Well, only the more interesting ones among the latest (caveat emptor: mileage of “interesting” may vary):

• “1 out of every 21 black men can expect to be murdered, a death rate double that of American servicemen in WWII” http://bit.ly/18NjADX 
• Really? Close to half of all Indians are racists? http://wp.me/Pd52p-B0 
• Twitter externality: 140 char limit = serosly fcking up our grammr skills
• Countries like Chad, Afghanistan & Liberia have maternal mortality rates higher than Sweden 250 years ago. http://wp.me/Pd52p-BV 
• In 1900 50% of US girls aged 5-19 were in school. Today, less girls in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan etc. are in school http://wp.me/Pd52p-Ea 
• There’s a liberty av. in every dictatorship & a street named after a tyrant in every democr. Still, remembering awful past > mocking hope.
• They all think of themselves as most compassionate & at the same time least arrogant. Cognitive dissonance anyone? pic.twitter.com/bk0VeB9gI3
• Those damn liberals, always trying to implement stick control: pic.twitter.com/V71ptC1y85
• “The world cld eliminate extreme poverty 4 abt $45 billion/year or +- the amount we spent on movie tickets annually” http://nyti.ms/188cCcz 

Follow me here.

women in Turkey, 1934

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In 1934, women in Turkey could vote in national elections, unlike in France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland… Last year,

Doğan News Agency and Hurriyet Daily News reported that Turkish Prosecutor Veli San acknowledged that over the past 9 years sex crimes in Turkey have increased 400 percent, with 32,988 open cases in 2011 as compared to 8,146 in 2002. Previously Today’s Zaman had reported that the leading cause of death for women ages 15-44 is gender-based violence. (source)

More posts in this series here. A very similar post is here.

anti-japanese war propaganda, with a mixed message

Indiscriminate targeting of the Japanese during WWII was apparently OK, but well-meaning people thought there was a risk that some of the Chinese in the US would be mistaken for Japanese. Hence this:

1941 Time Magazine infoblurb showing how to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese (with racist overtones)

Not that the Chinese were generally better treated in the US. Anti-Asian sentiment in the US and elsewhere dates from well before WWII. For example, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a ban on Chinese immigration that lasted until 1943:

the chinese must go

The Chinese must go, because we don’t need them anymore; technology will replace them

The original Yellow Peril rhetoric focused on the Chinese, not the Japanese. Chinese immigration into the US – and other Western countries as well – was important in the 19th century. The term refers to skin color and the fear that the mass immigration threatened white wages and standards of living and that the immigrants would eventually take over and destroy western civilization. The notion continued to have some currency until late in the 20th century, when it became associated with fears of Chinese overpopulation.

Satirical cartoon depicting anti-Chinese “native born citizens” (Irish, German, Italian and black) hanging a Chinese immigrant, 1880s

Artist George Keller illustrates tension between a white laborer and a Chinese immigrant. From The First Blow at the Chinese Question (1877)

“Hands off, gentlemen! America means fair play for all men”.

And did they need protection. Here’s the story of the Denver riot of 1880:

Denver had a section of town, populated by Chinese laborers, known as “Hop Alley”. The name was in reference to the widespread use of opium amongst the “Celestials” as some people referred to the Chinese at that time. A group of railroad laborers entered a bar in the area and confronted two Chinese men playing pool, hit one of them with a cue stick, and was promptly shot at by the other pool player. He missed, but word quickly spread that a Chinaman had killed a white man. A large crowd gathered with the intent to destroy the Chinese, along with all their possessions. (source)

Denver riot of 1880

Another example is the Asiatic Exclusion League, an organization formed in the early twentieth century in the United States and Canada that aimed to prevent immigration of people of Asian origin. In 1907, riots erupted in Vancouver when League members besieged Chinatown. Shouting racist slogans, as many as 10,000 people marched into Chinatown, vandalizing and causing thousands of dollars worth of damage. A small Kristallnacht. The mob then rampaged through Japantown, where they were confronted by residents armed with clubs and bottles with which they fought back (source).

Here’s a print from Mexico about the “terrible diseases of the Orient”, from 1932:

And here’s one from New Zealand:

Here’s another fine illustration betraying prejudice:

Sentiments like these have become rare nowadays, but haven’t totally disappeared. Here’s an Australian job ad:

More collections of images are here.

Is poverty a lack of basic resources, or instead the unequal distribution of resources? Is it the absolute income or wealth of people that matters, or the fact that other people are richer and can afford more luxuries? Intuitively, one would go with the former of those options: people are poor when they are starving or homeless or when they lack some other basic necessity. People can have enough of all basic necessities and still be a lot worse of than some group of ultra-rich. One the other hand, what counts as a basic necessity is not always obvious, and people may form their ideas about necessities in light of the lifestyle of the average member of their society at the current moment in history.

This is another way of expressing the difference between absolute and relative poverty. In the US, it’s common to defend and use an absolute definition of poverty (as does the World Bank), whereas in Europe the focus is on relative poverty. The difference is an important one, because the use of one or the other definition of poverty determines who counts as poor or not. Hence, it also determines who gets government assistance.

Now, something strange is going on here. Intuitively most people favor an absolute definition of poverty – that’s what my own intuition and an unscientific sample of friends tells me –  and yet, if you ask people what one needs to get by in life, the amounts they give you are far above commonly used absolute poverty thresholds. In fact, these amounts are closer to median income. And as median income rises, the amounts supposedly necessary in order to get by also rise. This tells us that people actually use a relative notion of poverty. And this is true even for the country that is supposedly most naturally in favor of an absolute notion of poverty, namely the US:

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I made a similar point here. More posts in this series are here.

Famished Chinese child dying in a gutter, by George Silk 1946

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by George Silk 1946

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These images are not from the more infamous famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward.

George Silk was a LIFE Magazine staffer, working for them 30 years. He extensively covered many aspects of the second world war, at one point being even captured by the Germans, and then fortunately escaping. He was also the first photographer to document Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Immediately after the war, he was in China recording the poor social conditions and the lack of resources and its devastating effects on the Chinese populace. (source)

More iconic images of human rights violations. More about famine.

Incredible.

On average, the shorter your first name, the more you will earn. In fact, the data show each extra letter “costs” you about $3,600 in annual salary. (source)

Online job matching site TheLadders has six million members … and a lot of salary data. For Mothers’ Day, the company decided to sort and analyze its information to see whether what our parents call us impacts our earning potential. (source)

More, and I think more serious posts in this series are here.

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If you want to fight for lower tax rates, don’t say it’s because you want more economic growth. Say what you really mean.

Here are the links:

• “Streets and Windows” in the Apple iBookstore/iTunes, for iPad/iPhone (free)
• “Portraits and Profiles” in the Apple iBookstore/iTunes, for iPad/iPhone (free)
• People who use other devices for reading ebooks can go here and here respectively (also free, but before downloading you only get to preview part of the books); Kindle users can go here and here respectively
• If you have a Paypal account and wish to pay through that channel, you can go here and here respectively ($1 because Paypal doesn’t allow free stuff…; also no preview)

Hardcopy versions are also available from Blurb, but those are obviously not for free. Actually they are quite expensive but the finishing is superb: glossy and heavy paper, excellent binding etc.

• “Streets and Windows” (hardcover) in the Blurb store (€63,23)
• “Portraits and Profiles” (hardcover) in the Blurb store (€55,97)

(Again, before downloading/buying you only get to preview part of the books).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them.

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One can, to some extent, understand – but not condone! – men who approve of domestic violence. After all, they may have good self-interested reasons to engage in it (power is useful). However, the level of female acquiescence is just baffling:

On average, 29 percent of women in countries with data concurred that wife beating was justified for arguing with the husband, 25 percent for refusing to have sex, and 21 percent for burning food. In Guinea, 60 percent of women found it permissible to be beaten for refusing to have sex with their spouses. In Ethiopia, 81 percent of women say that it is justified for a husband to beat his wife for at least one of the reasons listed in the Demographic and Health Surveys; 61 percent reported violence to be appropriate for burning food and 59 percent for arguing with their husbands. (source, source)

More about domestic violence. More posts in this series.

However, the defining feature of humanity, in my view at least, is missing from the plaques: what are human rights? Hence I’ve made some revisions. If someone wants to send them to ET, feel free. I’m sure he’ll understand. Perhaps some terrestrials could also benefit. I’m looking at you, Assad.

Human Rights Explained to Extraterrestrials

“The Bombardment of Phnom-Penh,” by Christine Engler 1974. Survivors sift through rubble after the Khmer Rouge bomb Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Under the Pol Pot Regime, the Khmer Rouge are laying siege to the city, attacking the two million refugees who have gathered there.

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More iconic images of human rights violations.

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There are different types of speech, and therefore also different types of free speech. The point I want to make here is that different types of free speech require different justifications. It’s a common error to reject some kinds of free speech because they seem unacceptable from the point of view of justificatory theories that are useful only for other types of free speech.

What does that mean, different types of speech? We can have different goals when we speak: we can try to persuade, to signal our allegiance or identity, to harm, to ostracize, to insult, to express emotions, to promise or to enter into a contract, to state facts, to name something, to order someone, etc.

Each purpose of speech requires a separate justification of free speech, and some purposes may be very hard to justify at all, in which case a limit on freedom of speech may be necessary. However, much talk about limits springs from a logical error. It’s important not to try to use a justification for one type of free speech in order to examine the justification of another type. This may result in the unwarranted conclusion that some type of free speech is not justifiable and that it can therefore be limited, whereas in reality we just use the wrong justification.

Take one type of speech: persuasion. Free persuasion is usually justified on the basis of the marketplace of ideas. In a nutshell: people should be allowed to try to persuade each other freely, because this process of free persuasion will improve the quality of opinions.

Now take another type of speech, namely emotive speech. Examples of emotive speech are “fuck you” (expressing rejection or disgust), “fuck” (expressing disappointment), “shit”, “motherfucker” etc. Such expletives, and emotive speech in general, are often viewed as completely lacking in merit and therefore unworthy of protection. US First Amendment jurisprudence is a case in point. The Supreme Court labels a lot of emotive speech as no-value or low-value speech and has no problem with restrictions of it. (See also here). Speech lacks value, according to the Supreme Court, if it’s no essential part of the exposition of ideas and doesn’t bring us closer to the truth. Any slight benefit it may have is outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

However, this means focussing on persuasion and the truth seeking purpose of speech, and using the justification of this type of speech in order to reject another type of speech. If, on the other hand, you believe that speech also has an emotional purpose, you would regard expletives as more valuable and more worthy of free speech protection.

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The distinction between low or no-value speech on the one hand and high value speech on the other hand, whatever its merits (and those are not obvious), points us towards a further remark regarding the distinction between types of speech and between types of justifications. Those distinctions aren’t clear-cut: even people who express themselves merely because of signaling needs can be justified to do so because of the value of the marketplace of ideas. Although they don’t want to persuade, the fact that they merely express an opinion without arguing for it is valuable in the marketplace of ideas because it can convince others of the lack of real value of their opinions. Likewise, an order may indicate that persuasion has failed, and this in turn may indicate the relative weakness of an opinion.

More posts in this series are here.

“worshipping their god, hate”

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“Here, kids, I have some candy for you. But you both have to come with me…”, suggestion of blood libel

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(source, read the story about Dreyfus here)

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More about the link between disgust and human rights. More – and more substantial – posts in this series.

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More serious stuff about sampling errors here, here and here. The monte carlo method is explained here. More statistical jokes.

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More data on poverty in India, China and Africa

by Ho Van Tay, 1979, who was led to the camp by the smell of decomposing bodies and discovered decapitated victims still shackled to iron beds. S21 was the notorious Security Prison 21, in the center of Phnom Penh

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More on the Khmer Rouge. More iconic images of human rights violations.

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Actually, he’s a few days late: May 3rd is the official press freedom day. More on Putin. More human rights ads.

This photo’s subjects, George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer, were two strangers, and a drunk Mendonsa – on a date with his future wife Rita at the time – noticed Zimmer in her nurse’s uniform, grabbed her and kissed her forcefully without her consent. A closer look at the image in question shows corroborating details that become stomach-turning when properly viewed: the smirks on the faces of the sailors in the background; the firm grasp around the physically smaller woman in his arms such that she could not escape if she tried; the woman’s clenched fist and limp body.

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Here’s story brimming with irony:

An Air Force officer who led the branch’s sexual assault prevention unit been arrested for allegedly committing an act of sexual assault. Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski is accused of drunkenly approaching a woman in a parking lot in Virginia and groping her. The woman fought back, and Krusinski’s mugshot appears to show cuts and bruises on his face. The news came on the eve of a new Pentagon report showing the epidemic of sexual assault among servicemembers is continuing to rise. There was a 6 percent increase in reports of sexual assaults in the military in fiscal year 2012 compared to the previous year. The number of people who anonymously said they were sexually assaulted, but never reported the attack, rose dramatically from 19,000 in fiscal year 2011 to 26,000 the following year. (source, source)

More on rape. More ironic human rights violations.

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More political graffiti.

a scene from Michael Crichton’s “Coma” (1978)

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Of all human rights, the right to life is probably the least controversial. It’s almost universally accepted and it’s supposed to have absolute or quasi-absolute power: most of us have a hard time accepting or even imagining justifiable limitations of this right. Hence, the question of the justification of the right to life seems relatively uninteresting. Compared to some other rights, it’s clear why we need it: we all want to live, or at least decide for ourselves whether or not we want to live.

If, for instance, you ask people why we need the right to free speech, or why violating this right is wrong, then they’ll have a much harder time coming up with a solid answer (even though there are solid answers). They’ll also assume that they would somehow be able to live without it. Life would perhaps not be pleasant or fulfilling, but it would go on. Not so without the right to life.

So why talk about the justification of the right to life? Well, because on closer inspection things aren’t so simple. If you ask yourself why killing is wrong, the answer is surprisingly difficult. The best attempt to answer the question has some unappealing results. We can argue that killing is wrong because living allows you to do things, be someone, become someone etc. (See here for instance). It’s because life is this fundamental prerequisite and this necessary condition for everything else that a right to life is basic, quasi-absolute and easy to justify in the minds of most people. It’s a justification without which there are no other justifications. It’s axiomatic. You can’t not take it for granted.

But if killing is wrong not because it takes away a life – living in itself is not valuable – but because it takes away the ability to act and be, then it’s OK to kill off people in an irreversible coma, harvest their organs etc. The harm imposed by killing can’t be the mere fact that life stops; a person whose life is ended by way of killing can’t experience the harm of absence of life. This person can’t experience anything. Adead person can no longer have any experiences, and taking away people’s ability to experience, in other words their ability to do things and to be someone, is indeed an imposition of harm. A special harm, yes, but a harm nonetheless. Contrary to the usual type of harm, this harm does not imply the experience of harm – how can it? – but rather the harm of absence of experience.

So it’s the imposition of complete and irreversible disability – the complete and final lack of the ability to do things and be someone – that is at stake, that makes killing wrong, and that justifies a right to life. Not the absence or the taking of life as such: the mere absence of life is not a harm. The disability has to be irreversible, because anaesthesia for example has the same disabling effect, but in a reversible manner. That is why killing the anesthetized and harvesting their organs is still wrong.

scene from Tarantino’s “Kill Bill”

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This answer to the question of the wrongness of killing is discomforting. Many of us would shudder at the conclusion that killing off people in an irreversible coma is right because it doesn’t mean imposing harm (the harm – complete and irreversible disability – has already been done). It doesn’t sound right. We sense that we would still impose a harm. But which harm? It can’t be a harm that they can experience, given that they can’t experience anything (so we’re not talking about cases of locked-in syndrome here). Hence, irreversible coma is the same harm as death. Killing people in an irreversible coma does not mean imposing extra harm. It’s not the loss of anything valuable that hasn’t been lost already by the event of the irreversible coma.

And yet, this still sounds unsatisfactory. Many of us would try to keep comatose people alive. After all, what looks like irreversibility may not be so in the future. But even if irreversibility is a certainty, we still wouldn’t be OK with pulling the plug. I’m afraid I have no solution. I’m stuck. And the absence of a solution complicates the justification of the right to life: if killing off irreversibly comatose people is not wrong, then the right to life loses part of its meaning.

More posts in this series are here.

ca. 1913 — The information card on Joseph Stalin, from the files of the Tsarist secret police in St. Petersburg. — Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

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It seems so obvious that we must punish criminals that we hardly think about the reasons why. And then when we do think about some of the possible reasons, we find that they are of dubious quality, and we start to wonder whether criminal punishment can be justified at all.

1. Retribution

The first reason that springs to mind is retribution: we impose punishment – i.e. pain, suffering or unpleasant consequences – because that is what criminals deserve. Punishment is a deserved and proportionate “repayment” for the crime that has been done. And indeed, the fact that wrongdoers deserve some form of proportionate punishment or unpleasantness seems to be a deep-seated intuition. But if we want to use this notion of retribution as a justification of criminal punishment, we need to define what exactly it is that a particular criminal deserves. Because if it turns out that we can’t decide, in a non-arbitrary way, what it is that a criminal deserves, then it’s useless to place desert and proportional repayment at the heart of the justification of criminal punishment.

And we can’t decide. We can’t determine which punishment fits which crime. Retribution naturally tends towards lex talionis (an eye for an eye). For two reasons: first because that is the easy answer to the question of deserved punishment, and second because of the origins of the word “retribution” (retribuere in Latin means to restore, to give back). However, the brutality of lex talionis is no longer acceptable these days, which is why retribution theorists have tried to find another, less brutal way of determining the deserved punishment. Proportionality is then considered to be a just retributive principle: the punishment must not be equal to the crime, but the gravity of the punishment must be proportional to the severity of the crime; more serious crimes should entail more severe punishments.

Proportionality, like the element of desert in the basic structure of retribution, is hard to argue with, but it’s also useless. It can justify any type of punishment because it doesn’t provide a non-arbitrary starting point or end point of severity. Hence, it fails to answer the basic question raised by retribution: which punishment fits which crime? If this question can’t be answered, then retribution can’t be a justification of criminal punishment.

True, retribution can still be used negatively: some punishments clearly don’t fit the crime, and are not deserved. A $10 dollar fine for a murder, or execution for shoplifting are examples. But a theory of punishment that can only say which punishment are not justifiable is clearly not a complete justification of criminal punishment. After all, such a theory doesn’t exclude the possibility that all punishments are not justifiable.

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2. Deterrence

With retribution out of the way, we can now consider an alternative justification of criminal punishment. We may decide to punish criminals because in doing so we instill fear in other – potential – criminals and therefore deter future crime. Punishment is then a means to protect society against crime. It’s a stop sign. And, like retribution, this seems to be, at first sight at least, a convincing justification. Like it is intuitively correct that a criminal deserves some kind of punishment, it is also intuitively convincing that people, when faced with the risk of punishment, will have a strong incentive to abstain from crime.

However, we again see that the initial appeal of this justification doesn’t survive closer scrutiny. First, there’s a lack of conclusive empirical evidence for the existence of a deterrent effect. Even the strongest possible punishment – death – doesn’t seem to deter. Part of the reason for this is the fact that crime often isn’t a rational calculation of risks, costs and benefits. And when it is, low conviction rates may have more weight in the criminals’ calculations than the severity or unpleasantness of unlikely punishments.

Another reason why deterrence cannot justify criminal punishment is its inherent immorality: to deter is to use people as means to reduce crime, and that kind of instrumentalization is morally unacceptable.

Buster Keaton in jail

3. Incapacitation

If we can’t deter, maybe we can incapacitate, and justify criminal punishment on that basis. Incapacitating a criminal allows us to protect society without instrumentalizing the criminal (we don’t use the criminal and his punishment as a fear-instilling mechanism; we simply keep the criminal away from his or her future victims).

Again, being able to stop criminals from reoffending is intuitively appealing, but it isn’t enough to justify a system of criminal punishment. If we should decide that incapacitation justifies criminal punishment, we’re still left with the task of deciding the type of criminal punishment it actually justifies. Which actions are necessary and just forms of incapacitation? Like retribution or proportionality, incapacitation leaves open a very wide array of possible punishments: cutting off the hands of thieves, house arrest, ostracism, banishment, imprisonment, chemical castration, etc. A theory that can’t help us to choose among those options can’t possibly be a complete justification of criminal punishment. Ideally, we don’t want a justification of punishment that allows all or most types of punishment. And again, the fact that some forms of incapacitation are clearly not acceptable isn’t ground enough for a justification based on incapacitation, like the fact that some punishments are clearly not deserved isn’t ground enough for a justification based on retribution.

4. Symbolic confirmation of social rules

Perhaps a more promising justification of criminal punishment is based on the social role of punishment. When we punish criminals for their crimes, we may not intend to give them what they deserve, incapacitate them or deter others; we may instead engage in a bit of theater. Which, by the way, is also one of the reasons for having public trials. The public condemnation of wrong actions is a symbolic confirmation of social rules, and this confirmation has an educational function. It teaches people the values and norms of society, in the hope that they internalize these values and norms through repeated public and symbolic confirmation. Furthermore, the punishment of crimes affirms not just certain values and norms (e.g. don’t steal or murder) but the necessity of peaceful social cooperation and therefore the necessity of society itself.

Like desert, protection, deterrence and incapacitation, these are all fine objectives. However, a justification of criminal punishment based on its symbolic role faces the criticism of instrumentalization, as in the case of deterrence. Especially when the stated objectives – affirmation of norms and society – can be reached through other means.

5. Signaling

And the same is true for the justification of punishment based on the need for signaling. Society, and especially the representatives of society, need to show that they care about victims of crime. However, they don’t have to do so at the expense of criminals. Still less acceptable is the use of punishment as a signal of authority. Punishment can’t be justified when it is merely a manifestation of power by those in charge.

revenge of the creature, UK movie poster, 1955

6. Healing and pacification

Punishment can be justified as therapy for the victims of crime, their relatives and friends, and even society as a whole. It’s a fact that punishment gives some satisfaction to victims, and responds to their sense of justice. It can also channel anger and revenge away from the more disturbing forms of those emotions, thereby preventing street justice and vigilantism. However, there’s a disturbing circularity to this justification: because people expect punishment, we should administer it, but because we administer it people continue to expect it. Also, when trying to channel emotions such as anger and revenge into socially acceptable forms we unconsciously promote them, whereas maybe we should try to limit those emotions as much as we can.

7. Rehabilitation

The rehabilitation of the criminal in the sense of his or her moral regeneration is no longer a fashionable justification of punishment. For several reasons: it’s expensive, and it upsets our sense of equal justice (successful rehabilitation can imply a radically shorter sentence). Also, some psychiatric excesses have been successfully ridiculed in movies such as A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In any case, the point is moot whether or not rehabilitation can be a successful justification of criminal punishment, since society has practically given up on it.

Conclusion

It’s extremely difficult to find an acceptable justification of criminal punishment. Hence, I strongly suspect that this is one of those social practices that seems perfectly normal and acceptable to contemporaries but also one for which we will be universally condemned by future generations.

Unsurprisingly, given the lack of solid justifications, people start to look for other reasons explaining the persistence of the practice. There’s talk of the new Jim Crow and criminal punishment being used to maintain oppressive social structures. Maybe it’s time to reread Foucault.

Still, it’s uncontested that society can’t function and people can’t thrive without respect for certain norms, especially the norms included in human rights. Those norms are regularly violated, and a society has the right and the duty to enforce compliance. A rejection of this right and duty means tolerating victimization and rights violations. But if punishment isn’t the right way to enforce compliance, which is? We can’t just accept punishment and to hell with justifications, because punishments do impose costs, both on the criminals being punished and on society as a whole. Imposing costs without justifications isn’t the right thing to do. Also, an unjustified system of punishment will lack legitimacy and will therefore be ineffective, something which will further undermine its legitimacy.

Hence, we’re left with the following choice: look harder for a justification, or find an alternative, non-punitive system of norm enforcement (maybe a system that is able to prevent violations of norms). Only half-jokingly: why not give law-abiding citizens prize money?

More here.

Ahmed, 7, the son of an FSA fighter (Free Syrian Army), mans a barricade in Aleppo. Photo by Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini

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More on Syria and on child soldiers. More iconic images.

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There is a clear correlation between the presence and quality of democratic government in a country and the level of respect for human rights in that country. That may sound obvious but it’s good to have some measured results. This paper for instance offers some clear evidence:

There is a substantial body of research devoted to understanding the relationship between democracy and government human rights performance. Most research centers on physical integrity rights but does not analyze the broader civil liberties encompassed by the category of “empowerment rights.” The dynamics of the relationship between the degree of democracy in a state and protection of empowerment rights might be different and improvements may take longer to emerge. This study examines the effects of democracy and democratic duration on empowerment rights scores, and it also uncovers time thresholds at which different scores are attained. The results show that regime type is more critical to the protection of empowerment rights than it is to physical integrity rights. Even in the earliest years of democracy there is a positive relationship between democracy and empowerment rights, but empowerment rights strengthen as countries gain democratic experience. …

Thus, countries with more institutionalized democratic regimes, as determined by the quality and longevity of democratic experience, are significantly more likely to respect both fundamental human rights and broader classes of civil liberties. … [A]lthough human rights protection is present in early years, it will usually be even greater after countries have had extended experience with democracy. (source)

Two graphs to back this up:

correlation between democracy and human rights

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Here and here are other papers giving some further evidence.

The interesting thing about all this is not that there is a correlation – anyone following the news could have guessed as much. What we should care about are the reasons why there is a correlation. From the studies cited above we can see that the most important causal link is the one going from democracy to respect for human rights. In other words, there is a correlation because democracy causes respect for human rights. Vice versa may also be possible, although the argument is probably weaker. And then there may also be a hidden variable that can partially explain the correlation. For example, it may well be that prosperity and high GDP promote both democracy and human rights.

But then the next question is: how does democracy cause higher levels of respect for human rights? I guess this can happen in several ways:

• Democracies are more likely to be systems based on the rule of law and the rule of law is necessary for the protection of human rights.
• Democratic rulers know that they can’t get away with repression. They’ll be voted out if they try, or, worse, they’ll suffer the consequences of the rule of law, imposed on them by other branches of power in a system of checks and balances and separation of powers.
• Democracies have systems of judicial review which allow courts to void legislation that contradicts basic constitutional rights.
• Democracies have powerful non-violent mechanisms for dispute settlement, such as well-functioning courts. People don’t need to take the law into their own hands. Internal peace and limitations on violent behavior have beneficial effects on a number of human rights.
• Democracy is correlated with high levels of prosperity, and prosperity makes it easier to promote respect for human rights. Rights cost money.
• Democracies need human rights to function adequately (no democracy without free speech, free assembly, free association etc.), so they have an added incentive to respect them.

None of the above is meant to imply the following:

1. That we can delay the implementation of human rights norms in non-democratic states. Remember the remark at the beginning that the causal link probably goes in two opposite directions and that human rights can promote democratic government. After all, if people are allowed to express themselves, they will express themselves about the workings of their government, and that is the first step towards democracy.
2. That rights are never violated in democracies or never respected in non-democracies. It’s merely a matter of probability.
3. That there are no elements other than democracy that promote human rights. Of course there must be. I mentioned prosperity a moment ago. Democracy is not a sufficient condition, although probably a necessary one, at least in the long run, for the full set of human rights and for the equal enjoyment of all rights by all people.
4. That the beneficial effect of democracy on human rights is equal for all human rights or for all types of democracy. Well-developed and long-lasting democracies do better, as mentioned above, but perhaps also deep democracies, meaning democracies that provide a wide range of opportunities for democratic say.

More about the link between democracy and human rights here, here, here and here. More posts in this series are here.

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More on same-sex marriage rights here.

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More on the Foundation’s No More Abuse page. More human rights ads.

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More on suicide here. More in the annals of heartlessness here.

A group of illegal Mexican laborers from the northern Indiana and Illinois region walk to board a train in Chicago, Ill., to be deported to their native Mexico, July 27, 1951

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The AP is out with an incredible report detailing the stories of undocumented immigrants who were deported by American hospitals, while they were unconscious.

Two of the immigrants profiled, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana, were unlucky enough to be involved in car accidents and their punishment was being flown to Mexico while still in a coma.  The kicker is, they had health insurance, because they had solid jobs, but without documentation proving legal immigrant status, the hospital took it upon themselves to deport Cruz and Rodriguez-Saldana. ….

When the men awoke, they were more than 1,800 miles away in a hospital in Veracruz, on the Mexican Gulf Coast. (source)

More absurd human rights violations here.

surrogacy advert

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Take a look at this list, helpfully compiled by Michael Sandel:

• In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a prison-cell upgrade costing $90 a night. This gives them access to a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to “disturb” them – read: rape them.
• Couples believing that their infertility impedes their right to a family life can buy an Indian surrogate mother for $8,000, less than one-third the going rate in the United States. Similar transactions take place between patients in need of organs and willing donors, the latter of course very often poor and desperate.
• In the U.S., patients who want easy access to a good doctor can buy their doctor’s cellphone number for $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees.
• People wanting to emigrate to the U.S. can do so when they invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment. This makes them eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.
• A single mother in Utah who needed money for her son’s education was paid $10,000 by an online casino to install a permanent tattoo of the casino’s Web address on her forehead.

In all of these cases – and probably in many others I’m not aware of – people pay money or sell themselves – or parts of themselves - in order to have their rights protected, or they get paid in order to help others secure their rights.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s distraught by this. It’s true that rights protection costs money – a lot of money – and a large proportion of what we pay in taxes is used by governments to protect our rights (taxes pay for a police protection, judicial protection, welfare, healthcare, education and other rights). So why shouldn’t individuals be able to bypass the state and use their money to secure their rights when the state or others fail to do so? (By “others” I refer to NGO’s, international institutions, private charities etc.). After all, everyone should be happy with better rights protection, no?

Well, yes, unless we start something that will lead to systematically unequal rights protection. We don’t want the wealthy to have better rights protection than others, or to be able to continuously improve their marginal protection (e.g. a gated community as a defense against unlikely attackers) while the poor are left with almost no protection at all. Slightly modifying the meaning of a standard expression: might shouldn’t be right. The advantage of outsourcing rights protection to the state is that we pool resources and use them where they are most needed. The market isn’t always the best place to allocate rights protection.

Even the rich will consent to this. After all, they may be able to buy some of their rights, but not all of them and not all of the time. Participating in government protection mechanisms will secure their rights when their money can’t.

Another problem caused by individuals buying their rights is that we may see crowding out of moral motivation. If other individuals, companies or governments can get money for securing rights, they’ll stop securing rights for moral reasons. And finally, the concept of rights will be corrupted. Rights are not something which should have to be bought. They are something people have a moral duty to give. Allowing rights to be bought and sold corrupts the value and meaning of rights.

More posts in this series are here.

Related articles

• What Isn’t for Sale? ( Michael J. Sandel) (larrycuban.wordpress.com)

“Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion, Captain”

If I count correctly, I have blogged about at least 12 ways in which our psychological or mental biases can lead us to violate other people’s rights:

1. spurious reasoning justifying our actions to ourselves post hoc
2. the role distance plays in our regard for fellow human beings
3. the notion that what comes first is also best
4. a preference for the status quo
5. the anchoring effect
6. last place aversion
7. learned helplessness
8. the just world fallacy
9. adaptive preferences
10. the bystander effect
11. inattentional blindness, and
12. stereotype threat

So it may come as a surprise that rationality – in the sense of the absence of biases that distort our proper thinking – can also cause rights violations. But when you think about it, it’s just plain obvious: whatever the irrational basis of Nazi anti-Semitism, the Holocaust was an example of rational planning; many people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki made perfect military sense; and others say the same about torture in the ticking bomb scenario.

However, the point is not just that rationality can be harmful, but that biases can be helpful. For example:

Take crime. The rational person weighs the benefit of mugging someone – the financial reward and the buzz of the violence netted off against the feeling of guilt afterwards – against the cost; the probability of being caught multiplied by the punishment.

But we don’t really want people to think so rationally because it would lead them to actually mug someone occasionally. It would be better if they had the heuristic “don’t mug people.” Such a heuristic is, however, irrational in the narrow economistic sense, as it would cause people to reject occasionally profitable actions. (source)

Given the low probability of getting caught for any crime, we would encourage crime if we would favor rationality over bias. If, on the other hand we could adopt a bias that people like us are highly likely to get caught (or, for that matter, another bias, such as the one that rich people deserve their wealth), then crime would go down.

All this is related to the question of whether false beliefs are useful for human rights.

More posts in this series are here.

Advertising for Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, c1943

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Daimler-Benz … avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. (source)

Can companies violate human rights and should they be held morally and legally responsible if they do? Or are companies just legal fictions that can’t do anything? In the latter case, if a company seems to be engaged in wrongdoing, then it’s really just the employees, the bosses or the shareholders – or all of them – that have done wrong. It’s therefore always the individuals who should be held responsible and not the company as such. This latter view is expressed in the following quote:

[C]orporate action and corporate responsibility is something of a metaphor. Corporations don’t misbehave, speak, think, and so on. People acting on behalf of corporations do. I support applying the First Amendment to the “speech of corporations” because I think the restrictions on such speech end up interfering with the rights of people, both as listeners and as people who associate in order to create an enterprise in which some of the employees speak on the enterprise’s behalf. “Corporations have First Amendment rights” is useful shorthand for conveying that, but we have to recognize that it’s just shorthand.

And because this is just shorthand, I find it hard to fault the Mercedes-Benz of today for the actions of the Mercedes-Benz of the Nazi era. Whatever Mercedes-Benz officers and employees did then is their responsibility — not the responsibility of the very different people who run the company today. And that action during the Nazi era strikes me as not really relevant to Mercedes-Benz’s current actions, or to what should be our attitudes with regard to the company and its products today. (source)

That sounds persuasive, until you start to think about the transtemporal aspect of things. Indeed, current Mercedes employees or bosses are not the same as those of the Nazi era, but the company is. It’s Mercedes now and it was Mercedes then. It’s not absurd to suggest that the company profited from its Nazi era wrongdoing – or from the wrongdoing of its people back then – and that this advantage extends to our current time.

I’ll explain. Suppose that the Nazis liked company X and its people, and that this liking led to the government backed discrimination or even elimination of competitors Y and Z. Y and Z never recovered after the end of the Nazi era, and hence company X continues to this day to profit from the absence of competitors Y and Z. And I could suggest numerous other examples of ongoing advantages resulting from actions taken decades ago (e.g. continuing returns on savings which accumulated while the wrongdoing took place and which resulted from the wrongdoing; continuing returns on expropriated goods, etc.).

(source unknown)

This discussion is similar to the one about reparations for slavery. None of the current white citizens of the US are responsible for the slavery that ended more than a century ago, and yet they do still profit – as a group – from the defunct institution, even those whites who don’t have forefathers directly implicated in slavery or who came to the US after the end of slavery. Of course, those who do have implicated forefathers profit directly from the wealth their forefathers accumulated through slavery and subsequently transferred across generations. But whites in general profit from the fact that slavery has imposed disadvantages on blacks even after its demise (lack of education, lack of certain skills, segregation, forced migration etc.). These disadvantages were and still are benefits to whites. For example, they make it easier for whites on the job market and elsewhere.

However, the guy quoted above may insist that the “group of currently living whites” is a lot like Mercedes: the group is a social fiction in the sense that it can’t act and hence can’t be responsible. Only individual whites can act. And what they do today can’t have effects on the past. Hence they can’t be responsible for what happened in the past. A fortiori, the group of whites can’t be responsible either. I agree that all of this is correct, but it doesn’t follow that the group shouldn’t be forced to pay reparations. Just as Mercedes today, it continues to profit from wrongdoing done in its name in the past, and that is unjust. Hence they should pay compensation for the unjust profit they reap.

More on corporate social responsibility here, here and here.

• 2008
• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012

I had to do 1 version per year because of the size of my blog. Even so, careful when downloading these things because they are still huge (>20mb). One additional remark: the pdfs are generated automatically without editing on my part. They look somewhat crappy here and there.

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More on truth and opinion in politics. More political jokes.

Iraqi man weeps over the body of his daughter who was killed in a car bomb explosion, Kirkuk, by Marwan Ibrahim 2010

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More on Iraq. More iconic images of human rights violations.

I’ve already documented several ways in which democracy tends to malfunction. Democracy seems to be a system for

• electing the most beautiful politicians
• electing the politicians with the most agreeable voice
• electing whomever shows up first on the ballot
• signaling disapproval of the weather
• etc.

Here’s another one:

It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House.

Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. That’s a lot of votes, certainly more than the margin of victory in a tight race. (source)

Compared to some of the previously cited distortions of the democratic process, this one is particularly disturbing. You could still argue that the way politicians look or sound has at least some relevance to the political process, even though it shouldn’t determine elections. You could also argue, even if it means stretching your neurons to breaking point, that a long spell of bad weather has an adverse effect on the economy, that politicians should take countermeasures, and that they should be punished if they don’t. If you’re feeling very generous, you could even say that the order effect is a general human bias and that we shouldn’t single out democracy for condemnation when we see this effect appearing in elections.

However, there seems to be no possible excuse for voting in favor of incumbents simply because your local football team scores a win. OK, I can understand that the exhilaration makes you feel good about everything, including perhaps the performance of the incumbents and the status quo in general, but that means we should see the same distortions when people vote after having had sex or after having eaten a chocolate bar. And those latter distortions may have an even greater impact on elections, given the fact that eating chocolate and having sex is more common than watching football. Given the large number of possible distortions like these, I simply can’t convince myself that they really do occur.

Bonus malfunction:

In the summer of 1916 … a dramatic weeklong series of shark attacks along New Jersey beaches left four people dead. Tourists fled, leaving some resorts with 75 percent vacancy rates in the midst of their high season. Letters poured into congressional offices demanding federal action; but what action would be effective in such circumstances? Voters probably didn’t know, but neither did they care. When President Woodrow Wilson—a former governor of New Jersey with strong local ties—ran for reelection a few months later, he was punished at the polls, losing as much as 10 percent of his expected vote in towns where shark attacks had occurred. (source)

More posts in this series are here.

Album cover of Frank Zappa’s “Them or Us”

Are we born as blank slates, and do we get our violent and malevolent inclinations through upbringing and social contact? Or are we born evil? I can’t possibly answer those questions in a blog post, or anywhere else for that matter. But we can get some clues if we focus on one type of rights violation, namely racism.

The available evidence seems to suggest that people are not naturally racist. I’ve discussed some recent findings here. Human evolution has indeed fostered a strong sense of group solidarity, and the dark side of this solidarity is a natural tendency to define outsiders as enemies. This is problematic from the point of view of human rights because it means that the interests and rights of outsiders are routinely discounted. However, “groupism” isn’t necessarily the same as racism. Outsiders can be virtually anyone: foreigners, heretics, infidels, Manchester United fans etc. Race can but doesn’t have to determine the inside-outside border. In fact, throughout much of early human history, when contact between races was the exception, groups have defined insiders and outsiders on other grounds than race. Racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the words of Robert Wright:

So it’s not as if the human lineage could have plausibly developed, by evolutionary adaptation, an instinctive reaction to members of different races. (source)

It seems we are ourselves responsible for the rights we violate. We can’t accuse nature or evolution.

More on groupism here. More posts in this series here.

More ironic human rights violations are here.

women clean the house, and stay slim at the same time

women make breakfast

women work in the kitchen

women do the dishes

women are responsible for educating their children

in China, beautiful women serve coffee on international women’s day

women look old rather quickly

women smell

some women can project their equipment

More sexist images here, here and here.

Abraham Lincoln

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A nice quote from Abraham Lincoln, ridiculing the notion that U.S. slaveholders lost their “freedom” when slavery was abolished:

The world has never had a good definition of liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in need of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name — liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. (source)

A similar point – one about the freedom of the tyrant – was made by Hannah Arendt. More posts in this series are here.

wealth in China

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Democracy is a human right. But how do we justify this right? One common argument is that democracies tend to be wealthier than non-democracies. However, there’s some disagreement about this argument: not about the goodness of wealth and wealth-enhancing institutions, but about whether democracies are in fact such institutions. Impressive economic growth rates in non-democratic countries such as China have planted doubts in many people’s minds.

Some time ago, I offered a rather “philosophical” argument against the view that democracies perform worse economically than some types of authoritarian government (i.e. China-style). But in fact we’re dealing with empirically verifiable hypotheses here. So I looked for some numbers and found this article by Dani Rodrik:

The relationship between a nation’s politics and its economic prospects is one of the most fundamental – and most studied – subjects in all of social science. Which is better for economic growth – a strong guiding hand that is free from the pressure of political competition, or a plurality of competing interests that fosters openness to new ideas and new political players? …

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, ultimately produce economies that are as fragile as their political systems. Their economic potency, when it exists, rests on the strength of individual leaders, or on favorable but temporary circumstances. They cannot aspire to continued economic innovation or to global economic leadership. (source)

Some data on democracy and growth are here.

The darling of the “authoritarian=efficient” crowd is, of course, China. China has indeed performed extremely well economically under a rather authoritarian government. However, that government is much less authoritarian than it was during the post-WWII decades of stagnation and extreme poverty. So maybe it’s the relative move towards greater freedom that is the true cause of China’s economic performance, rather than its authoritarian government per se.

Moreover, China has done very well in terms of growth and poverty reduction, but in terms of levels of prosperity it’s still way behind most countries that are much more free. Its astounding progress is partly due to the very low starting point that was engineered by its authoritarian rulers.

And finally, the supposed economic success of authoritarianism in China – if it exists – isn’t necessarily proof of the economic ability of authoritarianism in general (authoritarian disaster stories are unfortunately far more common than authoritarian success stories). It may not even be proof of the economic ability of authoritarianism in China, since correlation doesn’t imply causation, especially not if there are only very few observations: China’s economic success may be due to other factors – and maybe this success would have been even greater without authoritarian government.

Jesus raises the dead man Lazarus back to the living world (mosaic from Ravenna, 500′s AD)

The economic case for authoritarianism is a bit like this: usually, people don’t return from the dead. But there’s this one guy, Lazarus, who did. Some claim that there was this other fellow, Jesus, who done the deed and made Lazarus walk again. There are no other Jesuses around, and this one Jesus only did his trick once. Nobody quite knows how he did it. Some say he just happened to be around when it occurred and people put one and one together. Lazarus would have walked anyway, perhaps even sooner had this other fellow not stolen all the attention.

More here, here, here and here on the myth of successful authoritarianism.

Related Articles

• The heavy hand (economist.com)
• Where will China’s long march end? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Is Democracy Necessary for Economic Success? (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• India or China: Which Model for the Developing World? (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• Democracy or Autocracy: Which is Better for Economic Growth? Becker (becker-posner-blog.com)

This image made from video shows an explosion among Sri Lankan Muslim men during a religious procession, a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber killed 14 and wounded 35, AP photo 2009

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More about Sri Lanka and suicide bombing. More iconic images of human rights violations.

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In the U.S., 9 states – including Utah, the center of Mormonism – make polygamy a crime, while 49 states have bigamy statutes that can be used to prosecute polygamous families. Polygamy is only legal in North Africa and most of the Muslim world. Does it make sense to promote the right to same-sex, interracial and interreligious marriage, and at the same time oppose polygamy? (By the way, polygamy usually means polygyny: one husband, multiple wives – the opposite, polyandry, is extremely rare).

Marriage is a recognized human right, but does the word “marriage”, as it is used in human rights language, also cover polygamous marriage? From the texts of human rights treaties and declarations, it’s not even clear that it covers same-sex marriage – although it undoubtedly covers interracial and interreligious marriage. The word ”marriage” isn’t clearly defined in the texts. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration merely states the following:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Polygamy or same-sex marriage aren’t specifically mentioned as being forms of marriage that are included in the right to marry, but neither is it the case that sexual orientation or the numbers of partners are stipulated as unwarranted limitations to the right to marry. So the phrasing as it stands neither includes nor excludes polygamy or same-sex marriage as a right. Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights isn’t much clearer.

However, the case for same-sex or interracial marriage can be based on other articles, such as the non-discrimination provisions. Article 2 of the International Covenant states:

Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Sexual orientation is not mentioned but it is accepted that the list given here is a list of examples and not exhaustive. “Without distinction of any kind” is clear enough. Article 3 states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights set forth in the present Covenant.

And Article 26:

All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

It’s not clear whether polygamists can invoke the same non-discrimination provisions. Perhaps the right to privacy can help them. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence… Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Who Will Zuma’s first lady be? Pretoria News headline from April 11, 2009

However, apart from the question whether polygamy can be defended or not on the basis of existing human rights law, there are some good reasons why perhaps there shouldn’t be a right to polygamous marriage, even if it can be established that there is such a right. Wives may be pressured into polygamous marriages or prohibited from exiting them; they may suffer inequality and oppression in their marriage; and young girls may be forced to marry. The same risks exist of course in normal monogamous marriage, but are perhaps more important in polygamous marriage.

Moreover, polygamous marriage poses certain risks that are non-existent in normal marriage: excess boys in polygamous communities are often ostracized and condemned to a life of poverty and homelessness; and there’s a risk that marriage as an institution and as a general right may suffer when polygamy becomes widespread:

Polygamy is bad social policy for exactly the reason gay marriage is good social policy: everyone should have the opportunity to marry. Broad access to marriage is important not only for individual wellbeing but for social stability. And, to oversimplify only a little, when one man gets two wives, some other man gets no wife. There’s no better path to inequality, social unrest, and authoritarian social structures than polygamy. (source)

And yet, if it’s the case that

• polygamy remains a fringe custom
• polygamists are generally exercising their free choice and informed consent
• no children are forced to marry or are sexually abused
• and excess boys are not ostracized

then why would anyone oppose polygamy? Monogamous marriage isn’t illegal because some wives are beaten or because there are some cases of monogamous child marriage. One could oppose polygamy for religious reasons, but those aren’t sufficient in liberal democracies. Polygamy can only be problematic when it’s a practice that regularly and intrinsically leads to rights violations, as it does when child brides are common, when wives are commonly forced into marriage or when widespread polygamy makes it very difficult for men to find brides and marry.

Another thing to consider is gender equality. Even if polygamy is rare enough not to deny men a reasonable chance of marriage, and even if all polygamous wives are adults who freely consent to their marriage and who have equal standing within their marriages, then it’s still the case that the practice itself can signal gender inequality and hence perpetuate it. The reason is that polygyny, by its very nature, signals that men have more rights than women: a man can take several wives, but not vice versa. A legal right to polygamy would of course also entail a right to polyandry, but it’s unlikely that the risks to gender equality created by polygyny would be offset by many cases of polyandry. The more likely result is that polygyny fosters preexisting misogynistic prejudice because polygyny will always be more common that polyandry.

So, in the end a lot depends on how often polygamy results in rights violations. Is polygamy more like child marriage, which by definition is a rights violation (it involves pedophilia, the denial of education, health problems resulting from pregnancy at an early age etc.)? Or is it more like monogamous or same-sex marriage, which may produce rights violations such as domestic violence, but not intrinsically so? If some practice by definition violates rights, it should obviously be prohibited. If the practice only does so by accident and exceptionally, then it should in general be protected, especially when the practice itself is a human right. I claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with polygamy, as long as it’s not set up in such a way that it violates rights – as long as in most cases the wives consent (in an informed way), children are left alone, boys aren’t ostracized, and the practice isn’t so widespread that men can’t marry or that women feel they are second class citizens.

In this respect, polygamy is similar to hate speech. In the case of hate speech we are also dealing with a presumptive right, but one that can be abrogated when its exercise becomes too widespread with negative consequences for the rights of others. When a small black minority for instance is overwhelmed by hate speech, to such an extent that black people can’t go outside for fear of constant insult, then their right to freedom of movement should trump the speech rights of the haters.

For a more pessimistic view on polygamy, go here. Below a map showing the prevalence of polygamy/polygyny:

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More political graffiti.

The measurement of racial discrimination may seem like a purely technical topic, but in reality it comes with a huge moral dilemma. In order to measure racial discrimination, you have to categorize people into different racial groups (usually in your national census). On the basis of this you can then collect social information about those groups, and compare the average outcomes in order to detect large discrepancies between them. For example, do blacks in the US earn less, achieve less in school etc. Only then can you assume that there may be racism or discrimination and can you design policies that deal with it.

Now, categorizing people into different racial groups is not straightforward. You need to do violence to reality. Racial classifications and categorizations are not simply a reflection of factual reality, of “real group identities”. Instead they are social constructions or even fantasies influenced by centuries of prejudice, stereotypes and power relations. If we want to use racial classifications to measure discrimination, then we give people labels that may have little or nothing to do with who or what they are and how they identify themselves. Instead, these labels perpetuate the stereotypes and power relations that were the basis of the racial classifications when they were first conceived centuries ago. For example, “black” or “African-American” is not a simple descriptive label of a well-defined and existing group of people; instead it’s an ideological construction that was once used to segregate certain groups of very different people and subordinate them to a lower station in life. (Evidence for the claim that race is a social construct rather than a natural fact can be found in biology and in the fact that racial classifications differ wildly from one country to another).

In other words, the “statistical representation of diversity is a complex process which reveals the foundations of societies and their political choices” (source). In this particular case, the foundation of society was racism and the political choices were segregation and discrimination. If today we use the same racial and ethnic classifications that were once used to justify segregation and discrimination, then we run the risk of perpetuating racist social constructions. As a result, we may also help to perpetuate stereotypes and discrimination, even as we try to go in the opposite direction. It’s a form of path dependence.

Statistics are not just a reflection of social reality, but also affect this reality. Statistical categories are supposed to describe social groups, but at the same time they may influence people’s attitudes towards those groups because they contain memories of older judgments that were once attached to those groups. The dilemma is the following: the use of racial classifications to measure discrimination means giving people labels that have little or nothing to do with who they are or what they are; but they have something to do with how others treat them. It’s this treatment that we want to measure, and we can’t do so without the use of classifications. Using such classifications, however, can help to perpetuate the treatment we want to measure and avoid.

More posts in this series are here.

A would-be African immigrant crawls past sunbathers after his arrival on a makeshift boat on the Gran Tarajal beach in Spain’s Canary Islands, by Juan Medina 2006

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This man can be considered lucky. Other attempts are a lot less fortunate. More on illegal immigration and open borders. More iconic images of human rights violations.

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Assortative mating is the selective mating between individuals whose choice of marriage partners is determined by similarity of social environment. (It’s a form of homogamy, the mating of like with like). One example is the preference to mate with individuals of the same race. Take this case:

Is it racist when a white woman declares, when asked out on a date, that she will only date white men? … She, a white women, took her boss, an African American, to court on sexual harassment charges. During the hearings, he commented that she had said to him that she did not date African Americans, and he maintained that that was racist. (source)

Let’s not focus on the African American man’s apparent attempt to deflect harassment charges by playing the race card. That’s not what I want to discuss here – and, anyway, the story cited above doesn’t provide sufficient information to allow us to judge the intentions of either party. Let’s instead take the general case of a person of one race refusing to date and marry a person of another race for no other reason than race.

Is this kind of assortative mating racist? I think it is. It shows a general dislike of people of another race. It’s prejudiced and bigoted and it implies writing off whole groups of people on the sole basis of their skin color. However, is it also discrimination? I guess not. If it were discrimination, we would be allowed to use the power of the law to fight it, and no one wants the law to mess with people’s mating choices as long as both partners are consenting adults. (Polygamy may come to mind as a counterexample, but my view on the legality of polygamy is much more liberal than the conventional view; I’ll explain in another post).

No one has a right to his or her mate of choice, and no one can use the force of law to compel the consent of this mate of choice. Hence, there’s a lot of racism and bigotry that we can’t fight with the force of law and thus have to accept. We can try to change people’s minds over time, educate future generations and so on, but if this doesn’t convince everyone to regard all individuals as potential mates then there’s no more we can do.

I argued here that we can only speak about discrimination when there is a violation of rights. The account above is yet another example.

More posts in this series are here.

Even post-communist Russia sometimes gets the same treatment, deservedly or not:

(source)

The image of the globe-spanning octopus was also used to condemn the so-called global Jewish conspiracy:

Jewish imperialism, Danish version

(more here)

Amazingly, this red herring is still in use today:

Israeli intervention in US politics

Images condemning international intervention were common during the era of colonialism:

If it’s not the globe that’s carved up by the imperialists, it’s some kind of pizza/cake thing:

China is well-known for its desire to intervene in Taiwan in order to undo the intervention of someone else:

“We must liberate Taiwan”, 1958

The US as the “policeman of the world” is another famous anti-interventionist metaphor:

ballot

(source)

People’s choices are often sensitive to differences in the order in which the options appear. This is one among many psychological biases we all suffer from to some extent. For example,

In the Eurovision song contest, for example, the first or later performers have more chance of winning than those appearing in the middle of the show. (source)

Unsurprisingly, democracy is not immune from this bias. Here’s some evidence from the Irish democracy showing that the order of candidates on ballots affects election outcomes:

The estimated effect of being listed first on an alphabetical ballot paper in an Irish general election is approximately 544 first preference votes or 1.27 percentage points for the average candidate. (source)

In California,

being listed first benefits everyone. Major party candidates generally gain one to three percentage points, while minor party candidates may double their vote shares. (source)

And it’s not just candidates’ surnames or positions on ballots that affect democratic selection procedures. The tone of their voice, their looks and a ton of other biases also play a role. And yet I still believe in the value of democracy.

Needless to say that the order effect – or “ordering effect”, or “serial position effect” – isn’t limited to politics. Next time you walk into a shop and ask for advice, you can bet that the sales person will present you the most expensive item first, because having seen this one first, all the others will look like a bargain and will influence your decision to buy.

More on the order effect here. More posts in this series are here.

(source)

Percentage of U.S. women who believe they have a personal responsibility to help the worse off : 42

Of U.S. men : 27 (source)

More in the annals of heartlessness here.

Clark Gable in “Gone With the Wind”

Human rights are not like music or love, things people care about for their own sake or for the pleasure or happiness they provide. If people care about human rights they do so because they view those rights as means to achieve some other goals or purpose. I personally see the following reasons why people care about human rights.

Signaling

Human rights function as signaling tools (see also here). People who engage in human rights talk don’t necessarily have as a first priority the goal of improving respect for human rights, but perhaps only want to convey some meaningful information about themselves and use human rights talk to do that. They may of course improve respect for human rights along the way, sometimes unwittingly (for example because their talk contributes to a culture of human rights), but human rights are valuable to them primarily because they allow them to communicate certain things about themselves. For example, it’s possible that some of the people who are very expressive about perceived discrimination of a particular minority group may be primarily motivated by a possible leadership position within that minority group. Their human rights talk signals leadership aspirations. This kind of reason to care about human rights is not by definition useless for the promotion of human rights – it can advance the cause of human rights – but it’s obviously not the best possible reason.

Self-interest

Human rights promote people’s self-interest. That’s obviously true for their own rights, but also for the rights of others. I’ve written here about the ways in which people may view the promotion of the rights of others as a means to protect their own self-interest. This reason to care about human rights is more beneficial to the cause of human rights than the signaling reason, but it’s still not the best possible reason. People’s self-interest does not advance all human rights of all other people.

Values

People may believe that human rights promote some of their cherished values or ideals, such as freedom or equality, for themselves and for humanity in general. Like the previous two reasons for caring about human rights, this reason will only advance the cause of human rights contingently: if freedom is what you care about, you will only promote human rights to the extent that they enhance freedom, and only those rights that enhance freedom.

It’s not true that freedom is served by all human rights all of the time, at least not if you adopt a restrictive definition of freedom. For example, those human rights that guarantee a basic standard of living are not clearly meant to enhance the freedom of poor people – within the bounds of a certain definition of freedom - and they may even limit the freedom of those who have to contribute the means necessary to guarantee a basic standard of living for others. Conversely, if you’re an egalitarian and equality rather than freedom is what you care about, then you may not feel especially attached to the right to property for example.

Humanity

People may cherish rights because they believe human beings are uniquely valuable creatures who should be treated in a certain way. For example, you may believe that people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Or that they deserve to have their autonomy protected. Or that people have been created by God in His image and that this requires a certain treatment. Human rights are then viewed as means to achieve this treatment. Compared to the previous reasons to care about human rights, this reason is potentially more inclusive and wide-ranging and less contingent on facts about personal motivation. However, it depends on a substantive and inherently controversial philosophy about human nature, dignity or religion.

Evil

Conversely, people may cherish human rights, not because of their views about the inherent worth of human beings, but because of the evil inherent in humanity. Human rights are necessary not because they protect the good in people but because they protect people from the evil in others.

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• Human Rights and Utopia (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)