The zero price effect suggests that traditional cost-benefits [sic] models cannot account for the psychological effect of getting something for free. A linear model assumes that changes in cost are the same at all price levels and benefits stay the same. As a result, a decrease in price will make a good equally more or less attractive at all price points. The zero price model, on the other hand, suggests that there will be an increase in a good’s intrinsic value when the price is reduced to zero (Shampanier et al., 2007). Free goods have extra pulling power, as a reduction in price from $1 to zero is more powerful than a reduction from $2 to $1. This is a quote from page 194 of The Behavioral Economics Guide, 2021, available on line at a zero price. The authors state this point as if they think that the point they are addressing is a puzzle, or somehow doesn’t follow from, basic economics. But it does. Put aside the fact, which the authors should know, that there’s no such thing as “intrinsic value.” Value is subjective. The problem is even more basic. Drop the price from $2 to $1 and let people buy as much as they want, and they buy a given amount, which we can be reasonably sure is greater at $1 and than at $2. But drop the price from $1 to $0 and people can buy unlimited amounts. In fact, we shouldn’t even use the word “buy.” They won’t pay. So it shouldn’t be surprising that people will often value a price cut from $1 to $0 way more than they value a price cut from $2 to $1. The gain in consumer surplus is greater with the price cut from $1 to $0 than with the price cut from $2 to $1. HT2 Timothy Taylor, aka The Conversable Economist. (0 COMMENTS)

In the blogosphere and on twitter I see lots of people wrestling with the question of whether we should “believe the science”. It’s clear that they are searching for some sort of Reliable Epistemological Principle, and struggle to articulate exactly what that principle is. Clearly the “science” is not always correct. So how do we know when to believe the science? And which scientists do we believe? Richard Rorty made a career arguing that there is no Reliable Epistemological Principle. We need to look at each claim being made, and try to the best of our ability to figure out if it is true. The fact that lots of experts believe something is true is certainly one piece of evidence that deserves serious consideration. But that’s all it is. I’m rather bemused by the anguish that some people clearly feel when they find out that science is wrong on some point, especially when the anti-science crazies took the opposite side of that particular issue. They seem to think this is some sort of threat to the Reliable Epistemological Principle, the final arbiter of Objective Truth. People need to lighten up. We’ll be debating scientific questions from now until the end of time. Take comfort in the fact that science often has practical value. If you believe in the efficacy of vaccines, then you are likely to live longer than if you don’t. Here’s Rorty: We need a way of explaining why scientists are, and deserve to be, moral exemplars which does not depend on a distinction between objective fact and something softer, squishier, and more dubious. To get such a way of thinking, we can start by distinguishing two senses of the term ‘rationality’. In one sense, the one I have already discussed, to be rational is to be methodical: that is, to have criteria for success laid down in advance. . . . Another meaning for ‘rational’ is, in fact, available. In this sense, the word means something like ‘sane’ or ‘reasonable’ rather than ‘methodical’. It names a set of moral virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force. These are the virtues which members of a civilized society must possess if the society is to endure. In this sense of ‘rational’, the word means something more like ‘civilized’ than like ‘methodical’. When so construed, the distinction between the rational and the irrational has nothing in particular to do with the difference between the arts and the sciences. On this construction, to be rational is simply to discuss any topic – religious, literary, or scientific – in a way which eschews dogmatism, defensiveness, and righteous indignation. There is no problem about whether, in this latter, weaker, sense, the humanities are ‘rational disciplines’. Usually humanists display the moral virtues in question. Sometimes they don’t, but then sometimes scientists don’t either. Yet these moral virtues are felt to be not enough. Both humanists and the public hanker after rationality in the first, stronger sense of the term: a sense which is associated with objective truth, correspondence to reality, and method, and criteria. We should not try to satisfy this hankering, but rather try to eradicate it. It seems to me that you can think of scientific institutions such as the CDC and FDA as having spent the last 18 months obsessed with rationality of the first type, obsessed with method. Trust the science became trust in rigid and arbitrary methods that were followed because no one in the bureaucracy had the courage to suggest another approach. Alex Tabarrok spent the past 18 months engaged in rational analysis of the second kind, looking at all of the Covid-19 evidence in a reasonable way and trying to figure out the most useful way of interpreting that evidence. There is no cookbook for doing what he did; it’s either persuasive or it isn’t. Science is inevitably a messy human activity, reflecting all of our biases and assumptions. The output is not objective reality; rather it is useful models and tools that we can use to make our lives better. And that’s OK. (0 COMMENTS)

Thanks to everyone, again, for the excellent discussion. Some selected replies to “Book Club, Part 5”: Bryan’s Comments (1) Abstract Principles vs. Concrete Judgments In earlier work, I said philosophers have often mistakenly started from general, abstract principles and deduced implausible conclusions about particular cases, when they should instead have started from the apparent facts about particular cases and generalized from there. Bryan thinks that I just made the mistake that I’ve criticized in other philosophers. I started from the general principle that you shouldn’t cause enormous suffering for the sake of minor benefits, then (with some background empirical facts) deduced the supposedly implausible conclusion that we should stop buying meat from factory farms. Two comments: There’s no difference in my intuitions depending on whether I start from general principles or concrete judgments. If I consider a particular case of someone torturing an animal, it seems obviously awful. When I read section 1 of Stuart Rachels’ paper on “Vegetarianism” (http://jamesrachels.org/stuart/veg.pdf), all the things it describes happening on factory farms immediately strike me as horrific. Here’s a video that shows some of the same things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFO34lmAoMQ. Again, they seem horrible. And lots of people have similar reactions, which is why animal activists use things like that to recruit people to their cause. I find it horrifying that there are some people who have no negative reaction to cases of severe animal cruelty. When I think about that, I feel approximately the same way that you probably feel when you hear about psychopaths who have no negative reaction to human suffering, and there’s simply no way to convince them that they shouldn’t torture other people for fun. Sometimes, you should revise a specific judgement in light of a theoretical principle. E.g., it seems to you that interacting with foreigners is bad and harmful; then some economist comes along and gives some clever theoretical arguments about how importing foreign goods helps us, bringing more immigrants into the country helps us, etc. You should not say, “Intuitively, foreign imports are bad, so the law of comparative advantage is false” or “Intuitively, immigration is bad, so one or more of the economist’s premises must be false”. To take another example, say you’ve committed the conjunction fallacy in probabilistic reasoning – you judged Linda to be more likely to be a feminist bank teller than to be a bank teller. Someone gives you a proof that this is impossible, from the axioms of probability theory. You should not respond by saying that the axioms must be wrong, since intuitively, “Linda is a feminist bank teller” sounds more likely than “Linda is a bank teller.” What is the difference between the good cases and the bad cases of revising particular judgments in light of general principles? Three thoughts: In the bad cases that I had in mind, the starting principle simply wasn’t self-evident; it was at most sort of vaguely plausible. E.g.: David Hume starts from the premise “All ideas are copies of impressions”, and winds up inferring that we have no concept of causation. In some cases, you can see that a principle would have to be known by generalizing from particular cases. E.g., “all ideas are copies of impressions.” But in other cases, you can directly see the truth of a principle, because it holds in virtue of the nature of the abstract objects that the principle is about. E.g., “7 is larger than 5”, or “suffering is pro tanto bad”. iii.  Sometimes, our concrete judgments are biased, and more abstract generalizations avoid bias and can be used to correct the bias. (See my paper “Revisionary Intuitionism”, https://philarchive.org/archive/HUERIv1.) E.g., we’re biased against foreigners, but the general principles of economics are relatively unbiased, so we can use them to overcome our bias. It is similarly plausible, given everything we know about humans, that we’re biased against other species. But we can correct that bias using general ethical principles. Bryan gives the example of building a swimming pool, and in the process causing a den of mice to “horribly suffer”. Why are the mice horribly suffering instead of just running away? I guess for some reason they can’t get away, and somehow they get tortured by the bulldozer rather than dying quickly. Apparently, we’re supposed to think that this would be fine. But, again, I think that’s obviously wrong. If I were building the pool, I would certainly take the trouble to move the mice first. No vegan would hesitate to say the same thing. None of them would answer as in Bryan’s imagined dialogue. (2) Is it like Political Authority? Bryan agrees with me about political authority being an illusion. But given what he says in his last post, I don’t understand why. Bryan writes, “the case against government pits ubiquitous concrete, particular views about the ethical treatment of humans against sweeping moral generalizations about government authority.” Why would the authority-monger start from sweeping generalizations? Why wouldn’t they just start with “Taxing Jeff Bezos is fine”? Now, why don’t I defer to other people’s political intuitions? That’s a longer story than I can detail here. A big part of it is about how people’s attitudes toward government are affected by a host of biases, which are discussed in chapter 6 of The Problem of Political Authority. There’s also some arguments in section 1.6 in the same book. There’s a strong parallel with people’s attitudes toward non-human animal species. Some of the same biases apply (e.g., status quo bias, social proof, self-interest, cognitive dissonance). Even the form of argument is the same in the two cases: In the political case, I argue by debunking the various theories that are supposed to explain what is special about the government. They turn out to be pretty terrible. In the animal ethics case, I argue by debunking the theories that are supposed to explain what is special about humans. They turn out to be pretty terrible too. (3) Is Pain Bad Because You’re Smart? BC:      “This is not supposed to be a deductive argument, so it makes no sense to call it a ‘non sequitur.’ Instead, it is a moral premise – ‘The suffering of intelligent beings is much more morally important than the suffering of less-intelligent beings.’ And this premise strikes most of us as highly intuitive. The “non sequitur” I referred to was the inference, “animals are not smart; therefore, their suffering doesn’t matter.” Of course, you could make that valid by adding the premise “if a being isn’t smart, then its suffering doesn’t matter”. In that case, I’d just say that that’s an arbitrary premise. What on earth does your intelligence have to do with how bad your suffering is? To me, that’s like saying that pain is only bad when the person in pain is able to solve differential equations. The badness of pain just doesn’t on its face have anything to do with that. Does the claim make more sense if you add a bunch of other intellectual tasks that a person could do? Bryan says that intelligence is the ability to learn. So pain is only bad if you have a lot of learning ability? Imagine putting your hand on a hot stove. Imagine the intense pain. You can just see that that is a bad experience. Now, is part of what makes it bad the fact that you are able to learn a lot of stuff in general? Again, that just seems obviously not true. Here’s a hypothetical that my former colleague David Barnett used to give. There are two people who have headaches, and you only have one aspirin (and you can’t divide it). One of those people scored higher on an IQ test. True or false: “You should give the aspirin to that person, because his pain is worse, because he’s smarter”? False. I have no idea why someone would think that. Bryan cites the permissibility of killing banthas and the impermissibility of killing Ewoks. But the issue I raised was about pain and suffering, not killing. So change it to “it’s okay to torture banthas.” All vegans would say that it is not permissible to torture banthas for minor reasons. Furthermore, I bet lots of other Star Wars fans would agree. Anecdotally, I’ve found that many people, when actually made aware of the sort of extreme cruelty that occurs on factory farms, do in fact have an intuitive reaction that that is wrong. Hardly anyone says, “Oh yeah, that sounds fine.” Other cases: Michael Vick was sent to jail for running a dog-fighting ring, and many people regarded him as a bad person for that. If someone sees you beating the crap out of your dog, or lighting your cat on fire, they’ll judge you to be a terrible person. So I don’t think it’s at all intuitive to think “animal cruelty is fine”. It’s only clever intellectuals who wind up claiming that animal cruelty is fine, because they see that they’re going to have to say that in order to justify continuing their current practices. (4) Is it Fine to Torture Babies? I don’t think it’s controversial that newborn babies are dumb. If you give them problems to solve, they’re extremely bad at it. Rats can solve a new maze a lot faster than a baby can, etc. So I don’t see why Bryan shouldn’t favor baby torture. Bryan could just alter his theory, as in this suggestion: BC:      “The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.” [emphasis Bryan’s] This, again, strikes me as arbitrary and obviously false. It’s even more implausible than the previous idea, because of two new features of this principle: (a) It makes the intrinsic badness of your current pain dependent on something in the future. So if you’re going to be intelligent in 10 years, that future development retroactively makes your current suffering bad. (b) Actually, the principle makes the intrinsic badness of your current pain dependent, not on your actual characteristics, but on what normally happens with beings like you. This is about maximally implausible. The intrinsic badness of an experience you’re having obviously does not depend on the intelligence of other beings, or anyone’s intelligence at another time. Caplan notes that this leads to a “moderately anti-abortion view”. Why “moderately”? I assume that the above principle would also apply to death, as well as suffering, right? Since fetuses will normally develop intelligence later, shouldn’t Bryan take a very strong stance against virtually all abortion?   (5) Is it Fine to Torture Retarded Humans? BC:      “Most mentally retarded humans are still much more intelligent than almost any animal…” I think that’s just false. Many animals are smarter than many retarded humans. Here are some videos showing some striking behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04 (crow solves problems using water displacement) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYMRlvPxMPU (man drops phone, beluga whale retrieves) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6XuVlcEO4 (parrot answers questions requiring abstraction) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHjDiDQqNec (squirrel gets a man to save her baby) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tauiZGIMfk (hippos save a wildebeest from crocodiles)   BC:      “In the rare cases where humans are reduced to the mental level of an animal, we routinely consider options like euthanasia…” So let’s take a case of a severely retarded human. True story: Another professor once introduced me to her severely mentally disabled sister. The sister could not talk. She just occasionally made random, inarticulate noises. She appeared less competent than a typical adult animal. It seems as if Bryan is suggesting here that it would be okay to kill such a person for trivial reasons. Is that right? And would it have been permissible for me to torture my colleague’s sister for the sake of some minor benefit for myself? Bryan’s remark about being “reduced” to the level of an animal suggests that perhaps he is thinking of people who have suffered brain damage or some other mental deterioration. So let’s suppose that happens: a person has suffered severe brain damage such that he is left with about the abilities of a normal cow. Like a cow, he’s still able to walk around, eat, and experience pleasure or pain. Would it be okay to torture this person, if doing so would get you some little temporary pleasure? Maybe Bryan would say “yes” to all these. But virtually everyone else would say “no”. (6) Is It Obvious? BC:      “While Huemer concludes that – in light of their terrible arguments – meat-eaters are desperately trying to rationalize obviously evil behavior, I have an alternative explanation.  Namely: The moral unimportance of animal welfare is so obvious to almost everyone that asking them for arguments confuses them.” You could say that. But notice how unfalsifiable Bryan’s views are. If the arguments for view X are terrible, that doesn’t count against X; instead, it just means that X is even more obviously right than the positions that have good arguments for them! We don’t have to give any justification for X, because we can say it’s just obvious. (Even if many other smart people consider it obviously false.) If someone gives counter-examples to our principle, we can always modify the principle ad hoc to exclude them. Our principle and the modifications don’t have to be plausible on their own, and there doesn’t have to be any explanation of why they would be true, because we can just say it’s a brute fact, and we can just appeal to X itself. These strategies could be used to defend any awful practice, and no one could talk you out of it. To illustrate, I turn to two hypothetical characters, Jefferson Caplan and Statist Caplan. (7) Jefferson Caplan We’re back in the slavery era. Thomas Jefferson is against slavery; Jefferson Caplan is pro-slavery. They talk about it:   TJ:       Slavery is an abomination. JC:       You own slaves! And you hang out with other slave masters, like George Washington. That shows that deep down, you really know that slavery is cool.   I don’t know what TJ says after that. But I know that JC is not helping the two of them get at ethical truth. Maybe JC will succeed in getting TJ to endorse slavery because TJ doesn’t like being called a hypocrite, he doesn’t like cognitive dissonance, etc. But he won’t induce any rational belief change, since JC isn’t providing any significant amount of relevant evidence. There are many cases where a society had some horrible practice, and some people in the society said that it was wrong but didn’t fully dissociate themselves from the practice and its practitioners – in fact, I bet that pretty much always happens. Why? I don’t know, but talking about that is not going to help us understand our actual ethical obligations. The way to philosophical truth does not start with impugning your interlocutor’s sincerity, or otherwise starting a debate about their psychology. Those things virtually never help. Let’s imagine that, contrary to JC’s wishes, they manage to avoid that trap.   TJ:       Look, you agree that white people have rights and shouldn’t be enslaved. What’s so different about blacks? JC:       Whites are smarter. TJ:       So what? How does being smarter than someone mean you get to oppress and exploit them? [“But whatever may be the degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henri Gregoire] JC:       It’s just a brute fact, with no explanation needed. TJ:       Why should anyone believe that? JC:       Intuition. I just beat one of my slaves today, and that seemed fine to me. Lots of people do it, and they don’t feel bad about it either. But it’s of course wrong to beat other white people. The best explanation is that greater racial average IQ gives us the right to beat the shit out of people of another race.   Today, Bryan Caplan doesn’t share Jefferson Caplan’s intuitions. But plenty of people in the slavery era did. (8) Statist Caplan Statist Caplan is philosopher who reasons similarly to Bryan Caplan except that he supports conventional, statist political views. Regular Caplan talks to Statist Caplan about it:   RC:      Government is violating our rights. Taxation is theft. War is mass murder. Etc. We should have anarcho-capitalism. SC:       You’re friendly with some government employees! And you certainly don’t react to veterans like mass murderers. That proves that you really know, deep down, that government is cool.   Again, I don’t think RC and SC should proceed to have a debate about RC’s psychology. I think that’s just obviously going to deteriorate the discourse and lead them away from understanding the truth about the main subject. So let’s say they avoid that trap, again.   RC:      What’s so special about the government? SC:       Democratic governments have the right to rule. RC:      Really? Why is that? SC:       Brute fact; no explanation needed. RC:      Well, why should we believe this? SC:       Intuition. It’s obviously fine to tax people’s income, throw drug users in jail, and bar Mexican migrants from crossing the border. The best explanation of all this is that democratic governments really have authority. RC:      What about a case in which four friends at a table vote to steal money from the fifth? It’s democratic, but it’s still wrong. SC:       Oh yeah, that’s because they’re not a government. The principle is that democratic governments have authority. Again, best explanation of the obvious fact that taxing people is fine, etc.   RC is never going to convince SC. SC simply has built up an impregnable belief system defense. Even if RC comes up with some counter-example to the principle about democratic authority, SC will just modify his principle to exclude that example, then justify the modified principle by appealing to his intuitions about how taxation, drug prohibition, etc., are fine. Again, Bryan Caplan does not share Statist Caplan’s political intuitions. But Statist Caplan’s intuitions are actually way more common than Bryan’s. So I don’t see how Bryan has any answer to Statist Caplan. One more exchange:   RC:      Most of the arguments for political authority are terrible. So they’re probably trying to rationalize a bias. SC:       No, that just shows how truly self-evident political authority is! It’s just so obvious that when you ask people about it, it confuses them.   Fortunately, most people do not argue like the Caplans. Even though most people tend to assume the government has authority, they can easily be brought to see that this needs an explanation. Most can see that it would be odd and unsatisfying and just false to claim that there’s some brute, self-evident principle about democratic government authority. So they don’t say that. And so you can reason with them. Likewise, most people, when confronted about the issue, see the intrinsic oddness of the idea that only the pain of smart beings matters. People other than Bryan don’t claim this as a brute, self-evident axiom, because they can see that it would need an explanation. Not everything needs an explanation, but “Pain is only bad if you’re smart” definitely needs one. Clever intellectuals, though, see that they’re not going to be able to give the explanation, but they also see that no one can logically prove that it isn’t a self-evident, fundamental axiom, so that’s what they say.   (9) Digression About Abortion Here’s something that I’ve heard a couple of times from pro-choice people: It turns out that spontaneous abortion (where the embryo dies of natural causes, usually due to failure to implant in the womb) is much more common than medically induced abortion. In fact, that’s what happens to most embryos. But pro-life activists aren’t going around worrying about all the embryos that die in this way. They’re not, e.g., campaigning for medical research to figure out how to stop it. This proves that the pro-life people are lying: they don’t really think embryos are people, and they don’t really care about the lives of the unborn. When I heard that, I thought it was terrible. I don’t find it plausible or helpful to suggest that pro-lifers don’t believe their position. And that’s not because I’m some kind of ideological pro-lifer. I’m in fact agnostic about whether and when fetuses have rights. So I have an open mind on the ethics of abortion, as much as anyone does. But the above doesn’t move me one inch toward the pro-choice position. I think it’s obvious that thinking about the above is not going to help me figure out the morality of abortion.   (10) The Caplan Alternative to Anesthetic Imagine that you’re about to go in for surgery. The anesthesiologist comes and tells you that, unfortunately, they’ve just run out of their usual pain-blocking drug. They have a plan, though. They can strap you down really tightly so you can’t move, and administer a different drug instead of the pain-blocker. This other drug will simply addle your mind so that you can’t reason clearly and your IQ will temporarily drastically decline. Of course, you’ll still feel extremely intense pain and suffering as the doctors cut you open and such, but you’ll be so stupid that the pain won’t be bad. What say you? Are you ready to proceed with the surgery?   Reader Comments (1)        What if vastly super-intelligent aliens tortured humans for mild amusement? It can even be the case that, like modern factory farming, the torture of humanity wasn’t the direct goal of those aliens, but rather just the predictable side effect (a side effect the aliens don’t care about) of achieving their goal of getting mild amusement. Good point. Btw, I discussed this in my Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, p. 7.   (2)        “A vegetarian could respond “sure, but chickens are only killing each other because they are confined in these factory farms”. And that may be true, but chickens are not humans. You would first have to prove that chickens have a right to not be constrained.”   I don’t have to prove that, because my argument was not that factory farms violate animals’ rights. The claim was that they cause a lot of suffering. You said, “But we have to inflict the suffering, because otherwise they would peck each other to death” (my paraphrase). You imagine someone saying, “That’s only because we’re confining them in tiny spaces; we could stop doing that.” You then say, “You haven’t proved that confining them is intrinsically bad.” That last remark just forgets the original point and leaves no reason why inflicting the pain would be okay. (If confining them in tiny spaces causes you to have to inflict severe pain on them, then don’t confine them.)   (3)        “Most humans like the taste of meat. The price of steak at your local grocery store should be at least some indication to the truth of this statement. It seems weird to only say this is a minor benefit.” Imagine that you heard about someone who was recently arrested for torturing and killing people. Suppose the guy explained that he did it to make money; he got paid $200 for each person that he tortured and murdered. I think it would be completely fair and not weird at all to describe this as torturing and killing “for the sake of a minor benefit.” And I bet that’s more than the amount of money most people would pay for the meat from an entire animal.   (4)        [KevinDC] “I was among those who followed the initial debate between Huemer and Caplan years ago…” Thanks, KevinDC, for your comments. All good points.   (5)        “But it turns out that taste buds are remarkably adaptable – when you make a permanent change to the way you eat, the kinds of food which appeal to you also change quickly.” My experience is the same. It was only the transition period that was difficult. After the transition, it’s been easy to remain vegan for the last few decades. I have plenty of great meals. We vegans also have lower risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.   (6)        “It’s not at all clear to me that murdering 100 cows is worse than murdering 100 mice.” I assume cows are more intelligent than mice (larger brains), so even on Bryan’s view, it’s plausible that harming cows would be worse than harming mice.   (7)        “Almost nobody is a vegan, and almost nobody feels bad about this or considers it weird in any way.” This is similar to how most human societies in history have accepted slavery, and they didn’t feel bad about that either. Most people suck.   “Whenever I discussed the issue with others, I got pretty much the same response; we pretty quickly reached a point where they admitted that my arguments were sound, but they just weren’t going to change their behavior. That’s not what I would expect from people who strongly intuited that causing suffering was wrong.”   That happens to me a lot too. This is what I would expect if your arguments were in fact sound, and the other people were immoral.   “Theory two: People are just behaving as evolutionary biology would predict.”   That’s right, most people are. Most people are selfish and have minimal moral motivation. There are many other pieces of evidence that show this. E.g., the fact that most people will electrocute an innocent person if told to do so by a man in a white lab coat. I have a post coming up on my blog about how most people are amoral (http://fakenous.net). The most plausible explanation is not that electrocuting innocent people is morally okay, nor that torturing other creatures for trivial reasons is fine.   (8)        “I don’t have evidence at hand for the following claim, but it seems very common that people solve health issues with meat-related diets…” I couldn’t address all related issues, since this was just one chapter in a book that’s meant as an introduction to philosophy in general (not an animal ethics book, or even an ethics book). That being said, if you adopt a vegan or nearly-vegan diet, I recommend taking supplements. You should take B12 supplements (alternately, there is a lot of B12 in clams and other bivalves, which are perfectly ethical to eat). I also take a calcium/vitamin D supplement, and taurine. You can find supplements for pretty much any nutrient you want.   (0 COMMENTS)

In this blog, I’ve done many posts criticizing the way our regulators inhibited an effective response to Covid-19. They discouraged mask wearing, they discouraged Covid testing, they put up all sorts of regulatory and legal hurdles that dramatically slowed vaccine development, authorization, etc. Today, our biggest problem is that only 55% of Americans have received even a single dose of a Covid vaccine. Why is there so much resistance to the vaccines? Undoubtedly there are many factors, but Matt Yglesias identifies one especially inexcusable mistake made by the FDA: I vaguely recall someone being accused of “hate speech” for accurately quoting the Bible, word for word.  I wonder if Facebook will eventually ban someone for accurately explaining the FDA’s views on vaccine safety? PS.  In April of last year, I said we under-reacted to Covid at first, but would overreact by the end of the pandemic.  It looks like my prediction is coming true: L.A. County will require masks indoors amid alarming rise in coronavirus cases It seems increasingly likely that the delta variant of Covid is so contagious that almost everyone will either get vaccinated or get Covid.  If so, let’s just get it over with as soon as possible.  Vaccinate those who want it, and let the virus run wild among the remainder. (0 COMMENTS)

On July 8, I expressed my shock at co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s statement that it would be morally permissible for John, whose daughter is dying from cancer, to hack into Bill Gates’s bank account and steal the money to finance the medical treatment. I won’t repeat my argument here. If you want to know it, click on the link in this paragraph. On July 14, Bryan responded to my July 8 post. He led by saying: My general position, to repeat, is that we are morally obliged to respect libertarian rights unless the consequences of doing so are very bad. So far, so good. Bryan and I agree. Then Bryan speculates about where I think he’s gone wrong. I’m not sure why he speculates because I had already said where I think he’s gone wrong, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough, so let’s examine his speculations. Bryan writes: 1. He might think that we are morally obliged to respect libertarian rights regardless of the consequences.  This seems like a crazy view.  You shouldn’t steal a dime to save the world?  Come on. No, I don’t think that. Again we agree. The case we were discussing had literally nothing to do with saving the world. Next, Bryan writes: 2. He might think that the consequences of stealing from Bill Gates to save your child’s life are actually very bad. He’s getting warmer. He then walks through his reasoning: The original hypothetical only posited a single person who had to either steal from Gates or watch their child die.  Per Huemer’s general approach, I just accepted the hypothetical and ran with it.  And the consequences of this one hypothetical individual stealing do indeed seem very good on net. Here’s where we part a little. Notice that Bryan writes “the consequences of this one hypothetical stealing.” But he’s not discussing “the consequences.” He’s discussing one consequence. What other consequence is he leaving out? That if stealing is said to be alright in this case, people will come to think that it’s alright in many such cases. Bryan, though, seems aware of that issue, as evidenced by what he writes next: David is right that lots of people are in similar or worse positions than the parent of the child with cancer.  Wouldn’t the principle that all of them are are morally entitled to steal from Gates lead to bad consequences (i.e., destroying incentives to produce wealth, plus general chaos)?  No, because almost none of these desperate people are in a position to steal anything notable from Gates.  If these desperate people said, “I’m hungry” and you told them, “Fortunately, it’s morally fine to steal money from Bill Gates,” they would understandably be puzzled.  “And how am I supposed to do that?!” would be the obvious reaction.  (Some could pirate Microsoft software, I guess, but very few could make much money off of this). People, especially my wife, often tell me that I often take things too literally. And they’re right. Here’s a rare case, though, where I didn’t take things literally enough. I thought that if Bryan thinks it’s alright to steal thousands of dollars from Bill Gates to finance one’s daughter’s medical treatment that “has a reasonably high chance of saving her life,” then surely Bryan would think that it’s alright to steal a thousand dollars from Bill Gates when doing so gives a parent’s starving child in India or Haiti an even higher probability of saving her life. That’s where I wasn’t literal enough. For Bryan it matters that the person who is stealing has the technical expertise to do so. I think this way of thinking is bizarre. The person for whom it’s alright to steal is the person who has a fairly high amount of human capital. But wouldn’t it then make sense for that person to use his technical expertise to make money the old-fashioned way: by earning it? Bryan ends the discussion of theft by saying: You could change the hypothetical so that all of the poor people are in a position to steal from Gates, leaving societal devastation in their wake.  Then, of course, I’d revert to my anti-stealing default. So he and I are agreed that this massive theft by all the poor is wrong. Then I would ask him the following question: How little wealth would Bill Gates have to lose from theft by many (not all) poor people so that Bryan would say it’s right? I know that in his view a few thousand dollars is alright. How about a million? A hundred million? A billion? One of the benefits of a comments section is that commenters often have good ideas. A commenter on my July 8 post, Mark Young, wrote: I agree with Caplan, but with a caveat that he might also accept — and which, I hope, most others here would accept as well. Caplan says that the rights violation is OK if the benefit greatly exceeds the cost. I take that to mean that it’s not morally wrong to (for example) break into a cabin if you are lost in the woods in a blizzard. Saving your own life is a greater benefit than the cost to the cabin owner. (I hope you all agree with that.) But the moral calculus does not end with you breaking into the cabin. Once the emergency has passed you are morally obliged to make good the damage you’ve done. You must reimburse the cabin owner for the breakage and for any other consequential damages (say if the cabin becomes water damaged when a sudden thaw lets meltwater in thru the window you broke). It’d be nice if you went beyond that (maybe treat them to a meal at their fave restaurant), but reimburse the damages for sure. So long as Caplan agrees with that, then I’m with him. The person who stole the money from Bill Gates is required to repay the amount along with any consequential damages (the $15.00 bank charge for a bounced cheque, say). Each of the 100 million starving Indians would have to pay Bill back as soon as they can, along with extra money to cover any damages the temporary loss of funds caused him. (Again, assuming that each stole from Bill for a very good reason (“benefits vastly exceed the costs”) and there was no alternative that wasn’t equally as bad.) I agree. Does Bryan? Postscript: In the first comment on Bryan’s response to me, our co-blogger Scott Sumner references one of my favorite movies of all time: Recall the famous Coke machine joke in Dr. Strangelove. Here’s the scene. Notice what Colonel Bat Guano says: “You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.” My sense is that the Coca-Cola company would have no problem with having some change stolen from it to save the world. Call it a hunch.   (0 COMMENTS)

In a 2015 discussion at Liberty Matters, I commented on Anthony de Jasay’s work under the title “tricks or treats”. Looking back, it seems to me that I could have used the metaphorical distinction of tricks and treats to point out more clearly what unites and what separates the libertarianism of James M. Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay: Both thought of life in a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)[i] society as a “treat,” while issuing libertarian warnings against the “tricks” of government expansion in these societies.[ii] But Jasay classified contractarian arguments as “theoretical tricks” that would in fact contribute to eroding the “practical treats” of limited government, while Buchanan subscribed to contractarianism as a “theoretical treat” that would help to avoid the “tricks” that unleash government in practice. Their basic libertarian consent on many policy issues notwithstanding, Buchanan and Jasay were separated by their contractarian and anti-contractarian “opinions,” respectively. Since “it is on opinion only that government is founded”[iii] and since “opinions of legitimacy” are founded not only on tradition but also on supportive theoretical narratives, it potentially matters whether a contractarian or an anti-contractarian theoretical narrative is invoked in forming opinions concerning the (il-)legitimacy of state action. Impressed by the American Federalist tradition of constitutional democracy, Buchanan sought to provide “logical foundations of constitutional democracy”.[iv] But he did not only regard his preferred contractarian justification of constitutional democracy as normatively compelling;[v] he also tacitly assumed that contractarianism, to the extent that it would as a matter of fact be incorporated into prevailing political opinion, would contribute to the political aim of limiting the expansion of discretionary powers of democratic government. In Jasay’s eyes, Buchanan’s contractarian logic is flawed since “conceptual unanimity of all citizens” necessarily rests on contrary to fact assumptions. Coercion of concrete individuals does not become less real if a fictitious “representative” individual or the collectivity of all individuals in fictitious “conceptual unanimity” could conceivably “authorize” it. Beyond this conventional (“Hueman”) criticism, for Jasay the empirical psychology tacitly underlying Buchanan’s contractarianism seems precarious: persuading citizens that the time-honored maxim of “volenti non fit iniuria”[vi] can apply to government coercion has the effects of a tranquilizer that makes them feel good by putting their anti-coercive instincts to rest. Though he shares Buchanan’s libertarian end of controlling and restricting the sphere of state action, Jasay does not think that propagating contractarianism is conducive to that end.[vii] Buchanan is a reluctant moral archist who believes that fundamental government coercion can be justified by the consent of the governed while Jasay is a moral anarchist in that he believes that government coercion cannot be justified by the voluntary consent of the governed. Contrary to political anarchists, Jasay acknowledges that anarchical violence against a particular state order will merely give rise to another coercive state order rather than to a situation with no state at all. Contrary to moral archists Jasay thinks that denying the moral legitimacy of the state is morally and politically a better defense of liberty than contractarianism. In sum, in Jasay’s eyes the fact that after the state has been invented it will not go away, is an empirical rather than an independent consent-based normative reason for acquiescence with the political status quo. In particular, in the case of states in WEIRD societies, violence against the state would lead in all likelihood to worse states. Still, acquiescence with what we cannot prevent, is different from endorsing a rule of recognition[viii] that ratifies what is unavoidable as if it were a normatively legitimate result of consent. To the extent that the latter becomes part of the rule of recognition of a society it operates in truth as a rule of submission: as an ideological “false belief” that facilitates the growth of the discretionary powers of the state rather than hindering it. Referring to state action as the result of “coercion” rather than of a “conceptual contract” may not only be theoretically but also practically preferable.       [i] See Joseph Henrichs. The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. London: Allen Lane. 2020. [ii] The similarities of the basic logic of H. Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan. The Power to Tax. Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1980 (reprinted as volume 9 of The Collected Works of James Buchanan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999 ff.) and Anthony de Jasay. The State. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. (reprinted as Anthony de Jasay. The State. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1980) are quite striking. [iii] See David Hume, David. Essays. Moral, Political and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1985, essay iv. [iv] As the subtitle of the “Calculus” runs; see James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent – The logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962 (reprinted as volume 3 of The Collected Works of James Buchanan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999 ff.) [v] Even where he spoke of “the limits of liberty” the dual problem of the role of government was always center stage as well; see Buchanan, James M. The Limits of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 (reprinted as volume 7 of The Collected Works of James Buchanan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999 ff.) [vi] “One cannot be wronged by what one has ratified by one’s own voluntary assent” [vii] Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The Limits of State Action.” Liberty Fund. Accessed April 16, 2021. https://about.libertyfund.org/books/the-limits-of-state-action/ is discussed in “liberty matters” ####. [viii] In the sense of Herbert L. A. Hart. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hartmut Kliemt is a retired professor of philosophy and economics of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and guest professor for behavioral and institutional economics, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany. (0 COMMENTS)

For several decades until 1825, the British government forbade the exportation of some industrial machinery in order to prevent foreign textile manufacturers from competing with domestic manufacturers. It also tried to prevent the emigration of specialized artisans working on these machines. (See David J. Jeremy, “Damning the Flood: British Government Efforts to Check the Outflow of Technicians and Machinery, 1780-1843,” Business History Review, 51:1, 1-34.) No national security reasons were apparently involved at that episode, but Donald Trump or Joe Biden would have had no problem adding them to their protectionist agenda. Forbidding exports is protectionism as much as preventing imports. (Logically, however, a coherent conservative nationalist would want to keep “our national resources” at “our” service and should prefer export protectionism to import protectionism: see my Regulation piece “Logic, Economics, and Protectionist Nationalists.”)  Walking in Trump’s footsteps, Biden is trying to prevent exports of machinery to China, and from a foreign country at that (Stu Woo and Yang Jie, “China Wants a Chip Machine From the Dutch. The U.S. Said No,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2021): Some of the tech industry’s most important machines are made next to corn fields in the Netherlands. The U.S. government is trying to make sure they don’t end up in China. Beijing has been pressuring the Dutch government to allow its companies to buy ASML Holding NV’s marquee product: a machine called an extreme ultraviolet lithography system that is essential to making advanced microprocessors. The one-of-a-kind, 180-ton machines are used by companies including Intel Corp., South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and leading Apple Inc. supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make the chips in everything from cutting-edge smartphones and 5G cellular equipment to computers used for artificial intelligence. China wants the $150-million machines for domestic chip makers, so smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese tech companies can be less reliant on foreign suppliers. … The stance is a holdover from the Trump White House, which first identified the strategic value of the machine and reached out to Dutch officials. In order to understand the world, it is useful to note the three misleading terms in the WSJ’s 12-word title. What the title means to say is that some Chinese companies (not “China”) want machines from a Dutch company (not “the Dutch”) and that the US government (not “the U.S.”) is trying to prevent the sale. These companies are associations of Chinese, Dutch, and other shareholders, including American ones. It is true, of course, that the Chinese government has more power to submit Chinese companies than, at least thus far, the American and Dutch governments have at bulling nominally free enterprises. Chinese companies are more under the yoke of the government than Dutch or American ones. It is also true that the necessary briefness of a news title may justify the shortcuts, although they support biased linguistic usage. The story itself illustrates how illusory is the belief that forbidding a Western company to sell equipment to Chinese companies will help protect national security. First, the incapacity of the Chinese government and its cronies to manufacture a product equivalent to that of a rather obscure Dutch company—the WSJ says that Chinese manufacturers are a decade behind ASML’s machines—shows that a socialist economy cannot be as efficient as a capitalist one. By the time Chinese companies have benefited from their imported machines, there is a high probability that capitalist producers will still be 10 years ahead. Second, trying to make capitalist companies as subservient to their governments as socialist ones will, in time, make the former as entrepreneurially and technologically handicapped as the latter. Interestingly Peter Navarro, the former trade czar of the Trump administration, opposed the use of national security arguments against free trade in his 1984 book The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America (John Wiley & Sons, p. 82). That was before he allied with special interests to steal America. At any rate, in case of doubt, our own governments should privilege our own freedom to trade with whom wants to trade with us. (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Michael Easter talks about his book The Comfort Crisis with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Easter thinks modern life is too easy, too comfortable. To be healthy, he says, we need to move out of our comfort zones and every once in a while try to do something, especially something physically demanding, that we didn’t think was possible. Easter discusses rising levels of anxiety and depression in the West and why taking on challenges can be part of the solution. (0 COMMENTS)

Journalist and author Michael Easter talks about his book The Comfort Crisis with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Easter thinks modern life is too easy, too comfortable. To be healthy, he says, we need to move out of our comfort zones and every once in a while try to do something, especially something physically demanding, that we didn’t think […] The post Michael Easter on the Comfort Crisis appeared first on Econlib.

A spokeswoman for the Florida governor’s office said Norwegian’s stance discriminated against children and individuals who can’t be vaccinated, and noted the state’s legal efforts against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s sailing restrictions and protocols. “Apparently Norwegian prefers the shackles of the CDC to the freedom offered by Florida,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “This administration will not tolerate such widespread discrimination.” This is from Dave Sebastian, “Cruise Line Sues on Vaccine Proof,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2021 (print edition). You wouldn’t know it from the Florida governor’s spokeswoman’s quote, but Norwegian Cruise Lines is actually suing for freedom of association, and it is the governor and Florida’s surgeon general Scott Rivkees who are trying to take away this business’s freedom to decide which customers it will have. It’s actually a little more complicated. The spokeswoman is right that the CDC is trying to shackle the cruise line. So is the Florida government; it’s just that the shackles are different, as the news story makes clear. The Florida government is playing a game of chicken with the CDC, with Norwegian Cruise Line as the innocent pedestrian at whom both sides are aiming. I’ve written about this earlier here and here.   (0 COMMENTS)