Teddy's Atonement

According to Don Cooper, some news commentator said, the morning of Ted Kennedy's funeral, that "he spent the rest of his life trying to atone for his transgressions by serving the public." I've seen the same sentiment expressed in blog comments.

I find it very hard to understand what these people are thinking. How can his later life be seen as a sort of atonement? Maybe the idea is that "public [ie., government] service" makes you automatically virtuous, superior to the comparatively selfish private citizens who toil to pay your salary. Or maybe it is that people who do this sort of work are virtuous already, different from the ordinary run of human beings. Or maybe it is that pushing the "progressive" agenda automatically makes you superior.

Do these ideas even deserve to be refuted?*

As many people have said, the US Senate is the most exclusive club on Earth. You get a large (to me at least) salary at the expense of taxpayers, and in return you get to make up rules that they have to follow on pain of a term in prison. You also get to pass laws that take money from some people and give it to others (typically, ones who helped you to gain or keep your job). This sounds less like penance and more like privilege to me -- a privilege so immense as to be very difficult to justify from the point of view of absolute justice and morality.

If this had any connection with past transgressions (which it doesn't) I would have to think that it is not restitution to a world wronged, but a reward.

I have seen an idea similar to the public-service-as-atonement one attributed to Adlai Stevenson, but in a context in which it makes a lot more sense to me. Here is the Wikipedia version:

At the age of twelve Stevenson accidentally killed Ruth Merwin, a 16-year-old friend, while demonstrating drill technique with a rifle, inadvertently left loaded, during a party at the Stevenson home. Stevenson was devastated by the accident and rarely referred to it as an adult. However, as the Governor of Illinois he was told about a teenager who had survived an automobile accident while his friend was killed. Stevenson told the teen's father that he should tell his son that "he now has to live for two", which Stevenson's friends took to be a reference to the shooting incident

I find this story moving and more or less understandable. I see a couple of relevant differences from Teddy's case:

First, Adlai atoned by serving as governor of a state. I can actually see that as penance of a sort. Compared to being in the Senate, it is real gruntwork. And helming a state that contains a political cesspool like Chicago must have been repugnant to someone with Stevenson's refined sensibilities.

Second, the idea in this case doesn't sound like moral atonement -- in the sense of this will erase my guilt -- as much as something more primitive and profound. It seems to be something like: Because of me, there is one less person on earth. Unless I achieve enough good for two, my stay here will be a net deficit in the scheme of things.

Perhaps, as Spock would say, this is "not logical," but it does make a sort of emotional sense. If it isn't logical, it is psycho-logical.
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* Even further beneath contempt is the sentiment allegedly expressed by Melissa Lafsky at Huffington Post, who wondered what Maryjo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." Here we see utilitarianism exposing its cloven hoof. (Hat-tip to Mark Steyn.)

Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009

Even on Fox News, the coverage has ranged from respectful to reverent.

What the Hell? I just drove 500 miles in the past two days, and only saw one flag that was not at half staff.* Isn't that unusual for a mere Senator? What did they do when Bob ("Mr. Republican") Taft died, I wonder?

When did this man become a saint? I don't think I got that email.

The last time I paid any attention to him, he was still a hard-drinking, philandering jerk. But that admittedly was almost twenty years ago, when he was in his fifties and his ideas about fun leisure-time activities were the same as those of certain undergraduates on spring break in Cancún. My information, I realize, is badly out of date.

Somebody on Fox said that he sponsored over 2,000 pieces of legislation, as if that were a good thing. As if what we really need now is more rules and regulations, and anybody who slaps a lot more of them on us is doing us a great service.

I would like to know how many laws he repealed.

By the way, Maryjo Kopechne would have turned 69 on July 26th.
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* I also never saw a single Obama sticker on a bumper. McCain yes, and even Kerry, yes. Also anti-Obama stickers. But here in a state that gave him 10 electoral college votes all the Obama-Biden stickers have disappeared. Sup wit dat? Have those cars all gone into that vast, potlatch-like destruction of wealth, the "cash for clunkers" program? Or have the the stickers been peeled off out of shame? (On that one I am kidding of course. Voters almost never feel morally responsible for the consequences of their votes. One of the most distinctive features of democracy is the almost complete obliteration of responsibility on the part of the sovereign, which in democracy is the voter.)

On the Road

Once again, I'm traveling (visiting my friend Imtiaz Moosa up in River Falls). I'll be back to blogging this weekend.

Another Reason for Government Rationing of Medical Care (According to Singer)

In the article I blogged about the other day, Peter Singer gives an interesting argument to the conclusion that (to put it one way) Sarah Palin's grandmother and son ought to be discriminated against in a nationalized medical system.

Here is how it goes. First, he asks you to imagine having to make a certain sort of choice about your own life. Speaking of ways we might compare the value of different allocations of medical resources, he says:

How can we compare saving a person’s life with, say, making it possible for someone who was confined to bed to return to an active life? We can elicit people’s values on that too. One common method is to describe medical conditions to people — let’s say being a quadriplegic — and tell them that they can choose between 10 years in that condition or some smaller number of years without it. If most would prefer, say, 10 years as a quadriplegic to 4 years of nondisabled life, but would choose 6 years of nondisabled life over 10 with quadriplegia, but have difficulty deciding between 5 years of nondisabled life or 10 years with quadriplegia, then they are, in effect, assessing life with quadriplegia as half as good as nondisabled life.

From this this thought-experiment about choices you would make for yourself he draws a conclusion about how we ought to treat other people. He puts it in terms of the specific issue he was just talking about like this:

If that judgment represents a rough average across the population, we might conclude that restoring to nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all involved are similar.

More generally, the idea seems to be that our social calculations should be based on the idea that one more year of life for a quadriplegic has half the value of one more year for a non-quadriplegic (other things being equal). We should assume that for purposes of distributing medical care, it takes two quadriplegics to equal one healthy non-quadriplegic. Such a system discriminates against the disabled and, for similar reasons, against the old. What is wrong with his reasoning, if anything?

Something about it really bothers me -- not the conclusion, but the reasoning itself -- but I don’t think I have completely figured out what.

One point that is relevant is made by philosopher Tom Regan in another context. Singer's way of thinking reasons from the fact that I can enjoy twice the value that you can enjoy, to the conclusion that in our social calculations my life has twice the value that you have. It views humans as receptacles of value, but does not view them as having value in any other sense. We should respect the value people consume, but not the value that they are. That is how Singer is thinking. On the other hand, if you think that humans have value in and of themselves (if you believe in what Kant called “human dignity”) that gets in the way of sacrificing one person for the sake of another, which is what Singer (as I interpret him) advocates. So you can admit his premise but deny his conclusion.

Another thing that can block the inference that Singer makes is the particular way one might understand the first of these two sorts of value: the value that we consume. If I decide whether I would prefer ten years as a quadriplegic to four years of non-disabled life, I am judging what has the greatest value for me, or to me. Well, what if we all, quadriplegics included, preferred experiencing non-quadriplegic to quadriplegic life at Singer’s fanciful rate of two to one? Couldn’t quadriplegics still consistently deny that other people’s interests should be preferred over theirs at that same rate?

I think it is obvious that they can, though it is not so easy to say exactly why. It seems to have to do, though, with the fact that the two judgements are about profoundly different things. Thoreau would say the first is about expediency, and the second is about right and wrong.

Yet Another Dubious Use of a Taser

I don't know which is more disturbing: the police tasering a non-violent lunatic sitting on his front porch, or the mindless giggling of the moron who took this video and posted it on Youtube.

Here are the facts of this case, according to this legal blogger:

The officers were called to the scene by a neighbor. The man who was tased apparently spent the entire morning on his front lawn screaming racially charged remarks at the top of his lungs. Among the things he yelled were: “White Power!” and “Heil Hitler!” The officer was not sure what ethnicity the man was, but he informed me that his name appeared to be of hispanic origin. He was not a black man, contrary to some reports.

The first officers arrived on the scene. These were a mixture of different races (black, white, and hispanic). The man on the porch screamed racial slurs at them. Furthermore, he screamed “Shoot me motherfuckers!”, “I bet if I had a gun you would shoot me, maybe I should go get my gun!”, and other variations on this theme.

The officers identified this as a mental health issue but also realized that he seemed imbalanced enough that he might be dangerous. They called a negotiator to the scene to try to subdue him. The negotiator tried to talk him into calming down for 15 minutes to no avail. The commanding officer on the scene then decided that it was in the interest of the public’s welfare and the man’s own welfare to take him into custody and get him medical attention.

The man on the porch was advised ahead of time that he would be tased. Finally, we got what we saw on the video. Immediately after the tasing, the man was transferred to the hospital where he was treated for minor injuries. The police then transferred him to a mental institution. The entire incident lasted 17 minutes.

I read a lot of stories like this. Its a sort of hobby of mine. They often contain a detail like the above, that the cops warned their victim that they would taser him if he didn't quiet down or obey some other order. The idea often (though not in this case, I think) is be that this justifies the subsequent act of violence on the part of the cops. I suppose if they had "warned" him that they would blow his brains out if he didn't quiet down, that would justify summarily killing him.

I say it is only okay to threaten to do X if you have an independent right to do X. A threat cannot give you a right to carry it out.

It is time to stop the police from using tasers as instruments of torture and summary punishment, or as labor-saving devices.

Tasers should only be used as substitutes for more violent measures (such as clubbing or shooting the suspect), and only in situations where these more violent measures would be justified, or when less violent alternatives would be excessively hazardous for the police officer involved. Isn't that obvious?
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If you can take it, there are more stories and links here.

Keep Worrying about Death Panels

The following was written before the administration hinted it would stop insisting on a "public option" in the health care bill. I am now in South Dakota. Given that the idea of greatly expanded government provision of medical care is obviously not going away, I think the following still has interest, even if the hints are correct.

Last week Sarah Palin caused all kinds of upset when she said on Facebook:

"And who will suffer the most when they ration care?" She asked. "The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

This is hot-button rhetoric, but it did more to spark useful discussion than any one thing anyone else has said in this whole shallow, manipulated, spin-doctored debate. I think that the discussion soon became side-tracked, however.

It ended up with whoever is in charge of the mysterious "Senate bill" supposedly saying that payments for "end of life counseling" are out of the bill. End of discussion of that issue.

No, not end of discussion. Palin's comment was not about end of life counseling, it was about the broader issue of rationing. Now, to avoid sounding dense: Yes, I do see the connection between this counseling and rationing. If health insurance encourages these sessions (and why is "insurance" paying money for something that does not reduce risk to the insured?) more oldsters will think of alternatives to imposing heavy costs on loved ones (and taxpayers) with an endless series of surgeries with little promise of great benefits. Maybe you should just take a pain pill, or buy a nicer wheel chair. The saved money will then be spent on those who can get more out of it. The result would be a redistribution of death, to the old and ugly from the young and cool. That is one of the things that rationing does.

But it is not the only thing, nor is this the only reason to worry that this system would involve, or soon evolve into, rationing. Another reason is the well established mindset of those who push government health care.

You non-academics may not know this, but there is a sort of academic cottage industry called "medical ethics." The people in it often give seminars in which the sole question discussed is something like "which form of socialized medicine is the right one?" Yes, they are overwhelmingly for it, and they work without ceasing to impose their paper utopias on the rest of us. They are intensely dedicated, and absolutely convinced that their views are enlightened and sophisticated, and that those of us who disagree are a bunch of moral troglodytes.

A commonplace idea among them is that, once we have government health care, we should not indiscriminately give medical care to anyone who "needs" it. What is the point of government control, if we fail to organize the system more rationally than that? A term of art that is often used here is that of the QALY, or quality adjusted life year. This means that if we are thinking of investing money on a medical procedure for you, you lose points the older you are and the fewer years of life you will get out of the procedure, and you also lose points if the quality of the additional years is impaired somehow -- because you will be in pain, or are already missing a couple of limbs, or are retarded.

If the "experts" who have been pushing government health care for sixty years have their way, Sarah will basically be right. Both grandma and Trig will be in trouble.

Confusing Signals from the White House

As I write this on Sunday, the Administration has suggested that it will no longer insist on a "public option" in the health care reform bill.

If that is true, this would be the second time the people have effectively voiced their dissatisfaction with what government is doing since their voice was brazenly ignored in October over the TARP bill. (The first time they did so, of course, was when they spanked the Republicans in November for seven years of neocon insanity.) This would be by far the greater victory for democracy, in that it isn't just a matter of counting votes -- the pols actually had to listen, for once.

As I write, the American left has just begun to respond. The sound is making dogs howl and scratch their ears all over America. They are already saying that this would merely be a victory, not for the people (who have always hankered to be ruled by the left), but for the powerful insurance companies. They are ignoring the enormous corporate presence that was lined up in support of the bill. This would be a defeat for them.*

Meanwhile, the White House sent out some more signals keeping the left's hopes alive.

I'm about to leave for South Dakota, and recently wrote a couple more posts about medical care, to be published while I am gone. I think they still have interest, if they don't necessarily apply any longer to this particular bill.
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* Here is a response to the corporate ads in favor of the bill that have assaulted my eyes daily for a while: