If you want to promote respect for human rights you’re likely to turn to the law, and not just any law: human rights are usually if not always included in constitutions and in the human rights treaties that countries have accepted. They are, in other works, part of the basic law. You hope and expect that those in charge of verifying respect for the law and enforcing this respect when it’s absent will see that the case you bring before them is a clear violation of human rights – clear on the basis of the evidence you present – and will use their legal monopoly of violence in order to force the violators to stop, to respect the law and to remedy the harm that is done to you or to those you represent. Judicial courts, including international courts, and enforcement agencies such as the police force, the military, peacekeepers and such, are believed to be the institutions that are best placed to promote respect for human rights law.

You may have many good reasons for this belief: there’s the authority of the law as a special kind of rule, stronger and more commonly accepted than rules of morality, and there’s the possibility to use violence as a means to coerce. You may also have good reasons to believe that these legal and enforcement institutions will never be perfect: there can be perjury, judges may be incapable, suspects can escape, the police may be corrupt, laws can be counterproductive etc. Still, you strongly believe that the law is the best you can hope for in a world of imperfect humans, and certainly better than self-defense or persuasion.

the activist judge

Many of us will recognize our own beliefs in this description. However, one could easily call these beliefs naive. Look at the Supreme Court in the U.S. for instance. Would there be so much bickering over the nomination of new Justices by acting Presidents, if the judicial protection of rights was the quasi-mechanical process that I just described? Or is this bickering not proof of the fact that the political affiliation of the Justices determines to a large degree their rulings? Why would the other political party systematically object to the Justices proposed by the President if the politics of those Justices don’t make a lot of difference in the way they rule? But if those politics do make a lot of difference, what is left of the credibility of the system of law as a means to enforce respect for rights?

Some of this skepticism is the basis of the theory of legal indeterminacy. This theory states that laws have nothing to do with how judicial cases come out; that lawyers and judges can manipulate laws and the legal system in order to justify any decision they please; and that any possible result in any legal dispute can be justified as the legally correct outcome. If laws do not determine or – according to a more moderate form of the theory – do not significantly constrain judicial decisions, then it’s often futile or even risky to ask a judge to rule on a supposed rights violation. You may get the result you want, but only if the judges share your moral, political or religious outlook. In the worst case, your tormentor is vindicated, which will only encourage him and others like him.

The theory of indeterminacy is corroborated by the historical shifts in rulings based on the same texts. Take for example the death penalty in the U.S., which has been ruled both constitutional and unconstitutional. Of course, the indeterminacy of the law is not always the fault of judges, lawyers or prosecutors. The legislators also have a role to play. Laws have to be clear and unequivocal.

On the other hand, it’s impossible to require strict determinacy: no law, however carefully crafted, will produce one and the same legally acceptable type of outcome over decades. There will always be so-called hard cases that require interpretation and choices. And because beliefs and opinions change over time, interpretations and choice will also change. Still, in all legal systems in the world, there seems to be much more indeterminacy than what most of us believe would be optimal.

Woodrow Wilson trying to avoid the rocky shores of "war" and "intervention" on his way to "justice"

Take another example: international criminal justice. Here as well it’s clear that the equal application of the law is just a sick joke. Security Council Resolutions – which can be seen as quasi-judicial – are notoriously inconsistent, and their application is even more inconsistent. The International Criminal Court, one of the best international legal institutions around, only manages to prosecute the worst violators in the poorest and geopolitically irrelevant parts of Africa. China merely has to hint at possible economic consequences and all human rights talk about China – let alone action against China – stops instantly. Never mind the fact that China has accepted human rights treaties. Russia is part of the Council of Europe and has therefore accepted the jurisdiction of the most powerful international human rights court in the world. And yet, we all know that human rights in Russia are far from safe. International human rights law clearly suffers from collective action problems, perverse incentives, competing priorities and double standards.

So, if it’s naive to rely only on the law, which other means do we have in order to promote respect for human rights? The two major alternatives to law are story-telling and honor. Read more about those here and here respectively.

(image source)

(source)

What drives hate crime? Some say it’s poverty, and this seems to be corroborated by the following map:

(source)

On the other hand, the data here paint a different picture.

More data on hate crime here. More hate crime maps here. More human rights maps in general here.

(source)

At first sight, anarchism is an attractive theory for proponents of human rights. It’s often the state that violates human rights and getting rid of the state would therefore automatically and drastically reduce the number of rights violations. However, state action isn’t the only cause of rights violations; our fellow citizens can also take away our rights or fail to act in ways that protect our rights. When that happens, we often go to the state for protection. We regularly ask judges and police officers to protect our rights to physical security, property and life, and we depend on the government to provide education, poverty relief, transportation infrastructure etc.

Anarchists claim that we don’t necessarily have to go to the state for those forms of protection or provision. For example, the monopolization of violence by the state isn’t the only possible means to achieve physical security and protection of property. One can imagine private companies offering their protection services. That would also be more fair to those who need those services less (for example because they have less property or because they live somewhere isolated). In a government protection scheme, these people pay as much as anyone else (at least proportionally, given a more or less progressive tax system) whereas in a system of private protection services they could pay less or even nothing at all if they so wish.

One problem with a system of private protection services is that it can’t regulate violence or theft among the different service providers (a form of insecurity that can affect individuals as well). Anarchists could reply that a natural monopoly would arise as a result of that risk, but a monopoly would then drive up the price of security, which would be detrimental to the buyers and would, in the end, make government provided security look like a better deal. And government is definitely a better deal for those who can’t afford to buy private security.

And then there are of course the other, non-security related human rights. A free market solution to education, healthcare etc. is possible, but again would likely be insufficient for those who don’t have the means to buy those services. Rights are important first and foremost for vulnerable members of a community. If these people can’t count on rights, rights aren’t of much use. We all have rights and the protection of those rights shouldn’t be dependent on our individual ability to pay for them.

Of course, it’s true that rights cost money, and somehow this cost has to be covered in whichever way we think is best. But it seems better and more fair to cover this cost by way of taxation than by way of voluntary purchase, because then at least people’s rights don’t depend on their ability to pay, even though they depend on an overall social ability to cover the cost.

piglet free riding, by Leonard Leslie Brooke

Moreover, free market solutions can cause free rider problems, especially in the case of public goods – and many human rights are public goods. If people have to pay for services, then some may be able to enjoy the services without paying. In private garbage collection systems, for instance, people who don’t pay for the collection may just put their garbage next door, together with the garbage of the paying neighbor. That is obviously not a human rights issue, but the same effect can occur when people have to pay for rights protection or provision. Let’s reiterate the example of security: if a certain number of people in an area pay a private security agency, then this agency will provide security in the area, even – to some extent – for those who don’t pay. This, of course, will convince many that they don’t have to pay. State protection or provision can also suffer from free rider problems, but at least the state can force people to pay (by way of taxation). However, government monopolies create the same problems as private monopolies (see above), so perhaps a mixed system of government and private rights protection and provision would be optimal.

Obviously, when we argue in favor of the relative advantages of state vis-à-vis private protection and provision of rights, we also have to acknowledge the practical reality that states often fail to protect and provide. They fail in two ways: many of them don’t sufficiently protect or provide, and much of what they do is completely unrelated to rights and often even detrimental to rights. We also have to admit that whatever the theoretical merits of either state or private protection and provision, the empirical reality is difficult to ascertain. Whereas we have many cases of state action – some good, some very bad – we have very few cases of attempted anarchy. That doesn’t help the case of anarchism. Maybe some theoretical shortcomings of anarchism don’t turn out so bad in practice, compared to the practice of government. And there’s of course the status quo bias which doesn’t help anarchism either: we know what we have, and trying something new is always risky.

Eric Fischl - Untitled

(source)

I argued before that morality can be and often has been the cause of a lot of evil in the world. The conviction of knowing what is good and right can lead to violent coercion of others who don’t conform to certain ideals. At the very least, moral certainty inhibits cooperation and compromise. Hence the claim by George Carlin:

I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who’s lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis and I’ll show you someone who’s not causing any fucking trouble!

Of course, he’s not doing any good either, but the point is that doing good isn’t always good. More Carlin. More quotes & jokes.

Maybe this is good timing on my part, with Obama being accused of “class war”, Romney paying ridiculously little in taxes, the Occupy movement and the 99 percenters still going strong (I think), and all that. So hopefully, this paper will attract a few eyeballs, at least more than academic writing can normally expect.

Barry White for President

It’s both a damning verdict on democracy and a charming play on words: voters apparently use their vote to choose politicians with a certain type of voice (the word “vote” being related to “voice”). More precisely, voters prefer politicians with lower-pitched voices:

Participants in the study, published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, were asked to listen to archival voice recordings of nine U.S. presidents. The researchers, from Canada’s McMaster University, created higher- and lower-pitched versions of each voice. Listeners were then asked to assess the attractiveness, honesty, leadership potential and intelligence — among other qualities — of the speakers.

For nearly every attribute they were asked to rate, participants were significantly more likely to prefer the deeper voice. The only category in which higher voices won? Most Likely to Be Involved in a Government Scandal. …

Previous studies have found that both men and women find men with deeper voices more attractive and more dominant. And in eight U.S. presidential elections between 1960 and 2000, the candidate with the deeper voice has won the popular vote. (source)

Politicians’ looks create a similar distortion of proper democratic processes. Hence I guess the answer to the questions I asked here and here should be “yes” after all.

More posts in this series are here.

refugees, street art by Isaac Cordal

(source, source)

Isaac Cordal makes lovely miniature sculptures, puts them in the streets and photographs them from a low angle.

More political artists here. More on refugees here.

"Now then, my man, week's up! Can't 'ave a 'ome without payin' for it, ye know!"

Many of the people who are considered poor in developed countries have a higher living standard than the average middle class citizens of some centuries ago. If we bracket the minority of the extremely poor in developed countries (the homeless for example), poverty today seems to be a relatively comfortable position to be in, once you see it in a historical perspective.

The same is true for people in poor countries. In 1820, average income per person was low everywhere in the world: about $500 in China and South Asia, and about $1000-$1500 in Europe (1993 US$ PPP). In developing countries today the range is between $1000 and $3100 (the world average is about $6000, the US has more than $40,000). So, the poor of today are equally well off or even better off than the average world citizen 200 years ago. 75% of the world’s population lived on less than $1 a day in 1820. Today, almost no one does in the West. In China it’s less then 20%, in South Asia 40%, in Africa half. Globally, it’s less than a quarter. Historically, almost everyone was poor; today it’s a minority.

So it seems almost futile to talk about poverty today. What is defined as poverty now was the normal way of life not so long ago. However, if that’s the way you want to go, the concept of poverty evaporates. You’ll always find someone who’s worse off. You just need to go sufficiently far back in time (or move in space) to find people who are more deprived and who make the current poor (or the local poor) seem relatively well off. The baseline is then the caveman and everyone else isn’t really “poor”.

Hence, if you want to keep talking about poverty, you can’t engage in historical comparisons. Does that mean that poverty can only be measured against the current average standard of living? That poverty is a percentage of current median income? In that case, there will always be poverty and the fight against it is a Sisyphean task. I’m not entirely convinced of the usefulness of the concept of relative poverty – that you should compare people’s living standards to society’s average standard (where poverty becomes basically income inequality) – and the historical rather than spatial version of relative poverty reinforces my doubts. However, I know that people commonly see poverty as a relative thing and that they may feel deprived because they compare themselves to their living compatriots and not only because they are below a certain absolute level of income, consumption or capabilities. Conversely, the middle classes of some centuries ago, even if they had the same standard of living as some of today’s poor, felt good about themselves because they looked at the poor of their time and felt that they had done comparatively well.

Still, relative poverty is not the only solution to the problem of historical comparisons. Poverty can be measured relative to average historical or current standards of living, but can also be measured by comparing consumption, income or capabilities to a commonly accepted absolute minimum level (for example a minimum amount of calorie intake).

In the latter case, it’s not important how rich the rich really are, or what the median income is, or how poor the poor were centuries ago. It’s important to know what are people’s basic needs, how much they cost, and how many people currently can’t buy the stuff to fulfill their basic needs. Of course, these basic needs can’t always be determined scientifically (as in the case of calorie intake) and some level of arbitrariness is unavoidable. A lot depends on the capabilities we believe are necessary in order to have a minimally decent life, and that’s controversial.

Portrait of Cosette from Les Miserables

I also understand that social norms evolve and that basic needs can change over time. Several centuries ago a microwave and a cellphone were obviously not a basic need; now you will be considered poor if you lack these tools. In a pre-modern agrarian society, you would have been considered poor only when you were on the brink of starvation. You didn’t need technological tools, child care, education etc. in order to have a minimally decent life, because no one had those things and your functioning in the economy didn’t require them. Today, if you don’t have them, you’ll feel excluded, less than normal, weird, “trash” and in certain cases you’ll end up deeper in poverty because you’ll have a hard time finding a job if you don’t have a car, a cell phone or child care.

Also, why shouldn’t we become more ambitious over time? Should we be content if we’re able to avoid only the worst kind of deprivation? Or should we try to continually improve many different capabilities? The latter is I think a sign of civilization and progress. That doesn’t mean we should scatter our attention and forget to focus on the worst deprivation. It only means we shouldn’t stop after we’ve dealt with the worst. And we haven’t dealt with the worst simply because the percentages of those worst off have been coming down (see the numbers cited above). Indeed, a smaller share of the world’s population suffers from low income than some time ago. But because of population growth – which is a good thing resulting from higher life expectancy rates – the total number of people with low income is now higher. And total numbers also count, just as much as percentages. As Thomas Pogge has argued, the Holocaust wouldn’t be any less horrible if it turned out that the number of people killed was a smaller percentage of the world’s population than initially thought.

(source)

I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence, but in case you don’t immediately get the joke: is Mr. Grayton’s level of support currently 1% (20-19)? Or 16,2% (81% of 20%, a reduction of 19%)?

More statistical jokes here.

• more groups enjoy protection against discrimination (the disabled, transsexuals, older people, short people etc.) and
• discrimination becomes illegal in more social settings (employment, trade etc.).

I’ll focus here on employment discrimination, and more specifically discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age by employers. A growing body of law also seeks to prevent employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Discriminatory practices include bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, compensation, retaliation, and various types of harassment. (source)

In the U.S., many states have laws that protect all public employees against employment discrimination, including discrimination of people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many large cities and other localities have similar rules. A minority of states ban this type of discrimination in private employment: 21 states plus DC have laws banning discrimination in private employment that also cover sexual orientation, and 15 plus DC have laws that also cover gender identity.

Here’s a map showing those 21 and 15 states:

Legislation prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and Gender Identity in private employment

(source)

And here’s a map showing legislation covering both private and public employment:

Legislation Prohibiting Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

(source)

An interesting new development: employers seem to be discriminating against the unemployed. When evaluating candidates for positions, employers prefer to hire someone who already has a job elsewhere. They often even announce in their job postings that they don’t hire applicants who aren’t currently working. Unemployed candidates, even if they have the same qualifications, are refused because their current lack of a job is supposed to signal laziness or other disqualifying characteristics. Some therefore propose to include also discrimination of the unemployed in legislation prohibiting employment discrimination. Others think that would be a bad idea subjecting businesses to frivolous lawsuits every time an unemployed person fails to get a job.

More on discrimination here. More human rights maps here.

However, this whitewashing of inequality doesn’t work because the more unequal a society, the less social mobility there is:

(source, the “intergenerational earnings elasticity” is a measure of correlation between the income of grown children and their parents, or – in other words – how much a rise in your father’s income affects your expected income; higher values suggest less mobility, 0 means that the kids of rich people earn as much as the kids of the poor)

(source)

What is the mechanism here? In part, high levels of income inequality make social mobility more difficult: when income inequality is relatively high, people at the wrong end of inequality can offer comparatively less opportunities to their children than the people at the right end – less quality schooling, less quality healthcare etc. The children of wealthy parents have relatively more advantages compared to poor children then they would have in a less unequal society, and they are therefore more likely to end up in a high income group as adults. I assume that social mobility is a good thing and that people’s income should not be determined by the income of their parents.

Let’s assume a stylized economy called Mobilistan, consisting of just 2 families: the Jones family is “wealthy” while the Smith family is less wealthy. In a first scenario, income inequality in Mobilistan is a Gini value of 0.30 resulting from an income of $100,000 for the Jones’ and $25,000 for the Smith’s:

(I’ve used this handy Gini calculator here)

Assuming that the government of Mobilistan offers some education subsidies or public schooling facilities, we can also assume – given the specified levels of incomes - that the children of the Jones family and the Smith family can afford to attend the same schools. Hence, if some of the children of the Smith family work really hard and aren’t burdened with bad genes, and if some of the children of the Jones family drop out, then we may see that some adult children of the Smith family will belong to the same income class as the Jones family, and vice versa. In other words, we see social mobility. The effect of this mobility on income inequality can go either way: it can lead to lower or higher inequality or have no effect at all. It depends on the exact earnings of all the inhabitants of Mobilistan, including the adult offspring.

Now take a second scenario, and complicate things a tiny bit. There are now 4 families in Mobilistan: Smith, Daniels, Jones and Greggs. Both the Smith and Daniels families earn $25,000, and the Jones and Greggs families both earn $1,000,000. This results in a Gini of 0.46, an obviously higher inequality score:

This means that the Jones and Greggs families can afford better schooling for their children, which will make it much more difficult for the children of the Smith and Daniels families to compete for high paying jobs. This effect can be exarcerbated when the Jones and Greggs families start to outbid each other for the best education for their children, thereby making good education more expensive and even less accessible to the children of the Smith and Daniels families.

So instead of saying that inequality is not a problem because there is mobility, we should instead say that mobility is a problem because there is inequality.

More on social mobility here. More posts in this series are here.

(source)

But please, have some sympathy for the statistician. He’s not really a nihilist and he does care about people dying. All he wants is that the nihil regains its place at the right side of estimated numbers.

More on fake accuracy here. More statistical jokes here.

(source)

(source)

The complete lyrics are here. The song is here. More political graffiti here.

(source)

First, and for those in doubt: hunger is a human rights violations (see article 25 of the Universal Declaration). Second, before we discuss ways to measure this violation, we have to know what it is that we want to measure. It’s surprisingly difficult to define hunger.

Definition of hunger

The word “hunger” in this context does not refer to the subjective sensation that we have when lunch is late. We’re talking here about a chronic lack of food or a sudden and catastrophic lack of food (as in the case of a famine). We measure a lack of food by measuring dietary energy deficiency, which in turn is computed based on average daily calorie intake. The FAO estimates that the average minimum energy requirement per person is 1800 kcal per day. The global average per capita daily calorie intake is currently about 2800 kcal. This average obviously masks extreme differences between the obese and the chronically undernourished.

The FAO minimum energy requirement per person of 1800 kcal is also an average. The minimum calorie need depends on many things: age, climate, health, height, occupation etc.

Usually, the concept of “hunger” as it is defined here is different from “malnutrition“. Hunger is a lack of food defined as a lack of calorie intake. Malnutrition is a lack of quality food, of micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, and of a divers diet. Hence, people may have access to sufficient quantities of food and still be malnourished.

Hunger and famine are also different concepts. Hunger is a chronic and creeping lack of food, while a famine results from the sudden collapse of food stocks. A famine implies widespread starvation during a limited period. It can’t go on forever because it must stop when everyone has died or when food supplies are restored. Chronic hunger on the other hand can go on forever because it doesn’t imply widespread starvation. Of course, people do die of chronic hunger, and on a global level hunger kills more people than famines do. But whereas in the case of famine people die of starvation, the victims of chronic hunger usually don’t starve to death. When we say that hunger kills someone every 3.6 seconds we usually mean that this person dies from an infectious disease brought on by hunger. Hunger increases people’s vulnerability to diseases which are otherwise nonfatal (e.g. diarrhea, pneumonia etc.). In fact, most hunger related deaths do not occur during famines. Chronic hunger is much more deadly – it’s just not as noticeable as a famine. When and where famines occur, they are more deadly and catastrophic. But they occur, thank God, only exceptionally. Hunger on the other hand is a permanent fixture of the lives of millions and ubiquitous in many countries.

"dying child" by Jac Saorsa

(source)

Measurement of hunger

Given this definition, how do we go about and measure the extent of chronic hunger? (The measurement of famine is a separate problem, discussed here). There are different possible methods:

• So-called food intake surveys (FIS) estimate dietary intake and try to relate this to energy needs determined by physical activity. Calorie intake below a minimum level means hunger. The problem here is that minimum calorie intake thresholds are somewhat arbitrary and do not always take people’s different calorie requirements into account. Even for a single individual, this threshold can vary over time (depending on the climate, the individual’s age, occupation and health etc.). Moreover, when trying to measure calorie intake, you’re faced with the problem of hunger due to imperfect absorption: it’s not because someone in a sample buys and consumes x number of calories that he or she actually absorbs those calories. The widespread incidence of diarrhea and other health problems often mean that only a fraction of calories eaten are absorbed by the body.
• In order to bypass this, some propose a measurement method based on revealed preferences. The greater the share of calories people receive from the cheapest foods available to them, the hungrier they are; and, conversely, the more they buy expensive sources of calories, the less hungry they are. Their choice of foods reveals whether they have enough calories. This method therefore eliminates the threshold and absorption problems.

Our approach derives from the fact that when a person is below their nutrition threshold, there is a large utility penalty due to the physical discomfort associated with the body’s physiological and biochemical reaction to insufficient nutrition. At this stage, the marginal utility of calories is extremely high, so a utility-maximizing consumer will largely choose foods that are the cheapest available source of calories, typically a staple like cassava, rice or wheat. However, once they have passed subsistence, the marginal utility of calories declines significantly and they will begin to substitute towards foods that are more expensive sources of calories but that have higher levels of non-nutritional attributes such as taste. Thus, though any individual’s actual subsistence threshold is unobservable, their choice to switch away from the cheapest source of calories reveals that their marginal utility of calories is low and that they have surpassed subsistence. Accordingly, the percent of calories consumed from the staple food source, or the staple calorie share (SCS), can be used as an indicator for nutritional sufficiency. (source, source)

• Still another method consists of measuring hunger’s physical effects on growth and thinness. Instead of measuring calorie intake, hunger or revealed preferences, you measure people’s length, their stunted growth and their body mass index. However, this is very approximative since length and weight may be determined by lots of factors, many of them unrelated to hunger.
• And finally there are subjective approaches. The WFP does surveys asking people how often they ate in the last week and what they ate, how often they skip meals, how far they are away from markets, if their hunger is temporary or chronic etc. Gallup does something similar.

More on hunger here. More data here. And more posts in this series here.

(source)

Egypt’s army has devised an original method to defend itself against possible allegations of rape by women “in its care”:

By now, almost everyone has heard the about the 18 women protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square who this past spring were detained, beaten, given electric shocks, strip searched and forced to submit to “virginity tests“. (source)

May I suggest that trying to protect yourself against potential charges of rape by violating women’s bodies isn’t really very smart? Of course, the real reason for these tests is torture and intimidation. Women will probably think twice before participating in protests if they know what may happen if they are detained. The tests themselves are horrific, but they can also entail future harm: if the tests are negative, women risk prostitution charges, jail sentences and social stigma.

The tests involve an inspection of a female’s hymen, on the mistaken assumption that her hymen can only be torn as a result of sexual intercourse. This is one account of the way in which the tests were conducted:

[T]he female detainees were separated into two groups, the married and unmarried. The seven unmarried women were given a medical checkup during which the “virginity test” was done. …

“They took us out one by one … they took me to a bed in a passageway in front of the cell. There were lots of soldiers around and they could see me.

I asked if the soldiers could move away and the officer escorting me teased me.

A woman prison guard in plainclothes stood at my head and then a man in military uniform examined me with his hand for several minutes. It was painful. He took his time”. (source)

Fortunately, an Egyptian court has now ruled that virginity tests on female detainees are illegal, referencing the human rights guaranteed in the Egyptian Constitutional Declaration of 2011 as well as Egypt’s obligation under international law. Which of course doesn’t mean the tests will end. Virginity tests in general have not been outlawed, only those taking place in military detention premises. And it remains to be seen if the military will respect the ruling.

More on gender based violence. More absurd human rights violations.

Participation in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

However, international law may be no more than window-dressing, at least in this case. In large parts of the world, national law does not conform to the obligation of CEDAW or it’s not enforced when it conforms:

(source, click images to enlarge)

(source)

More maps on country participation in international human rights instruments are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

Democratic peace theory states that democracies are less likely to engage in war with each other, for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is the fact that in a democracy, the people vote, and the people are also those who shoulder the cost of war. In a regime in which the people can influence the decision to go to war, such a decision will only be taken very reluctantly. Conversely, a regime that doesn’t need to listen to its people can easily impose the cost of war. (More here, here and here).

What’s the link with targeted killings of terrorists? Let’s limit the discussion to drone attacks in the context of a war. Killing terrorists in any other context amounts to extrajudicial execution, since those terrorists are criminals rather than combatants and therefore have a right to a trial (unless killing them is the only way to stop an imminent attack). In the context of a war, targeted killings carried out by unmanned drone aircraft are supposed to have certain advantages compared to “normal” military engagement with the enemy. Two of those advantages are that

• drone attacks are said to be more precise and hence less likely to result in civilian casualties, and that
• you can avoid putting your own soldiers in harms way.

The supposed precision of drone attacks is contested, since it’s often difficult to judge from thousands of miles away whether the target is real, whether the informants on the ground are reliable and whether there’s no risk to innocent bystanders. There have been reports of civilian casualties resulting from drone attacks, although the true extent of this problem is difficult to measure since there’s no public information on those attacks.

Officers control and watch images taken by Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones)

In some cases, troops on the ground may be better able to judge these things. It’s also not commonly accepted that it’s ethical to focus on troop safety over and above the risk of civilian casualties. This focus is, of course, understandable in the case of a democracy engaging in a war. Public opinion is powerful in a democracy and doesn’t like it when troops are put in harms way – that’s one of the origins of the democratic peace theory. (It’s sometimes called the body bag syndrome). Hence, a democracy may be particularly tempted to use drone attacks and targeted killings, since a more traditional war is difficult to sell to a powerful public opinion.

If indeed a democracy is tempted to use targeted killings, then the price to pay may be the loss of democratic peace. Targeted killings remove one of the most powerful causes of democratic peace: the high cost of war. By making war less costly on the party initiating the war, targeted killings make war more likely.

[T]o me the reason to prefer human to robotic war is a cold and brutal one: because it brings war home to the citizenry in the form of the dead and wounded, and the citizenry may then be less likely to support future wars except out of clear necessity. (source)

More on targeted killings here.

Related Articles

• Drone attack in Pakistan kills at least 12 (guardian.co.uk)
• Gabriella Blum and Philip Heymann on Targeted Killing (volokh.com)
• Drone attacks to continue, says US official (teabreak.pk)

The Father's Curse or The Ungrateful Son, 1777 (oil on canvas) by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). A son deserts his family, including an aged father, to join the army. The cursing father on the left reaches with outstretched hands to his departing son, while the female members of the family plead desperately. Even the baby clings anxiously to his brother’s coattails. The son stretches out his arm as he advances toward the door, where his bemused companion observes the scene.

“After everything I’ve done for you…”, a study in ungratefulness:

An undocumented immigrant who came forward to help police solve a high-profile murder is being rewarded for his bravery by being deported. … Currently being held at the Essex County Jail, Chehoud says federal immigration authorities ignored recommendations by New Jersey police and prosecutors that he be allowed to stay in the United States. … According to a recent article in the NY Daily News, the murder of Michael Augulis in 1999 would have gone unsolved if it weren’t for Chehoud’s aid to law enforcement officials. Originally called an accidental drowning in Sandy Hook Bay, Chehoud told police that two men in a fishing boat had thrown Augulis overboard, knowing he couldn’t swim. New Jersey State Police later arrested the two men, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

New Jersey police and prosecutors have pleaded Chehoud’s case, telling federal immigration officials that he was so critical to solving the case that he should be allowed to stay, not punished for coming forward.

Undocumented immigrants often avoid reporting crimes against themselves or others precisely because they fear exposing themselves to law enforcement officials. Chehoud’s treatment is likely to solidify that impression and discourage the undocumented from seeking out help when they need it. (source)

More on illegal immigration. More in the annals of heartlessness.

Gustav Klimt's Woman seated with thighs apart (1916)

(source)

While you might think of masturbation as a sort of last refuge for the incarcerated — a truly inalienable freedom, given the happy proximity of the sex organs — that is not the case. In fact, a number of state prisons regard jerking off as a rule infraction. … [Such restrictions are “well-entrenched” in the correctional environment [in the U.S.]. (source)

And probably elsewhere as well. The rules apply even when there’s no indecent exposure. In the 19th century, some U.S. prison officials even

chloroformed masturbators and implanted metal rings through their foreskins. (source)

These days, prison officials often turn a blind eye and don’t enforce the rules. But sometimes

prisoners do … get in trouble for engaging in autoerotic behavior. Early on the morning of May 16, 2000, in South Carolina’s Lieber Correctional Institution, Officer Patricia Sinkler saw inmate Freddie Williams “in the front entrance of the shower, curtains open, with his left hand propped up against the wall, turned sideways, making back and forth movements with his right hand on his penis,” according to a court document. Sinkler filed a disciplinary report recommending that Williams be charged with sexual misconduct, and he was brought before a hearing officer and convicted. Williams appealed multiple times, insisting he had not intentionally exposed himself; the officer had simply walked past when he was going at it. He lost and had to relinquish 240 good-time credits.

A similar case occurred in Florida in 2006: Broward County inmate Terry Lee Alexander was sitting alone on his bunk masturbating when a female deputy who was monitoring him from a central control room more than 100 feet away took exception to Alexander’s “blatant” exertions and wrote him up. Alexander was charged and convicted of exposure, with the jury determining that a cell is “a limited access public place.” The same deputy had also filed reports on seven other locked-up masturbators. When Alexander’s attorney asked the deputy in court if she had considered calling a SWAT team to halt his client’s activity, she replied, “I wish I had.” (source)

Whether all this means that prisoners – or the population in general – should have a legal right to masturbate, is another matter. Probably not I guess. Not every prohibition on government intrusion should necessarily be translated into a right. The right to privacy should be sufficient to protect the act of masturbation and a specific right to masturbate is superfluous. And yes, inmates shouldn’t lose their right to privacy just because they’re in prison, even if some limitations of that right are inevitable in their case.

(source unknown)

Especially for the general population, a right to masturbate is utterly superfluous, since people normally enjoy enough privacy beyond the prison walls in order to be able to masturbate without government intrusion. Prisoners, however, may not always be granted enough privacy, as the cases cited above make clear. But instead of claiming a right to masturbate, inmates should insist on their right to privacy.

What about the right to be able to consume pornography? Again either for prisoners only or for the general population. For the latter, this right is covered by free speech. For the former, such a right would entail the additional right to be given pornography, as prisoners can’t go about procuring it themselves in the free speech marketplace. A prisoners’ right to pornography is not covered by free speech. However, I doubt it would be a good thing to have it. It may be good policy if prisons make porn available, but that doesn’t mean prisoners have a right to be given porn. Which doesn’t mean that prison officials have a right to take pornography away from prisoners once they have it. People don’t lose all their rights when they are incarcerated. And that includes private property.

In any case, taking away prisoners’ porn or their right to masturbate is likely to be counterproductive, as it will create unrest and lead to an increasing number of sexual predation cases among prisoners.

More on porn and masturbation. More in the annals of heartlessness.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools (painted c. 1490–1500) is intended to exemplify the human condition. Representatives of the whole of mankind are voyaging through the seas of time. Every one of them is a fool: eating and drinking too much, flirting and cheating, playing silly games, and we don’t look at the poor who fell out of the ship and are now begging for some crumbs. The ship drifts aimlessly and we never reach the harbour. (By the way, the scene where four fools try to eat a hanging pancake without using their hands is based on a folk custom).

According to Foucault, the painting also represents the view that “madmen” should be deported overseas. Madness was often equated with poverty, the incapacity to work and the inability to integrate in the group. In England, it was feared that the country could be overrun by the poor, and it was proposed that they be banished and deported to the colonies.

More political artists here.

gitmo by numbers, ACLU infographic

(source)

The oldest prisoner is 98 years old? Come on people. Nobody can claim with a straight face that this person is a serious threat. I’m sure he can be handled by those manly security guards in a normal US prison where he would find himself serving a sentence imposed on him after a regular trial.

More in this series here.

(source)

More on communism and capitalism. More jokes.

scene outside a UK polling station

(source)

Any attempt to measure the degree of democracy in a country should take into account the fact that democracy is something multidimensional. It won’t suffice to measure elections, not even the different aspects of elections such as frequency, participation, fairness, transparency etc. It takes more than fair and inclusive elections to have a democracy. Of course, the theoretical ideal of democracy is a controversial notion, so we won’t be able to agree on all the necessary dimensions or elements of a true democracy. Still, you can’t escape this problem if you want to build a measurement system: measuring something means deciding which parts of it are worth measuring.

You would also do best to take a maximalist approach: leaving out too many characteristics would allow many or even all countries to qualify as fully democratic and would make it impossible to differentiate between the different levels or the different quality of democracy across countries. A measurement system is useful precisely because it offers distinctions and detailed rankings and because it makes it possible to determine the distance to an ideal, whatever the nature of the ideal. Obviously, a maximalist approach is by definition more controversial than a minimal one. Everyone agrees that you can’t have a democracy without elections (or, better, without voting more generally). Whether strong free speech rights and an independent judiciary are necessary is less clear. And the same is true for other potential attributes of democracy.

Once you’ve determined what you believe are necessary attributes you can start to measure the extent at which they are present in different countries. Hence, your measurement will look like a set of sliding scales:

With all the markers on the right side in the case of a non-existing ideal democracy, and all the markers on the left side in the unfortunately very real case of total absence of democracy.

(The aggregation of these scales into a total country score is another matter that I’ve discussed elsewhere).

Some candidates of attributes are:

• Does a country include more or less people in the right to have a democratic say? How high is the voting age? Are criminals excluded from the vote, even after they have served their sentence? Are immigrants without citizenship excluded? Are there conditions attached to the right to vote (such as property, education, gender etc.)?
• Does a country include more or less topics in the right to a democratic say? Are voters not allowed to have a say about the affairs of the military, or about policies that have an impact on the rights of minorities? Does the judiciary have a right to judicial review of democratically approved laws?
• Does a country include more or less positions in the right to a democratic say? Can voters elect the president, judges, prosecutors, mayors, etc., or only parliamentarians? Can they elect local office holders? Does a country have a federalist structure with important powers at the local or state level?
• Does a country impose qualified majorities for certain topics or positions? Do voters have to approve certain measures with a two-thirds supermajority?
• Does a country provide more or less ways to express a democratic say? Can voters only elect officials or can they also vote on issues in referenda?
• Does a country impose more or less restrictions on the formation of a democratic say? Are free speech rights and assembly and association rights respected?
• Does a country accept more or less imbalances of power in the formation of a democratic say? Are there campaign financing rules?
• Does a country show more or less respect for the expression of a democratic say? How much corruption is there? Is the judiciary independent?

A “more” score on any of these attributes will push up the total “democracy score” for a country. At least it seems so, if not for the conclusion that all these complications in the measurement system are still not enough. We need to go further and add additional dimensions. For example, one can argue that we shouldn’t define democracy solely on the basis of the right to a democratic say, not even if we render this right as complex as we did above. A democracy should, ideally, also be a stable form of government, and allowing people to decide about the fundamental rights of minorities is an expression of the right to a democratic say but it is not in the long term interest of democracy. Those minorities will ultimately rebel against this tyranny of the majority and cause havoc for everyone.

More posts in this series are here.

Michael Douglas portrays a greedy corporate raider (Gordon Gekko) in the 1987 film "Wall Street," directed by Oliver Stone.

(source)

An anonymous career banker inside Goldman Sachs opened a twitter account (@GSElevator) with the intention of revealing the hilarious banter that takes place in the privacy of the GS elevators:

• “Groupon… Food stamps for the middle class.”
• “My garbage disposal eats better than 98% of the world.”
• “Walking around the protesters outside makes me feel like how a black guy must feel in the gym shower.”
• “I never give money to homeless people. I can’t reward failure in good conscience.”
• “Fact. Nearly 50% of all American workers have less than $10k saved for retirement.”
  “Fuck. That wouldn’t cover a ski weekend.”
• “From my experience, most people really should have lower self-esteem.”
• “My charity work begins & ends with black tie galas. And if drunk me is the highest bidder on a signed Springsteen guitar, so be it.” (source)

More in the annals of heartlessness.

Here are the States of the US that have hate crime laws covering crimes motivated by race, religion or ethnicity:

blue: presence of hate crime laws covering crimes motivated by race, religion or ethnicity, dd Oct 2009

(source)

An interesting question is to what extent the concept of hate crime should be open to modification: when is it appropriate or necessary to include new groups? Whereas a lot of hate crime legislation is limited to attacks on racial or religious groups, other laws include sexual orientation and gender identity, in which case homosexuals and transgendered people enjoy added protection:

hate crime legislation including secual orientation and gender identity

(source)

(source)

(source, click image to enlarge)

Data on Europe are below:

hate crime laws incl. sexual orientation in Romania, Croatia & Greece

(source, the full version of this map is here)

Another hate crime map here. More human rights maps here.

(source)

The context, including the reference to the hairstyle, is here:

More political graffiti.

(source)

Allow me to engage in some simplistic historical generalizations. Although, like most us, I have abandoned my youthful illusions about the overall progress of humanity, I still think we’ve taken giant steps towards the moral ideal of human equality. See what you think about this:

• During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, with the formation of the nation state in Europe and the development of the virtue of patriotism, citizens of those new states – and their copies elsewhere in the world – stopped acting as if members of neighboring tribes were somehow subhuman. Human equality, equal concern and equal rights were extended from the tribe to the nation.
• After the end of the religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the gradual acceptance of religious liberty, adherents of other religions were no longer viewed as sinners who had to be destroyed, but rather as equal citizens enjoying the same rights.
• From the middle of the 19th century (with the abolition of slavery) to the middle of the 20th (with the Civil Rights movement), non-whites gradually won equal rights.
• During roughly the same period, workers and the workers’ movement convinced the other social classes that someone who has to sell his or her labor power for a living isn’t destined to an animal-like life in filth and misery.
• From the beginning of the 20th century (with the suffragette movement) until the end of that century, women gradually won their equal place in many areas of society: politics, the labor market, etc. This movement, like all the previous ones, isn’t complete, but at least nowadays it’s rare to encounter the view that women are lesser men and should be relegated to the home.
• The Holocaust, ironically, resulted in a dramatic acceleration of the emancipation of Jews.
• The end of colonialism in the mid-20th century was the culmination of a long process during which westerners convinced themselves that the people they had colonized were not animals or subhumans but rather human beings like themselves.
• The latest step forward in the history of human equality can be witnessed in our own time: gays and lesbians are now in the process of achieving what other outgroups have achieved before them.

(source)

So these are all consecutive steps during which the circle of people who are considered as “people like us” has been widened again and again. Sure, this is history painted with a very rough brush. I obviously don’t mean to say that the inclusion of new groups into the class of “equal human beings” has been complete or final after each step. There are many racists left after the Civil Rights movement; many intolerant religious fundamentalists after the acceptance of the right to freedom of religion etc. Also, there have been major steps backward: nazism came after a long period of Jewish emancipation; the end of slavery in the U.S. resulted in renewed racism etc. And neither do I mean to imply that prior to the abolition of slavery there wasn’t a single soul who believed blacks were equal human beings, or that there were no women considered as equal before the victories of feminism.

There’s no reason to believe that this inclusionary movement is about to stop. I can see at least three additional steps:

• Our current treatment of criminals may come to be seen as unacceptable. There’s already a strong movement for the abolition of capital punishment, but I’m convinced that our whole system of criminal punishment is without justification. And I’m not just talking about overcrowding, prison rape, excessively long sentences etc. Read more here.
• Migrants as well may become more accepted, to the point that an open borders policy will be generalized. Currently, we still condemn people to misery for no other reason than the fact that they are born in the wrong place, like older generations condemned people to slavery for no other reason than their skin color. The causes of this exclusion are an insufficient awareness of the benefits of immigration and lingering prejudices against outgroups.
• And, finally, the inclusionary movement may one day lead to better treatment of animals: our current system of industrial meat production will then be considered barbaric.

Do I forget something?

I will update this as often as I can.

(source, source; original here and here)

(source, source; original here)

(source, source; original here)

(source, source; original here)

(source, source; original here)

This is so evocative: it shows an alternative history, the history of a better humanity.

More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

The Ploughing Lesson by François-André Vincent (1746-1816)

As I stated before, economic theory suggests that income inequality is a necessary price to pay for economic efficiency: unequal rewards incite those with talents, skill and perseverance to innovate and to be productive, so they can reap higher benefits. Ultimately, this serves the welfare of the whole of society (a process which is then caricatured in trickle down economics). The mirror image of this is reductions of inequality that take away incentives for doing well, and that therefore result in economic inefficiency and less prosperity for all.

Tyler Cowen has framed it like this:

Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary … We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can. (source)

But is that really true? There is some evidence that reducing inequality through redistribution actually promotes wealth creation. What’s the mechanism? Sam Bowles claims to have identified one element of it:

Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources … [I]n a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive. Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor”. (source)

More about that effect here and here. Other parts of the mechanism through which inequality impedes and equality promotes growth may be the following:

Poverty causes credit constraints. This stops the poor investing in businesses or education; the low aspirations caused by poverty can have the same effect. … Inequality can create the threat of redistribution which can blunt incentives to invest. Or it can lead to state interventions – such as the minimum wage – that harm wealth creation. … The backlash against wealth-creating processes such as globalization, offshoring and private equity in the UK and US are founded in the view that they create inequality. If we had better redistribution mechanisms (say, a basic income) such backlashes would be reduced, and the wealth creation process enhanced. (source)

That sounds persuasive and I want to see some evidence. In the meantime, it’s perhaps a bit glib to announce that “the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited”.

Related Articles

• Spirit of the age (economist.com)
• Readers Comments on Inequality (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)

• Philosophy: you don’t have to be smart to be stupid, but it helps
• Julian Baggini: “Conservatism is not a philosophy but a disposition”, or in other words, you can’t win an argument with ME
• my 2011 annual blog report, for addicts only http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2011/annual-report/ #yearinreview
• marriage = inattentional blindness + confirmation bias + sunk cost fallacy + adaptive preferences – beauty bias
• Weird photo opportunity. The 1 who just lost an election = only 1 smiling. Apart from that they’re the best of friends. http://t.co/npC75gZP
• I’m strongly against capital punishment (http://wp.me/pd52p-6TX), but the makers of Photoshop are testing my resolve: http://t.co/3aan59CQ
• go 2 court 4 bad review: http://bit.ly/tsEWyA & http://wp.me/pd52p-6FC freedom of speech thin veneer even for those making a living of speech
• #Korea must be THE best natural experiment proving the value of freedom wp.me/pd52p-10Y
• #Romney: full length fence at border with Mexico, #Bachmann: double fence; #Cain: electrify it; #anotherguy: landmines! wp.me/pd52p-7od
• Only real problem in life: we’re just not smart enough. Fortunately, politics is one thing that isn’t about smart. http://t.co/UCf9GWu9
• Amazing how much serious legal analysis a few nutcases can spawn http://bit.ly/hobew8 they must feel pretty good about themselves
• meritocracy and social mobility in the US: “70% of the top 1% have been employed by their father’s firm” http://t.co/7xGbDOzQ
• Everyone should have a maximum # of children so as to maximize chances that 1 of them solves the overpopulation problem http://t.co/ARRI8S1J

Follow me here. Previous overviews of tweets are here.

(source)

More statistical jokes here.

The right to food (art. 25 of the Universal Declaration i.a.) doesn’t get a good press. Only a handful believe that it’s comparable in importance to rights such as free speech or freedom of religion. This disdain surprises me. And it’s not just that it shows a failure to understand the interdependence of rights – none of our rights make any sense on an empty stomach. If you know that 6 million children under the age of five die of hunger every year there is at least a prima facie reason – although not a sufficient reason, I admit – to claim that there should be a human right to food.

The counter argument goes as follows: if we grant people a right to food, they will stop working and just watch television all day while the government gives them food. That will destroy both the economy and people’s character.

I think that’s really silly. Let’s make an analogy with an uncontroversial right, the right to free movement. This right doesn’t mean that the government should “give people movement”. That doesn’t make sense. People claiming that right don’t ask for the government to move them. What they ask is

1. that the government doesn’t hinder their free movement (hence a legal prohibition on internal border controls, restricted zones etc.); and
2. that the government helps people to acquire the capability to move freely if they don’t have that capability (hence assistance to people with disabilities and the construction of public highways).

The same is true for the right to food. This right doesn’t tell the government to give people food. All it demands is that the government doesn’t take away people’s food or people’s ability to acquire food (as it did in this instance), and that it helps people acquire the ability to get food. The latter may imply temporary food provision (or giving cash for food) to those in dire need, but this provision is aimed at capacity building, and should stop when people’s capabilities are restored.

A closely related discussion is the one about positive and negative rights. See here.

(source)

This more or less tracks population density:

(source)

Meaning that the genocide was pretty much everywhere, something that’s also represented in this strange map (inspired by the iconic skull images of the Killing Fields):

(source)

More human rights maps here.

(source)

The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979. … Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by … indicate at least 1,386,734 victims. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million. (source)

More on genocide here and here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

(source)

Witchcraft is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia. Recently, another person was executed:

the Saudi Interior Ministry announced on Monday that it had beheaded a woman named Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser for practicing “witchcraft and sorcery.” The London-based al-Hayat newspaper, citing the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman after a report from a female investigator, claims Nasser was tricking people into paying $800 per session to have their illnesses cured. (source)

How do prosecutors prove that someone is in fact a witch?

[T]he bar for proving someone guilty isn’t very high. Witch hunting is fairly institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, with the country’s religious police running an Anti-Witchcraft Unit and a sorcery hotline to combat practices like astrology and fortune telling that are considered un-Islamic.

But institutionalized is not the same thing as codified. A top official in the kingdom’s Ministry of Justice told Human Rights Watch in 2008 that there is no legal definition for witchcraft (Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a penal code) or specific body of evidence that has probative value in witchcraft trials.

Instead, judges have wide latitude in interpreting Sharia law and sentencing suspected criminals. And Amnesty International claims these judges use witchcraft charges to arbitrarily ”punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion.” A Human Rights Watch researcher tells The Media Line that foreigners in particular are often the targets of sorcery accusations because of their traditional practices or, occasionally, because Saudi men facing charges of sexual harassment by domestic workers want to discredit their accusers.

The evidence arrayed against witchcraft suspects typically revolves around statements from accusers and suspicious personal belongings that suggest the supernatural, in a country where superstition is still widespread. (source)

In 2007

Saudi authorities beheaded an Egyptian pharmacist who had been accused by neighbors of casting spells to separate a man from his wife and placing Korans in mosque bathrooms. “He confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom,” the Saudi Press Agency reported, adding that books on black magic, a candle with an incantation “to summon devils,” and “foul-smelling herbs” had been found in the pharmacist’s home. (source)

Here’s an alternative verification procedure:

More absurd human rights violations.

(source)

More on truth in politics here, here and here. More on the stupidity of voters here. More jokes here.

Anti-papal painting by Girolamo da Treviso, "A Protestant Allegory"

(source - The painting refers to the English Reformation, formally sanctioned by the Act of Supremacy of 1534, whereby Henry VIII broke away from the Church of Rome and was established as head of the Church of England. The painting was in the collection of Henry VIII who owned at least two other anti-papal pictures. The composition comprises a pope sprawling on the ground, flanked by two female figures representing avarice and hypocrisy, all of whom are being stoned by the four evangelists. On the ground in front of these figures are a cardinal’s hat and a document with four seals (probably a Papal Bull). The city in the distance on the left may be Jerusalem. Above the city is a burning candle, which contrasts with another in the immediate foreground that has been extinguished by a cooking pan. These candles have been interpreted as symbolizing respectively the true light of the Gospels and the false doctrine of Rome)

Rights are often described as correlates of duties: if you have a right to something, someone else – or maybe everyone else – has a duty to respect your right. However,  it’s also possible to conceptualize your right as a means for you to execute your own duties. So, rather than your rights being my duties, your rights are your duties. This may sound weird but bear with me for a second.

Many early Protestants conceived of their rights exactly in this way. And if you know that Protestant thinking was one of the main driving forces behind the human rights revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, then you also know that it’s important to understand the early Protestant mindset.

How exactly did they view human rights? The individual, according to early Protestants, has certain duties towards God: to exercise his or her religion, to honor God, to worship, to rest on Sunday, to proselytize, and to treat neighbors with care and love. These duties were then transformed into rights, not the rights of others but the rights of the duty bearers. A right became the expression of a duty. If it’s a duty to proselytize, then Protestants should have the right to free speech as a means to proselytize. If it’s a duty to worship God, then Protestants have a right to religious liberty. Etc. Protestants didn’t demand their rights and their freedom from government in order to pursue their desires and private wants, but in order to better be able to perform their religious duties.

Why do I mention this? It’s ancient history by now. These days, hardly anyone conceives of their rights in this way, and Protestants – especially American Protestants – are no longer at the frontline of the battle for human rights (if anything, they oppose many contemporary interpretations of human rights, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, social security etc.).

Richard Rorty

I mention it because it’s interesting to see how different people belonging to different traditions and cultures can account for human rights in different ways, using the resources available in their own heritage. I don’t think this particular Protestant interpretation of human rights is a convincing account – neither for me personally (I’m an agnostic) nor for present-day Protestants. But I do think that it can inspire others, and particularly those who belong to traditions that contain strong anti-rights strands, to have another look at their heritage and try to find an account of human rights that can be supported by other strands of the same tradition. I mean, if what we would now call fundamentalist Protestants could do it centuries ago, why not pious Muslims today?

Jacques Maritain

All this boils down to the problem of the justification of human rights. Why do we need human rights? Even if you share Richard Rorty’s skepticism about foundationalism - as I do – you’ll still have to answer the question “but why?” if you talk about respecting rights to those who are hostile to them. There’s no way around that question. A particularly powerful answer is one that uses the resources available in the traditions of those who are hostile. An even more powerful answer is one that those people can come up with themselves. Seeing how others did it may inspire them. And I have no problem with different people coming up with totally different and even incompatible justifications of human rights. To put some words into the mouth of Jacques Maritain: I don’t care why people adhere to and respect human rights, as long as they do.

More on the justifications of human rights here, here and here.

(source unknown)

More on the recession here. More political graffiti here.

(source, more about the watermelon stereotype here)

Measuring racism is a problem, as I’ve argued before. Asking people if they’re racist won’t work because they don’t answer this question correctly, and understandably so. This is due to the social desirability bias. Surveys may minimize this bias if they approach the subject indirectly. For example, rather than simply asking people if they are racist or if they believe blacks are inferior, surveys could ask some of the following questions:

• Do you believe God has created the races separately?
• What do you believe are the reasons for higher incarceration rates/lower IQ scores/… among blacks?
• Etc.

Still, no guarantee that bias won’t falsify the results. Maybe it’s better to dump the survey method altogether and go for something even more indirect. For example, you can measure

• racism in employment decisions, such as numbers of callbacks received by applicants with black sounding names
• racism in criminal justice, for example the degree to which black federal lower-court judges are overturned more often than cases authored by similar white judges, or differences in crime rates by race of the perpetrator, or juror behavior
• racial profiling
• residential racial segregation
• racist consumer behavior, e.g. reluctance to buy something from a black seller
• the numbers of interracial marriages
• the numbers and membership of hate groups
• the number of hate crimes
• etc.

newspaper clipping about an interracial marriage; February 10, 1955

(source)

A disadvantage of many of these indirect measurements is that they don’t necessarily reflect the beliefs of the whole population. You can’t just extrapolate the rates you find in these measurements. It’s not because some judges and police officers are racist that the same rate of the total population is racist. Not all people who live in predominantly white neighborhoods do so because they don’t want to live in mixed neighborhoods. Different crime rates by race can be an indicator of racist law enforcement, but can also hide other causes, such as different poverty rates by race (which can themselves be indicators of racism). Higher numbers of hate crimes or hate groups may represent a radicalization of an increasingly small minority. And so on.

Another alternative measurement system is the Implicit Association Test. This is a psychological test that measures implicit attitudes and beliefs that people are either unwilling or unable to report.

Because the IAT requires that users make a series of rapid judgments, researchers believe that IAT scores may reflect attitudes which people are unwilling to reveal publicly. (source)

Participants in an IAT are asked to rapidly decide which words are associated. For example, is “female” or “male” associated with “family” and “career” respectively? This way, you can measure the strength of association between mental constructs such as “female” or “male” on the one hand and attributes such as “family” or “career” on the other. And this allows you to detect prejudice. The same is true for racism. You can read here or here how an IAT is usually performed.

Yet another measurement system uses evidence from Google search data, such as in this example. The advantage of this system is that it avoids the social desirability bias, since Google searches are done alone and online and without prior knowledge of the fact that the search results will be used to measure racism. Hence, people searching on Google are more likely to express social taboos. In this respect, the measurement system is similar to the IAT. Another advantage of the Google method, compared to traditional surveys, is that the Google sample is very large and more or less evenly distributed across all areas of a country. This allows for some fine grained geographical breakdown of racial animus.

More specifically, the purpose of the Google method is to analyze trends in searches that include words like “nigger” or “niggers” (not “nigga” because that’s slang in some Black communities, and not necessarily a disparaging term). In order to avoid searches for the term “nigger” by people who may not be racially motivated – such as researchers (Google can’t tell the difference) – you could refine the method and analyze only searches for phrases like “why are niggers lazy”, “Obama+nigger“, “niggers/blacks+apes” etc. If you find that those searches are more common in some locations than others, or that they become more common in some locations, then you can try to correlate those findings with other, existing indicators of racism such as those cited above, or with historic indicators such as prevalence of slavery or lynchings.

More posts in this series are here.

Statistics on Capital Punishment

38,124

The Causes of Poverty (3): Overview

28,673

Segregation, A Collection of Images

27,091

Statistics on Discrimination of Homosexuals

26,137

Statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Correlations

25,242

Human Rights Quote (48): Aids Disaster

22,808

Statistics on Child Labor

20,832

Statistics on Discrimination of Women

17,862

Statistics on Prison Population Rates

17,850

Statistics on Child Soldiers

15,704

Children’s Rights (2): Child Labor

15,306

Overpopulation, A Collection of Images

14,844

Torture, A Collection of Images

14,677

Limiting Free Speech (3): Hate Speech

14,493

The Anti-Democrat’s Paradox

14,420

Statistics on Racism

12,239

Statistics on Poverty and Education

11,745

Statistics on Poverty in India

11,260

The Causes of Poverty (17): Overpopulation

11,122

The Causes of Poverty (18): Amartya Sen, Famines, and Democracy

11,040

(source unknown)

… and as usual we’ll take a short holiday break. Daily posting will resume on January 2nd.

In the meantime, why don’t we – tongueincheekish - reflect on some of the human rights issues thrown up by the Holidays? After all, the nativity story is about the slaughter of innocent children as well as the birth of the Holy One. Hardly an event to remember with songs of joy and happiness. And then there’s Santa Claus, giving toys instead of basic necessities, and giving richer children more toys than poor children. The Holidays seems designed to justify rampant capitalism, inequality and consumerism.

Santa also has a 1984-like disrespect for privacy, sliding down chimneys in the middle of the night without a word or a ring of the bell. Even more 1984-like is his ability to read children’s minds and ascertain their “goodness” or “badness”. His morals, furthermore, are arbitrary and authoritarian, and children have no occasion to contest his moral judgment or to justify their supposedly “bad” behavior. All this talk about a ”record” of children’s annual performance is just plain creepy and no better than the KGB. It looks like the myth of Santa has been designed to instill fear of an omniscient moral punisher – similar to the eye of God – and to initiate very young children into the all pervasive social discipline they will have to inhabit as adults.

In addition, let’s not forget that the holiday season is the occasion to elevate Christianity above all other religions, and is a slap in the face of religious liberty, the separation of state and church and government neutrality.

Bonus joke:

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.” (source)

Still, a really sincere “merry Christmas and a happy new year” to all of you, Christmas addicts and libertarians included.

(source)

More on the invisible hand and on charity. More human rights cartoons.

However, certain borders are fortified more than others. The US-Mexican border, the India-Pakistan border, the separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea are among the places where the toughest national security and anti-movement policies are in force. Below are some maps and aerial images that illustrate the extent of these policies.

The US-Mexican border

The US is constructing a border fence in order to stop illegal Mexican immigrants - as well as “terrorists” according to some. This fence currently covers about a third of the border. Right wing politicians want to expand it, even though the non-fenced areas are so remote or rugged as to make a fence pointless or impractical. Together with drone aircraft, helicopters, video surveillance, seismic sensors, infrared sensors, private vigilantes and thousands of border patrol guards in all-terrain vehicles and on horse-back, it has indeed driven down the numbers of illegal immigrants – although the recession has also done its bit.

(source, click image to enlarge)

(source, more on SBInet here)

aerial photo of border at Imperial Beach, CA

(source)

The India-Pakistan border

The border between these two countries is hotly contested, especially in the region of Kashmir. India is also wary of terrorist infiltration along the entire border. Sometimes called the “Berlin Wall of Asia”, the border has only one road crossing. Half of the border is floodlit, and hence can be seen from space:

India Pakistan border as seen from the International Space Station (southern part to the right side of this image)

(source)

India Pakistan border as seen from the International Space Station (northern part on the left side of this image)

(source)

(source)

The separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories

To so-called Westbank Barrier between the West Bank and Israel will be approximately 760 kilometres upon completion. In some places it’s a concrete wall. 12% of the West Bank area is on the Israel side of the barrier, meaning that parts of the occupied territories captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 are now “in Israel”. The main rationale for the barrier is protection against terrorist incursions, specifically by suicide bombers. The barrier severely disrupts free movement in the Westbank as well as access to Israel for Palestinians working there. Some Jewish settlers, on the other hand, condemn the barrier for appearing to renounce the Jewish claim to the whole of the “Land of Israel”.

(source)

(source)

The DMZ between North and South Korea

Since the end of the Korean war, there’s a country-wide demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, cutting the Korean Peninsula roughly in half along the 38th parallel. It’s 250 kilometres long – plus extensions into the sea – and approximately 4 km wide. It’s the most heavily militarized border in the world.

Korean dmz map

(source)

The South has discovered four tunnels crossing the DMZ, dug by North Korea. The North claimed they were for coal mining but no coal has been found in the tunnels, which are dug through granite. Some of the tunnel walls have been painted black to give the appearance of anthracite. Not very cunning. The tunnels are believed to have been planned as military invasion routes.

The border is visible from space at night, not because it’s floodlit but because of the large difference in electricity use between the prosperous South and the impoverished North:

(source)

And, no, it’s not dark because they’re all building tunnels…

All these borders are sad reminders of humanity’s penchant for xenophobia, exclusion, parochialism, national hostility and war. And a testimony to almost universally shared misconceptions about property rights over the earth, about freedom of movement and about the value of diversity and equal opportunity.

More human rights maps here. More on satellite images and human rights here.

An interesting talk about gendercide, gender differences in child mortality and in literacy and education, human trafficking, maternal mortality etc.

More human rights videos are here.

"Wall Street in Panic" from 1929. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

As an update of this previous post, here’s some more information about the nature of the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction.

In a recent paper, Lane Kenworthy has compared growth and income data for 17 developed countries. Specifically, he looked at the ways in which the incomes of people in low to middle income groups benefit from economic growth. “Growth” here means increases in the amount of per capita GDP – this caveat is necessary in order to filter out economic growth that is the result of population growth and that doesn’t make the average person better off (although it obviously can make some persons better off, immigrants for instance). “Income” includes both wages and welfare benefits or other government transfers. Another preliminary remark: it’s wrong to think that growth automatically and by definition makes everyone – and hence also the poor – better off. It just makes the average person better off. That means that it can also make some people – e.g. the poor – worse off. Growth numbers are silent about the distribution of the effects of growth.

The question which the paper tries to answer is the following. Given that poor people can benefit from economic growth in two ways:

1. either growth “trickles down“: more aggregate national income or production means more jobs, better paid jobs etc.
2. or growth can increase the government’s tax base so that the welfare system can be made more generous,

which of these two mechanisms has been most prominent in the 17 countries examined in the paper?

The answer is “number 2″. Why? Well, in some of the selected countries economic growth was accompanied by a significant rise in low-to-middle household incomes, while in the other countries the effect of economic growth on the incomes of people in low-to-middle income groups was much smaller or zero. If economic growth trickles down (1), then one would assume it trickles down everywhere. After all, if growth results in more and better paid jobs for the poor, then there’s no a priori reason why this result would occur in one country but not in another.

The nature of government transfer systems is the reason why the effect of growth on the incomes of the poor is not the same in all countries:

when households on low incomes got better off, it was due most often to a rise in net government transfers. Where net transfers increased, incomes tended to increase in concert with economic growth. Norway, the UK, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark illustrate this pattern. Where net transfers were stagnant, income trends were decoupled from growth of the economy. We observe this in the United States, Canada, and Switzerland. This is an important finding. It means that, as a general rule, growth has not trickled down to low income households through wages or employment. And it means that, when government transfers haven’t grown, wages and employment haven’t stepped in to take their place. (source)

(source unknown)

Looking at all this from the perspective of the causes of poverty: it’s clear that poor economic growth in wealthy countries cannot, by itself, explain poverty, because these countries can witness both growth and stagnation of the lowest incomes (as a result of their failure to implement the necessary transfer programs). Hence you can have growth without poverty reduction. If lack of growth is the main cause of poverty, then growth would by itself and automatically reduce poverty. We see that this is not the case.

In poor countries, on the other hand, growth can perhaps be sufficient. Those countries start from a lower base and more can trickle down. A lack of growth can, therefore, explain the persistence of poverty in developing countries, but probably not in developed countries. The latter have a basis of wealth that is large enough to fund welfare programs even if growth is poor. Growth helps to make this funding easier, but it’s not really necessary. A more progressive tax system, coupled with some good legislative will, can also do the trick.

More here.

(source)

More on Thomas Jefferson here. More political graffiti here.

torture scene with rats from the movie "1984"

(source)

When democratic governments consider the option of torturing someone, the stakes are usually high. They won’t consider it just for some marginal benefit. The paradigmatic case is the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill thousands or even millions. Torture is supposed to be justified because the benefits are huge, or – stated negatively – because the possible harm resulting from a failure to torture is huge. Combining the size of what is at stake with the urgency of the threat makes the case for torture even stronger.

However, this justification of torture has some unsettling side effects. Given the urgency, and given the fact that terrorists are probably trained to withstand torture, a free society would have to

maintain a professional class of torturers, and to equip them with continuously-updated torture techniques and equipment. Grave dangers to democracy and to individual freedoms would be posed by an institutionalized professional “torture squad”. (source)

Such a highly trained and continuously available torture squad would be necessary to inflict torture that is likely to succeed in extracting the information on a reliable basis and within an extremely short time frame. It would also be necessary to inflict levels of pain sufficient to procure the victim’s compliance but insufficient to kill or render incapable of communication. Amateur thugs will not suffice. You really need professionals.

This is the institutionalization of torture. It’s difficult to see how a free society could survive the presence of such a torture squad. It would infect our entire society to know that there are people among us who torture for a living. The squad members themselves will most likely fail to remain well-intentioned, and the mere existence of such a squad corrupts morality in a society. It’s naive to think that the members of the torture squad will return to normality once their job is done and function like normal law-abiding and non-violent citizens in between emergency sessions. Torture leads to the destruction of a democracy and a free society that decides to go this way.

More on social and political suicide here. More on the ticking bomb here.

(image source)

(source)

More on ecology. More jokes.

Another way to frame the question in the title of this post is: what falls under the header of “expression”, and what not? Only if something is justifiably called expression can it enjoy the protection of the right to free expression. I’ll argue below that “expression” covers more actions than the ones we intuitively classify under that concept. Hence, freedom of expression protects more than we think it protects.

And yet, it’s not because something is expression that it automatically enjoys protection. Some actions which we readily classify as “expression” are not and should not be protected by freedom of speech. In other words, freedom of expression covers more and at the same time less than we think.

The obvious type of action that is covered by the right to free speech, and the type that represents the large majority of expressive actions, is speaking and writing in day-to-day language. Such actions enjoy a prima facie protection by the right to free speech. Nothing special about that. However, the right also applies to other expressive actions, ones that do not involve speech or writing in ordinary language:

• some non-linguistic means of expression, such as visual art
• some forms of protest such as the burning of a draft card, a flag or a cross
• pornography
• the display of symbols (e.g. a swastika)
• etc.

These types of expressive actions can also claim protection in certain circumstances.

So, some things which are not readily identified as speech are nevertheless considered as speech acts and receive some form of protection from the right to free speech.

On the other hand, some actions that are unmistakably speech – such as hate speech, incitement etc. – are often justifiably excluded from the protection of the right to free speech.

Free speech therefore covers at the same time more and less than a cursory examination would conclude. However, the broad definition of speech that expands speech beyond mere linguistic acts does create a problem. Non-linguistic expressive actions are hard to delineate. All actions can include an expressive component, and it’s often difficult to determine when an agent intended to convey a message through her actions. So the concept can become too broad, and we risk, as a result, that freedom of speech covers all actions and becomes indistinguishable from freedom tout court. That can’t be the purpose.

Afghans burning a US flag after allegations of civilian casualties during an American attack

(source unknown)

Notwithstanding this problem, it’s obvious that not all linguistic or non-linguistic expressive actions should enjoy protection by the right to free speech. Terrorism is certainly an expressive action, but no one would claim that it should be protected by freedom of speech.

Beside the “freedom of what?” question, there’s another interesting one: “freedom from what?” Usually, freedom of expression, like many other type of freedom, is believed to be primarily or exclusively a freedom from government interference with speech. While that’s an important dimension of freedom, it’s not the only one. Rights have a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension: citizens can also violate each others rights, and hence freedom of expression for example is also a freedom from interference by fellow-citizens. More on the dimensions of human rights is here. More on free speech here.