice⁹, as opposed to one that would allow the construction of institutions¹, so he spends lots of time pointing out that Rawls' theory isn't useful from his point of view. He is though rather shy of talking this through with examples. At one point (p 104 in my edition) he calls out famine, or exclusion from medical access, as things calling urgently for remedy, which said remedy would advance Justice². But he does this without any form of comparison, so it isn't really clear that he even needs his comparative theory. Indeed, it isn't really clear that he needs any theory of Justice, since he is able to identify Injustice without it, and to know that removing this Injustice would "advance Justice".

Implicitly, though, he has in mind a comparison of "the existing world" with one pet Injustice - say, Famine - with another (imaginary) case - the same world, but without the malign situation⁸. Since the two differ (in his imagination) in no way other than one lacks <bad thing>, it is easy for him to say that the second is better. But of course, the second world doesn't actually exist, and nowhere does he knuckle down to the hard work of thinking how to compare the real world, with a better one where <bad thing> has been alleviated, but the various trade-offs necessary for that have taken place.

Notice that what he is calling for can also be interpreted as a call for piecemeal changes, rather than revolution. If we followed the imaginary Rawls program and devised new ideally just institutions, putting them in place would be a revolution. Sen is implicitly calling for fixing one thing at a time. This is exactly the idea of "piecemeal social engineering" that Popper puts forward in TOSAIE; can Sen really be that badly read that he doesn't know this?

It is easy to nod along at his idea that all we need to do is compare something unjust to something better and prefer the better; but I don't think it works. Imagine: you have wrangled control, or influence, somewhere, and get to promote Justice within some limited area. You perhaps look around, and identify <bad things>, and you think what might be done to make a <better world>. But you can't do any of this without a theory of what is Just, or where you want to get to. It is like Popper's point that to do Science, you cannot simply <make observations and deduce theories>. Without a theory, and idea, you have no wlay to decide what to observe. And a theory of (In)Justice that amounts to no more than "I know it when I see it" isn't transferrable from one mind to another. And when the goons from Sen's govt come to take away your flute¹⁰, you can have no answer to "but we say it is Just".

He is keen on Adam Smith's "impartial spectator" as an arbiter of morals, and this is nice, because Smith's humane discussion in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is worth reading⁵. But his problem is that he leans too hard on the Spectator, to be kind to him; or being less kind, he hasn't really understood that the Spectator is a purely imaginary being. Yet Sen repeatedly speaks as though the Spectator can bring us information, in the way that a perspective from a real person outside us could. On a similar vein, he is keen to discuss what groups-of-people might form Rawls' Under-the-Veil groups⁶. Unfortunately, there is no answer to this; it is (yet another) weakness in Rawls, which he sweeps under the carpet because there is no answer. Sen is worried that Rawls' (effectively national) groups might lack external perspective from - ker-ching! - perhaps people in poorer nations⁷. But this is unthinking of him: people can still read under the Veil. Do we owe "concern" to people in other nations (p 129)? Sen would like to think so, but doesn't address the overwhelming additional complexity that forcing this "concern" would entail. Page 140 worries about exclusionary neglect and global justice, without ever noticing that most of the "excluded" folk's main problem is their own government, not anyone else's.

On page 61 there is a discussion of whether people can be expected to act in compliance with the agreement made Under-the-Veil. Rawls, who expects unanimity, thinks there would be (yay, and even unto the seventh generation, but what then?); Sen, who thinks there wouldn't be, regards this as a flaw; but the point is that we have the criminal law to deal with those who break the law (see also point 6 on page 90). On page 63 we find that Liberty, seen in the Introduction as a mere nice-to-have, has now become a central concern. This is an improvement. On page 75 we have a discussion of Goodness and Smartness which would benefit from reading Hazlitt. On page 82 he asserts that we have to seek institutions that promote justice rather than simply are just. But whether or not the state should force, nudge, or push folk to be moral is a subject of intense debate, not something to be simply asserted.

But really, there isn't much else there; if you've read this far and want more, get the book for yourself. He is fond of bringing in Akbar and other Indian worthies, perhaps to remind us that India exists. He has a couple of pages of "critique of the enlightenment" which says that their over-reliance on reason has lead to atrocities like Stalin and Pol Pot. This is stupid, obviously, so he then walks it back again, leaving us with a net wasted two pages and a small portion of our lives wasted that we shall never get back⁴.

Part two

There is, predictably, little in it. I find a brief discussion of whether we owe duties, due to our power, to the less powerful. Sen clearly thinks we do, but is unable or unwilling to advance any clear arguments in favour of the idea (around p 206). There's also a discussion of "consequential-ism" vs "duty-ism", conducted bizarrely within an Arjuna-Vishna framework, p 210. At no point does Sen realise that one good reason for following rules-aka-duty is that the consequences of some actions cannot reasonably be forseen (if you decline to fight a battle for fear of killing people, will that save the people, or - perhaps by making the battle less decisive - kill even more people? Sen just doesn't think things through).

Part three

Part three flows by without any great evidence of thought; I have to admit I'm skipping, though. He is keen on capabilities; cripples are poorer than they look. This is something you need to worry about, if you insist on mixting justice and economics.

Part four

By p 374 we're on human rights, which is my excuse to trot out I dislike rights-based language. He has no such qualms, to him rights are just good things; and I can't tell from his careless text whether he thinks he is writing Truth or Opinion. There's a right not to be assaulted, there's a right not to be tortured, and you definitely don-'t want to stop and think: hold on... Isn't not being tortured already covered in not being assaulted? Why do we need a seperate, much more limited right? The answer of course is that, oh dear, "not being assaulted" turns out to be too broad; under certain circumstances The State is going to assault you (police controlling a riot, perhaps); and so we need a seperate right for oh no The State really really won't violate this one, except very rarely and in the darkness. But subtleties of that order are beyond Sen, vitiating his discussion.

He doesn't seem very good at economics: if someone wants to do something, in ordinary economic terms that is what they want, it is in their interest to do it, it represents utility to them; doing it is good to them and being prevented is bad. But Sen insists we must carefully examine whether it is really in their "interest" to do the thing (p 378) - which is, in reality, impossible to do. This all seems a part of his paternalism.

Notes

1. This despite the fact that Rawl's theory, whilst nominally constructive, doesn't actually manage to construct any institutions, even if you neglect his many fatal errors. Oh, I said that last time. Never mind.

2. Still without clarifying quite what Justice is; I think we have to take from his examples of non-Just situations what Justice might be; or perhaps he is implicitly using Hobbes' "all that is not unjust is just" idea.

3. Wiki also points me to a gushing Economist review.

4. Or at least, I have. You dear reader can avoid that fate by not reading it. Aside: you will perhaps find this hard to believe but in pre-composing this review in my head I formulated much well-deserved invective, but decided to omit it.

5. Although (cough) I admit to only having read about the first third. To be vaguely fair to me I dropped it in the bath, so it puffed out and became harder to read, but I really ought to pick it up again.

6. See this link to my earlier review of Rawls if you've forgotten what the Veil is. For my use, see the footnote on page 57 which makes it clear, if you're in doubt, that (a) Rawls really does expect unanimity; and (b) he was aware of objections to this idea even pre-publication.

7. And yet he offers very weak examples of what might benefit from such an analysis; see p 71 where women's rights, and the death penalty, are suggested.

8. Which means that all the pseudo-mathematical wankery about partial orderings is pointless. It also means that really, he isn't even doing a simple comparison; he just says that <bad things> are <bad>.

9. I am - characteristically - being overly generous to my subject. As other comments show, Sen really isn't interested in a "theory" of Justice at all; and perhaps to be fair the title is "idea", not "theory". It would be more accurate to say that he argues against the utility of a theory, and instead relentlessly pushed the idea of comparatives, without ever doing the hard work required to make his idea coherent.

10. If that doesn't mean anything to you, see the Introduction.

The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen: Introduction

Just the introduction (but now the rest is also available), but there's enough wrong in it that it is worth writing up, or so I fool myself. I picked this book up knowing I was going to disagree with it, but interested to discover exactly where. So don't accuse me of being unbiased.

Hobbes, as we all know, taught us the meaning of Justice quite some time ago. And yet it is an unpopular definition, since it lacks wiggle room; there is nothing there for smooth-tongued lawyers or slippery politicians or unscrupulous economists.

Sen, to be fair, lays his approval of theft out for all to see early on with a parable: consider three children disputing the ownership of a wooden flute. Child A asserts that she is the only one who can play it, and thus should have it. Child B says that he is much poorer than the other two, and has no other toys, and thus should have it. Child C says that she has spent the past few months making the flute by herself. Hobbes, and I, and any other sane person, immeadiately sees the correct answer; but that is far too simple for the oh-so-sophisticated Sen, who wraps a cloud of squid-ink around a desire to steal the flute and gain the power and prestige that go with allocating it. And all without noting that in the real world, there is a further problem: only C has an unique claim; both A and B would in practice be but examplars of a class of meritless claimants. Back in the real world, he is keen on "patent reform" to make drugs more available to the third world, which is apparently "clearly" part of "global justice", also an undefined term. But if you wish to improve the lives of the poor, and are granting yourself in imagination god-like powers to change the world, why not imagine giving these poor folk western-style govt instead of the hideously corrupt pols currently keeping them poor?

 

Sen would like to contrast what-he-calls a "transcendental" approach (he has been reading too much Kant) with a "comparative" approach. The T-folk seek ultimately just institutions by construction¹; the C-folk are more interested in comparing outcomes under actual institutions. He claims Hobbes for the T-folk but this is an error on his part (I don't think he has actually read much Hobbes); Hobbes doesn't really design institutions; his work is at a deeper level than that, on the definition of the word. Sen wants his ideas of Justice to guide his social arrangements, in some way; again, he doesn't justify this he rather takes it as given; but I say that on a sub-stratum of Justice you can build many different social arrangements and it isn't at all clear why your Justice should guide these at all.

Sen does not trouble himself with the meaning of the word Justice, treating it I can only assume as well known, since he doesn't even trouble to note that he isn't going to define it. Instead he saying that a starting point will be something like "how can justice be advanced?".

Sen has a lot of time for Rawls, who he regards as the leading political philosopher of our time, which is toss. But he does at least manage to notice what so many others fail to see, that there will not be agreement under the Veil of Ignorance.

He is weakly in favour of freedom: freedom to choose our lives can improve our well-being, and beyond that it may be valuable in itself (my bold).

Anyway, that concludes the introduction.

Refs

* The Climate-Risk Industrial Complex and the Manufactured Insurance Crisis.

* A serious problem in the developing world is that the moment anyone makes anything, their family and relations show up demanding a claim. Or, Bryan Caplan's version.

* District Court Judge Patti Saris vacated a Trump executive order that brought a halt to all offshore wind power development, as well as some projects on land.

* Public Choice: The Normative Core.

Notes

1. Or so Sen repeatedly claims, and I think it is fair to say this is where Rawls would like to go. But whilst this may be in principle their desire, in practice they get nowhere near deriving institutions; indeed, Rawls gets nowhere near even deriving, say, the Constitution.