Stuff I've been into for a while but haven't written about

First- I think minimalist shoes are a revolution waiting to happen. I've been wearing Vibram Fivefingers (probably Chinese forgeries, but they work well), and Softstar RunAmocs. I'm pretty sure the arch of my foot has become much stronger and more pronounced since wearing these (about a year), and my posture has improved. I won't even wear conventional shoes any more. Highly recommended. Search "minimalist shoes" on Google to find more- this is a growing trend, and a very positive one, I think.

Next- I'm very interested in the free school movement. The most famous such school is the Sudbury Valley School. I'm less interested in the democratic aspect than in the freedom accorded to students. I am persuaded by Peter Gray's argument that our current paradigm of education is deeply coercive, and unnecessarily so. This especially true in China. The liberation of children, and with it, of the human imagination, will be a huge step toward a more just society.

Food and tea pairings

Suggested to me by a Taiwanese tea merchant:
Aged, roasted oolong and pork belly braised in soy sauce (红烧肉）

My own discoveries:
Fenghuang Dancong （凤凰单从）and fresh grapefruit, preferably on a cool, rainy spring morning.
Aged raw Puer （普洱）and slowly boiled bamboo shoots and pork ribs, dabbed in soy sauce (I should say tamari- gluten is death!)

Testing

testing

Thinking about the ethics of carnivory makes me think ontological ethics is doomed

I need to think more about this, and I guess I'd need an argument that specifically addresses the weaknesses of ontology. But I think the issue of whether eating meat is ethical or not hinges on 1) deciding animals are worth considering as morally relevant and if we do 2) what actually will bring about the best result for all moral agents- human and animal alike. I don't think 1)can be answered through anything but a decision to do it- to decide that the suffering of animals matters. No argument will decide it.

To answer 2) will need a lot of knowledge of how the actions of billions over time impact many enormously complex systems. I don't think there's going to be one blanket proscription that is going to work for everyone everywhere. But I'm not totally sure about that.

All of this suggest to me that ethics for the real world is going to have to be much more bottom-up. It really always has been- professional philosophers just were mostly not paying attention.

Scattered thoughts again, but I don't want to stop myself from putting stuff out there. I can always go back and correct myself.

Bleg: The development of the modern parent-child relationship

Here in China, parents still hold position of unquestioned authority for most people. This is true even for adults. I had one student, a man well into his fourties, still unmarried, who wanted to marry a woman who had adopted a child. His parents forbade it, threatening to disown him if he went through with it. He acquiesced and last I heard had married a woman more to his parents liking.

This seems completely inconceivable to most westerners, yet I believe this kind of practice was not always unique to China, India, or other cultures with which we associate filial piety; I'm pretty sure this was once the standard in the west as well. But we've moved away from it, just as we've moved away from other nasty things of the old days.

Gary Becker told a story of how the transition to industrialization created a more dynamic environment that made the knowledge of older generations much less useful. This seems very plausible to me, but I guess I'm looking for more of a history of ideas on this subject. What were people writing about the authority of parents during, say, the Enlightenment?

I'd be grateful for any knowledge any of you have on this topic.

Another round

Naomi took the time to pen a response to my response, to which I, in turn, responded. Naomi:

That makes sense, thanks for clarifying, and for having an interesting discussion! Unfortunately, with the growing global demand for meat (trying to keep pace with American's consumption habits) I don't think we have the land, nor the farmland/grain for feed, to ethically raise number of animals required to meet current demand. Our meat eating habits will have to change if we want to ethically eat animals, and trying to convince people accustomed to regular meat consumption to eat less is going to be a hard sell. Before factory farming, eating meat was a treat, something for special occasions, not a daily (or mealy) occurrence. We need to return the ritual to our meat eating, and in doing so, show that we value the animals we consume. How to do this in a world of ubiquitous fast food seems overwhelming.

To which I wrote:

Hey Naomi,You have a good point, but I don't think it's totally right. Yes, ifeveryone in world wanted to eat as much meat as the typical American rightnow, and had the means to, that would probably be a disaster. I don't think anyone knows how much meat people would consume if all meat was produced in
the way we think is good- that would be a much different world. But a few points:

I think a lot of people have the egalitarian intuition that, if something
cannot be done by everyone, we shouldn't do it. But I think there are many
cases where following this rule is not desirable. Many new technologies
are prohibitively expensive at first, and consume a lot of resources. But I wouldn't say, therefore, that we shouldn't have them. I'd say to let people
with the money buy them, and, if these technologies hold a lot of promise, people will find a way to produce them more cheaply. This is good for
society overall, in my view (and I think most economists would agree, for
what that's worth).

So in the case of pastured meat, I'd say: buy as much as you think you can afford. This will encourage the development of those farms, and there are probably applications of technology that could drive down the cost, while maintaining the humaneness and environmental impact that we want. At least greater economies of scale will develop, which will bring the price down.
Yes, some people won't be able to afford as much as others, but, again, I
think it's a fallacy to suppose that such an outcome is bad, even by, say,
the Rawlsian maximin principle.

This, in my view, is why markets work well: prices will determine the distribution of resources in an efficient way, and provide incentives for innovation. Yes, factory farming is, to some extent, a result of such a
market, but this is where people can put their money where their values are,
and also, to some extent, the present situation is a result of government policy, for example in subsidizing corn. And there are probably good
argument for policies like banning use of hormones and/or antibiotics in
cattle. Anyway, if I'm right about all this, we can safely encourage people
to eat as much pastured (meaning fully grass-fed, in the case of cows andthe way we think is good- that would be a much different world. But a few points:

I think a lot of people have the egalitarian intuition that, if somethingcannot be done by everyone, we shouldn't do it. But I think there are manycases where following this rule is not desirable. Many new technologiesare prohibitively expensive at first, and consume a lot of resources. But I wouldn't say, therefore, that we shouldn't have them. I'd say to let peoplewith the money buy them, and, if these technologies hold a lot of promise, people will find a way to produce them more cheaply. This is good forsociety overall, in my view (and I think most economists would agree, forwhat that's worth).

 So in the case of pastured meat, I'd say: buy as much as you think you can afford. This will encourage the development of those farms, and there are probably applications of technology that could drive down the cost, while maintaining the humaneness and environmental impact that we want. At least greater economies of scale will develop, which will bring the price down.Yes, some people won't be able to afford as much as others, but, again, Ithink it's a fallacy to suppose that such an outcome is bad, even by, say,the Rawlsian maximin principle.

This, in my view, is why markets work well: prices will determine the distribution of resources in an efficient way, and provide incentives for innovation. Yes, factory farming is, to some extent, a result of such amarket, but this is where people can put their money where their values are,and also, to some extent, the present situation is a result of government policy, for example in subsidizing corn. And there are probably goodargument for policies like banning use of hormones and/or antibiotics incattle. Anyway, if I'm right about all this, we can safely encourage peopleto eat as much pastured (meaning fully grass-fed, in the case of cows andsheep) meat as they please. 

This is something I need to think more about. I should say many of the ideas I've expressed here are influenced by, or directly taken from Melissa McEwen and Amar Bhidé .

A comment on my last post, and my response

My old classmate Naomi posted this comment on my last post on Facebook:

I am not sure what the vegan population is like in China, but in America, I get the sense that a lot of the vegan movement is a response to the industrial farming techniques of modern agriculture (even calling it "farming" and "agriculture" seems insincere and inaccurate, since what these words abstractly mean to most people is so far from the reality as to be completely unrelated and unrecognizable). I don't think there was a vegan movement before factory farms (the term was coined in 1944). Of course, vegetarian diets have been around for centuries, usually as part of a religious practice that advocates non-violence towards animals.

I don't think you can separate modern vegetarian and vegan culture from factory farming, and the key moral issues surrounding factory farming have to do with quality of life, humane practices and humane slaughter (not to mention serious environmental and infectious disease issues). Yes, vegetarians and vegans are often adamant in their denouncement of any use of animals for food, but I believe the core of their outrage is fueled by inhumane practices. I do not think that animal rights activists would deface, destroy, or kidnap from farms that practiced humane raising and slaughtering of animals.

This is why I think that the moral argument for vegan or vegetarian diet is stronger in America than in a nation that does not primarily rely on factory farming (sadly, there aren't many, if any, nations out there that don't). I don't think you can accurately separate what most ethical vegan idealists say their reasoning is from the moral issues surrounding factory farming.

I don't think you can separate modern vegetarian and vegan culture from factory farming, and the key moral issues surrounding factory farming have to do with quality of life, humane practices and humane slaughter (not to mention serious environmental and infectious disease issues). Yes, vegetarians and vegans are often adamant in their denouncement of any use of animals for food, but I believe the core of their outrage is fueled by inhumane practices. I do not think that animal rights activists would deface, destroy, or kidnap from farms that practiced humane raising and slaughtering of animals. 

 This is why I think that the moral argument for vegan or vegetarian diet is stronger in America than in a nation that does not primarily rely on factory farming (sadly, there aren't many, if any, nations out there that don't). I don't think you can accurately separate what most ethical vegan idealists say their reasoning is from the moral issues surrounding factory farming.

 I posted this in response:

 I agree that this is certainly what motivates many vegans, but it is also true, as you said, that many vegans reject ANY use of animals by humans- certainly for food. Also, there are many ethical arguments that support this conviction, and, in my view, they often rely on the error that I describe in my post. The post was really about this kind of error in ethical reasoning, not about veganism per se.

But I also don’t think I agree with you when you say. “ I don't think you can accurately separate what most ethical vegan idealists say their reasoning is from the moral issues surrounding factory farming.” For one, I think there are people motivated to be vegans by the kind of arguments I criticize. Now, if the only choices where to be an undiscerning carnivore or a vegan, this would be OK, since getting people to adopt veganism would be good. But there is a real alternative to those concerned about factory farming: to buy animals products from farms that treat animals more humanely. And there are many people who do this out of an ethical conviction that factory farming is cruel.

This alternative has become much more mainstream in recent years, and I think it’s a force for good. Given that this choice exists, I think it is important to do exactly what you say we can’t: separate ethical arguments for veganism from arguments for more conscientious carnivory. One reason for this is because many people will simply never opt for veganism, but are much more likely to opt for buying pastured, humanely raised meat. Another reason is because, to the best of my judgment, a vegan diet is not actually more humane or eco-friendly compared to this alternative; there are many cases where pasturing animals in the right way is much better for an ecosystem than agriculture (obviously most vegans would dispute this, but I think they’re wrong). Another reason is that, again to the best of my judgment, a whole foods diet that includes pastured meat is more health-promoting than veganism, at least for most people.

So, for all these reasons, I would like for ethical vegans to consider that conscientious omnivorism is a better alternative to what they’re doing. And there are actually many vegans who have been persuaded by this argument. I also think it’s important to make the typical, carnivorous American more aware of the evils (yes, I’d call it that) of factory farming, and get them to support more traditional, ecological, healthful, and humane methods of meat production. But, like I said, my concern in the post was more about a certain kind of ethical reasoning that I think we’d be better off abandoning. But your point is an important one, and I probably should have elaborated on my views to make the argument clearer, so thanks for your response! :-)

We need ethics for the real world

I've been thinking about why I find ethical arguments for veganism unconvincing. I think it's for the same reason that I find many ethical views unconvincing: one begins with some ethical intuition that most people (but not all!) will accept, and from these abstract to all areas of human behavior. For the ethical vegan, killing humans is wrong because humans are sentient. Animals are also sentient, so it must be wrong to kill them, too. (I realize there are many arguments made for veganism, but this is a common one- of which there are many variations). 

I think the mistake here is to assume that ethical principles must be justified by one essential principle. In the real world, ethics seems to result from a variety of human intuitions, along with a whole mess of social phenomena. It seems clear to me that we have taboos against killing people for many reasons- many of which do not apply to animals. One might argue that these reasons are flawed, but it seems to me that ethical vegans just insist that one criteria for what makes killing wrong is all that's relevant. 

I happen to be more of a utilitarian, and I think carnivory can be justified on utilitarian grounds, even if non-human animals receive the same ethical weight as humans. But I see this as an open question- it really depends on many contingent facts about the world, many of which I don't know for certain. I also realize that most people are not strict utilitarians, and this is relevant for how I choose to live as an moral agent. 

Even if you are completely convinced that veganism is a moral imperative, I think you have to contend with the fact that most people disagree with you, and try to really think about the practicalities of enforcing your belief. But maybe this is where I just deeply disagree with ethical vegans, and with all strong deontologists: I think ethics without consideration of many facts in the real world is just pointless. 

You really should try cutting caffeine

I've been caffeine free now for about five days. I had gone caffeine free for a week or so a few months back. Both times, I have experienced much better sleep (especially being able to far a sleep much more quickly), greater, much more even energy throughout the day, and improved mood.

Most Americans consume lots of coffee. I think many folks would benefit a lot from cutting it out for a while.

I am a lover of Chinese tea, and I cherish coffee-fueled philosophical conversations with good friends. After a month or so I'm going to try reintroducing it and see how I react. But it would only ever be a couple of times a week. I will compensate by drinking only really good tea.

Follow-up on collective responsibilty

I think an advantage of the way of thinking about the concepts I discussed in this post is that it might allow us to find ways to improve societies without implying that the members of the society are to blame, or should feel ashamed for, their society's problems. At the same time, they may see it as their responsibility to act to change things.

This is a little idealistic. There clearly is a deep tribalist impulse, which often prevents people from looking at their own group clearly. But maybe one way of addressing this is to get use a conceptual framework that separates social failure from collective guilt. In my perfect world, people wouldn't feel pride based on group status, but that's really a long way off.

People don't know what their own traditions are

One phenomenon I've noticed recently in China is that people have many inaccurate beliefs about what Chinese tradition actually is. For example, most Chinese people see it as the most Chinese thing ever to eat rice with every meal. But it this could not have been possible for the mass of Chinese people until perhaps 50 years ago, as white rice, without industrial husking and polishing techniques, was extremely labor-intensive, and would have been too expensive for most people to consume every day. People are slightly more aware that industrial seed oil is not a traditional Chinese thing, as its introduction is far more recent. Yet most people use it every day, partially because the false notion that these oils are healthy, and that animal fat is bad, has trickled in from the United States. (Melissa McEwen has noticed similar things among immigrant populations in Queens.)

In other cases, there seems to be blind adherence to traditions that seem to make very little sense, while embracing potentially harmful aspects of modernity. For example, women in China, after giving birth, typically spend a month at home, during which time they are not supposed to go outside, wash their hair, or brush their teeth. Meanwhile, the majority of births in China occur by C section, and there is increasing evidence that this can be harmful to both mother and child.

All of this leads me to suspect that there is a big problem with traditionalism as commonly practiced. Common practices seem to change without people even noticing. Even the most vehement followers of tradition always adopt some new things, and these small changes can make a big difference.

In the case of food, to be a traditionalist now requires one to actively avoid all kinds of foods, and seeking out the tiny quantities of foods that are produced in the traditional way. In some cases, you have to go back to find out what the traditions actually were. Basically, you have to be a scholar and researcher. It has to be a passion. I think, as innovation continues to accelerate, and the costs of new technologies accumulates*, we're going to see more and more people specializing in the re-remembering of lost traditions. The paleo movement is, perhaps, an example of this.

*I think the benefits of new technologies mostly outway the costs. But the costs they impose are new, and one way we make progress is by learning to deal with the problems that new technologies create. I owe this insight to Kevin Kelly.

Some initial thoughts on collective failure, responsibility, and guilt

I'm sure the ideas I've been juggling in my head for a while are not new. It seems like an issue some philosopher must have grappled with. But at any rate it's something that itches at me often when I encounter arguments about the issues I list in the title of this post. I want to make this fairly quick, and build on it in the future, so I'm gonna keep it short and punchy.

Some definitions:

Collective failure
I understand collective failure as an outcome within a given group where all/most members of the group are made worse off (could we call that a Pareto decline?),  and the outcome cannot be fully attributed to some exogenous forces, and each member of the group did something that was a necessary (but not, in itself, sufficient) to allow the outcome to happen. (That's too wordy!)

Collective failure may effect people outside the group. For example, if we imagine that the policies of communist China under Mao where responsible for suffering among all Chinese people, we may say this was the result of a collective failure- but not among ALL Chinese, but among, say, the political class, or the educated class, or whatever.

Collective responsibility
Most ethical theories, along with most folk's ethical intuitions, hold that a person is morally responsible for an action iff she could have done otherwise. While I see the usefulness of this way of thinking, I think it comes loaded with some metaphysical baggage; I don't think we ever really know if someone could have done otherwise from what he/she actually did do. OK, but let's say we can imagine, in some cases, that someone could have done otherwise. The role of this way of thinking may be to change future incentives in order to shift behavior at the margin in order to decrease socially costly behavior.

But in the case of collective responsibility, we seem to run into a problem: this way of thinking doesn't apply easily to groups. If you say a group could have done otherwise, it seems like you need a way to translate that into individual action. And here we have the real problem: it's obvious that many individual actions are only possible if others act a certain way. That is, someone could only have also differently if others had also acted differently. Now, there are cases where an individual could plausibly have been able to induce others to behave in this way, but there are also many cases where this isn't the case. In such cases, how can we attribute responsibility in a way that can be sensibly applied to all individuals in a group?

I think a plausible answer to this question goes something like this:
When we attribute responsibility for some outcome to some group, one thing we want to do is to induce that group to develop social practices that will make this outcome less likely in the future. Such practices may only be possible with widespread changes in behavior among all, or a sufficient number of members of the group. I think social norms that guide a lot of behavior are like this: they require most  members to opt in. And I think perception of  collective responsibility within a group may induce a change of behavior that can change social norms and, thus, social outcomes.

Collective guilt
In some usages, 'guilt' and 'responsibility' may be used interchangeably, but I want to argue that, in cases dealing with social outcomes, it is more useful to make a distinction. I think 'guilt' ought to be used only to apply to those we actually punish. Part of the reason for this is rhetorical and pragmatic. People seem to recoil at most suggestions of collective guilt, and probably rightly so. For one thing, guilt also has a connotation of exclusion; once we ascribe guilt, the common understanding is that those who aren't guilty are off the hook. It also has a connotation of finality; once we've found out who is guilty, we punish them, or make them give compensation, and then we're finished. With many social problems, however, thing are more complicated than this kind of thinking allows for.

Application and conclusion
Let me try to apply this thinking to a concrete case to make it clearer. Suppose we attribute the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and occupying authorities from 1932-1946 to a collective failure among the Japanese people at the time to curb the highly nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Japanese society at that time.

We may say that those people who committed the atrocities, and those who ordered them, or even knowingly allowed them to occur, are clearly guilty in some sense. We may even hold guilty all Japanese who were of a certain age at that time- though in a different sense; we're not going to throw all of them in prison, but we may, say, want them to feel guilty in order to change their behavior in the future.

But it seems pretty absurd to hold most Japanese people alive today to be guilty for those crimes. After all, they weren't even alive at the time, or they were children.And assigning guilt in this way may fuel resentment among Japanese people, or bigotry against Japanese people.

 But we may want to attribute some kind of collective responsibility- not for what happened then, but to do better in the future- to develop better social norms, institutions, and practices so that the Japanese military will never again act in such a way. After all, norms and institutions are sticky- they don't change overnight, and they depend on many bottom-up social phenomena- not only on policy or actions by leaders, but also on the actions of all people within the group.

Of course, we do a lot more than this. We also encourage policies, act in international diplomacy, etc. But this kind of assigning of responsibility is one of the things we may do.


I hope these ideas are useful in helping us understand some important problems we face in our society, and in addressing these problems. In the future, I plan to elaborate on these ideas.

Update

Once again, a long time since I bothered to do a post here. My wireless router at home broke, and since then my VPN at home doesn't work. I got up early this morning, and I'm now at Starbucks sipping a cup of tea, so here I am.

My reading lately has been pointing my thinking increasingly toward a convergence of various ideas- Nassim Taleb, Richard Rorty, Seth Roberts and the various writers of paleo diet related blogs. It's all been getting me to think about the relationship between dynamism, coping with limited knowledge, the open society, and living well.

It's exciting to see the emergence of a strain of thought that seems to me so necessary for "our times". Let me try to lay out what I see going on here:

A distrust of theorizing, and an embracing of epistemological openness and tinkering
Both Rorty and Taleb offer convincing arguments against any theory as the final arbiter of Truth. Taleb suggests tinkering as a better paradigm. The smartest paleo writers seem to get this idea. Scientific evidence matters, but individuals need to be able to tinker around, see what works, and make new discoveries.

Embracing social dynamism
This follows to some extent from the latter. The smartest paleo writers understand that society flourishes when it allows a bottom-up discovery process to be the driver of social progress. It's refreshing to see more and more libertarians also fully embrace the implications of Hayek- there is never perfect knowledge, competition- indeed, perfect ANYTHING. The reason to embrace markets is because they allow for discovery, and keep the many failures that will occur along the way small. Government tends to push for one-size-fits-all solutions, and failures are massively damaging. But the smart libertarians understand that big business is often completely dependent on big government; social orders are dependent on each other.

Imperfect knowledge
The Chicago version of libertarianism is misleading. You don't need to believe in perfect competition, or perfect rationality, to support a greater role for markets. Indeed, the concept of the market, broadly understood, is just another way of saying something like 'a decentralized, bottom-up process of discovery'. We should also include in this what one might call 'the marketplace of ideas', and indeed most human interaction. We lack a good word for all of this. Ideas are just as important as production, even in 'the market' more narrowly construed.
The human body, like society, is a complex system, and we understand it very poorly. Overarching theories are very likely to miss something. We should proceed cautiously. Avoid the most clearly damaging things, and go with what works- don't worry too much about why. The convergence of evolutionary logic and scientific evidence can point us in the right direction, but don't wed yourself to any conclusion.

Never completely trust large institutions
The American government and it's corporate clients are not in the business of guarding the common good. I don't think there is deliberate intention to harm, but the net effect often is to harm the mass of people.
In the case of health, they continue to forward a hypothesis that appears weaker than ever. They have helped to destroy the knowledge embedded in traditional foodways- how many Americans know how to render lard?- and pushed deeply damaging alternatives.
The internet is empowering people to create social networks to help rebuild this knowledge. It's going to take some time, but many have already rebuilt their health.

This is all very scattered. If I ever get around to it, I'll try to better organize it and elaborate on some of these ideas.