1:56 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Faster than a speeding cricket match. A friend alerts me to today's NYT article on speed cricket (motto: "Twice the action, half the time!").

For those not living in the former Empire, standard cricket is a game that could have only been spread through force of arms--a sort of mutant baseball played on a geologic timescale, complete with breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches. It's not unusual for five-day international matches to end in a tie. This past year, the shortest county-level match played in England or Wales lasted 6 hours and 10 minutes. In the new version, however, games are limited to three hours, which has led to no small outcry:

"It's sad to contemplate what's happening," said David Frith, former editor of the Wisden Cricket Monthly. "Cricket is meant to attract people who are said to be dreamy and poetic, liking the subtleties and depth of the game, but this is attracting people on the fringe who want something else."

However, there were others who found the three-hour match downright fascinating, including cricket fan Karl Burgess:

"You have to talk in degrees of excitement," he said. "In cricket terms, this is exciting."

Now if the Brits can just figure out how to make cold and hot water come out of the same tap, I'll be happy.

 

8:04 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Fish on freedom. A friend of mine recently sent me a column written by Stanley Fish on the First Amendment and college campuses. Fish complains that the notion of free speech has been woefully misapplied in campus politics, "pressed into service at the drop of a hat" in controversies that pose no First Amendment issue whatsoever. When a student-run newspaper chooses to print or to cut an offensive article, or when a university edits its fundraising letters to be politically neutral, or when Harvard's English department chooses to invite--then dis-invite--then re-invite--then delay indefinitely the invitation of Oxford poet Tom Paulin, these private parties are exercising their own judgment as to what messages they want to forward or associate with. The First Amendment may protect unpopular as well as popular speech, Fish writes, "[b]ut what it protects unpopular speech from is abridgment by the government of its free expression."

Although I'm not a big fan of some of Fish's earlier work, he's clearly right on the law. The freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment deals with government restraints or mandates on expression, and nothing but. An individual decision of editorial judgment can be neither defended nor criticized on the basis of First Amendment obligations.

But while I agree with many of Fish's points, his argument rings a bit hollow, in that it fails to recognize any common thread running between the cases of individual judgment and the cases of censorship by the government. While the former have no relation whatsoever to the First Amendment's legal guarantees, they do have some relation to the philosophical background that explains why something like a First Amendment might be a good idea.

Many defenders of freedom of expression start by placing value on diversity of expression. They argue that it's a positive good to have a lot of different viewpoints represented in the 'marketplace of ideas,' because that way the truth will be well-tested against error. And it's clear that this diversity can be threatened just as much by systemic self-censorship as by systematic state censorship; in either case, the flow of ideas into the public square will be restricted. (This assumes that the self-censorship is based on the position taken, not the quality of the argument or its appropriateness for a given forum.)

Now, it may be possible to come up with a defense of the First Amendment that doesn't value diversity of expression for its own sake. One such approach would be absolutist: it would claim that it's just wrong, in itself, for the government to prevent individuals from speaking. Censorship might imply a certain disrespect for their humanity, treat them as a means only rather than an end, etc. But it's not entirely clear why this argument wouldn't apply to collective and informal censorship by society just as strongly as specific and formal censorship by the state. This is especially true if the social conditions that allow for informal censorship--e.g., he owns a printing press and you do not--are backed up by law.

A second approach would see the freedom of speech as a purely practical measure. If the government were able to restrict or mandate certain types of expression, the argument goes, then presumably it would encourage only as much speech as serves the interests of the party in power, and the democratic process would be rendered ineffective. Thus, even if we think that speech has no inherent value, there might be reason to stop the government from regulating it. There's a clear analogue to this argument with respect to freedom of religion: certain religions might very well be silly or not worthy of being allowed in society, but that government involvement in religion would simply become so messy (cf. the persecution of the Huguenots, the investiture controversy, the Taliban) that it's better not to touch the subject in the first place.

But the analogy between speech and religion eventually breaks down. In the case of religion, it doesn't particularly matter if one faith is socially dominant, so long as its devotees are unable to use the coercive power of the state against the devotees of other faiths (or of none). The goal of avoiding religious wars can be achieved regardless of the absolute number of different religions represented in society. In the case of speech, however, the goal of a well-functioning democracy isn't necessarily achieved simply by government neutrality. Imagine a society where the First Amendment is strictly adhered to, but all of the mass media outlets are controlled by private parties who happen to be sympathetic to the government's position. If no one is willing to print material criticizing the government--not because they're afraid of coercion, but because they think it would be disloyal or they simply don't agree--then the democratic process will be just as flawed. The very purpose behind restraints on government censorship requires a diverse marketplace of ideas to be fully realized.

So while Fish is technically right to say that "no one is silenced because a single outlet declines to publish him," there is reason to believe that if every outlet declines to publish (or at least every outlet with a reasonably-sized audience), something might be lost. This coordination problem produces in many editors a general sense of obligation, that newspapers and the media as a whole ought to provide a forum in which many viewpoints can be represented. This helps explain why liberal editors on an Op-Ed page occasionally print well-argued conservative pieces, and vice versa. The pressure to maintain an open forum is especially strong on a college campus, where a single daily newspaper might enjoy a near-monopoly of the public square.

This argument doesn't imply that any contribution to the marketplace is to be valued; sophistries and falsehoods don't improve public discourse, and if every editor just happened to 'guess right' when assessing stories, the world would be a better place. It also doesn't imply that newspapers must always publish different viewpoints, no matter how much they disagree. Given the current state of communications technology, the immense variety of publications and media outlets, and the increasing availability of web sites and vanity presses, claims of 'silencing' are much harder to make. But this argument does explain why, when editors aren't sure that they've guessed right, they might feel a moral pressure to let another viewpoint through--and why appeals to 'free speech' might have some force in shaping our individual judgments.

 

12:47 PM :: Stephen (contact)

So ordered. Eugene Volokh points out one of the Supreme Court's less publicized holdings in the affirmative action case of Grutter v. Bollinger: the University of Michigan Law School is officially "one of the Nation's top law schools." Prof. Volokh compares this ruling to an earlier opinion of the Court, which held that Creedence Clearwater Revival was "one of the greatest American rock and roll groups of all time" (Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. (1994), at 1).

All of this reminds me of a favorite headline in The Onion (unfortunately no longer available on their website): "Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules."

UPDATE: The Onion article still exists, thanks to web.archive.org. Sadly, though, I can't find a copy of another favorite, "Supreme Court Overturns Car."

 

12:41 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Crowd control and total war. On June 18, U.S. troops fired on protesters in Baghdad who were throwing rocks and bricks at their vehicles. According to a picture caption in the New York Times, "An American officer said his forces lacked nonlethal forms of crowd control, like rubber bullets." Two civilians were killed in the shooting.

As I read the caption, two thoughts went through my mind. The first was disappointment and anger--that American troops should be deployed without the appropriate equipment, and that it should have led to the unnecessary deaths of civilians. Our troops ought to have access to every nonlethal tool in peacetime for the same reason they ought to have access to every lethal tool in wartime: to be able to accomplish their mission with the least danger to themselves or others. Right now American troops are putting themselves in unsafe situations, because their choice is between doing nothing and opening fire--and it's costing the lives of the people we fought a war to help. The shooting may not be over in Iraq, but right now the U.S. Army is now also the Baghdad Police Department, and someone ought to get our troops the supplies they need.

The second thought was to wonder about the moral status of the soldiers' actions. Without commenting on these shootings in particular (I don't know enough about the exact sequence of events), how ought soldiers to act when faced with rock-throwing protesters? The protesters are civilians, it is true, but 300 people throwing bricks could also pose a legitimate threat to the troops. Assuming that a crowd does not disperse when warning shots are fired, and that they so outnumber the troops as to make individual arrests infeasible, how should the troops respond? And on what doctrine of just war should an answer to this question rely?

One possible suggestion was made by Thomas Nagel in his famous essay "War and Massacre" (Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:2 (Winter 1972), pp. 123-144). Written during the Vietnam War, the essay sets out Nagel's opposition to the doctrine of "total war," which holds that almost any tactics in war--attacks on civilians, Sherman's march to the sea, the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--are acceptable if they will shorten the war and reduce the total amount of death and devastation. Nagel rejects this view and holds that regardless of the consequences, certain tactics are beyond the pale. In the essay, he seeks an alternative vision of justice in bello, a middle ground between total war and complete pacifism: he wants to explain how could it be moral to conduct a just war and to kill enemy soldiers, without accepting that the ends always justify the means.

Two potential arguments are ruled out at the start. First, because Nagel is concerned with means rather than ends, killing an enemy soldier can't be acceptable simply because of its effects, such as advancing a just victory or preventing the moral evils that would follow defeat. If the effects were all that mattered, it should be just as acceptable to target deliberately a large number of innocent people, if doing so would achieve the same good results.

Second, Nagel claims, we can't argue that the enemy soldiers are themselves acting immorally and therefore deserve to die. To illustrate the point, he contrasts the example of an unwilling enemy conscript, who drives a tank at us "with profoundest regrets and nothing but love in his heart," with that of "a wicked but noncombatant hairdresser," who wholeheartedly supports the bloodthirsty aggression of his government. One might wonder whether in fact the conscripted soldier could be acting morally while he is fighting for the wrong side in an unjust war--but in any case, the point is taken. Even in war, we do not kill people solely because they are evil.

Instead, Nagel argues, the division between combatants and noncombatants--those whom it is acceptable and unacceptable to target--must be at least partly based on an assessment of "immediate threat or harmfulness," and must target the cause of the danger rather than "peripheral" factors. The latter distinction forces us to separate the enemy soldiers' existence as human beings from their existence qua soldiers, as Nagel writes:

The threat presented by an army and its members does not consist merely in the fact that they are men, but in the fact that they are armed and are using their arms in the pursuit of certain objectives. Contributions to their arms and logistics are contributions to this threat; contributions to their mere existence as men are not.

This distinction between men-as-soldiers and men-as-men has the potential to explain a number of our intuitions surrounding the laws of war. While it might be acceptable to kill the conscripted tank-driver, or to bomb the munitions factories that supply them with arms, it is not acceptable to kill the medical personnel who bind up combatants' wounds (even if it helps them to fight another day), or to bomb the civilian farmers who supply the enemy troops with food. The results of applying this distinction are not always clear--is a ball-bearing factory a legitimate target when most of its output goes into tanks?--but neither are our intuitions as to appropriate tactics.

On the same grounds, Nagel argues, the force that is used against the men must be commensurate with the threat they pose as soldiers. It is unacceptable, for instance, to use weapons that are "designed to maim or disfigure or torture the opponent rather than merely to stop him." The use of napalm--"an atrocity in all circumstances that I can imagine, whoever the target may be"--does not merely stop enemy soldiers, but causes great pain, horrible burns, and permanent scarring. What justifies force is the immediate threat, and what goes beyond the stopping the threat is ipso facto unjustified.

In drawing this distinction, Nagel is not weighing future pains and pleasures; he is not arguing that the pain of napalm is so horrible as to render any possible benefits from its use irrelevant. In fact, he fully admits that such tactics may be of great benefit in a war, and would argue against their use even if it would speed the day of victory (and thereby save lives). Moreover, even if one invented Napalm Lite^TM, which had the same military value but 30 percent less scarring, its use would be just as immoral; it would still be by its nature aimed at the men and not the soldiers. Using napalm is analogous to killing civilian hostages or burning a village to root out the guerrillas; as a tactic it is inherently mistargeted, and causes harm in ways that a just war--regardless of how serious the cause or how significant the benefits--cannot license.

Yet Nagel’s claim here seems to raise insoluble problems for our practical decisions in cases of self-defense--and here we return to the question of crowd control in Baghdad. Suppose that the U.S. troops in Baghdad are put in danger from rock-throwing protesters, and suppose further that they are morally justified in using some kind of force to disperse them. However, by Nagel's argument, they may be required to use rubber bullets rather than live fire, because the former are sufficient to avoid danger and to disperse the crowd. The use of deadly force in such circumstances would be greater than the minimum amount of harm physically required to prevent the attack, and would therefore target the protesters as human beings and not merely as throwers of rocks. Furthermore, such unnecessary force cannot become "necessary" simply because the soldiers have not been issued rubber bullets, or because they were forgetful and left all their rubber bullets at home. Necessity, for Nagel, is defined by the nature of the threat and not by the tools available to counter it. If would be wrong to inflict a certain amount of harm on others--as it would be in this case, since incapacitation would accomplish perfectly the desired end, and no purpose is served through the extra killing or suffering--it surely does not become less wrong simply because one only has access to blunt instruments. (If one doubts this, imagine what Nagel would say if the soldiers had no available weapons except napalm--the use of which is "an atrocity in all circumstances I can imagine.")

By Nagel's argument, then, the troops under threat may never fire back, no matter how many of their fellow soldiers have been killed or injured, so long as the weapons they would use are morally defective. But soldiers are rarely so lucky as to have morally acceptable weapons at their disposal, which would neutralize the protesters while causing the least possible degree of harm to the men. What might such weapons be--painless stun guns? Spiderman-silk? And who knows what wondrous anti-personnel devices the future might hold? Under Nagel’s framework, I see no way to avoid holding soldiers responsible for living in a century when the optimal weapons have not yet been invented. Even if the troops are morally justified in using some kind of force against the protesters, there is no kind of force in existence today which they would be morally justified in using--which comes close to a practical contradiction. Following Nagel's advice would force the soldiers to be pacifists in practice, if not in theory. And this absolutism is a direct consequence of any doctrine in which the men-as-protesters may be targeted, but the men-as-men are sacrosanct.

The problems with Nagel's doctrine, however, aren't limited to the case of protesters. Imagine that an enemy brigade is crossing the border as part of an aggressive and immoral invasion. How could it be acceptable to attempt to kill the soldiers, given that the threat they represent would be removed if one merely immobilized them? As Nagel acknowledges in a footnote, "ordinary bullets, after all, can cause death, and nothing is more permanent than that." Only rarely would it be the case that an attacker must be killed in order for the danger to be averted; in most cases, the moral agent desireth not the death of the sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live. Nagel briefly considers the argument for "incapacitating gases" to knock troops unconscious without killing them, but he notes that the general taboo on chemical warfare might be sufficiently valuable to justify prohibiting them. (A friend of mine once argued on similar grounds for the morality of mild biological weapons--say, a nasty stomach flu that incapacitates soldiers but doesn't kill anyone--at a Pugwash conference, where the idea was somewhat heatedly rejected.) But here Nagel falls victim to his own critique: his endorsement of bullets and his acceptance of the taboo on chemical weapons are purely based on an assessment of the consequences. The policy is designed to achieve desirable ends--the preservation of a norm against chemical warfare by aggressor nations--through unacceptable means, namely the deliberate use in war of death-inflicting bullets when sleeping gas would serve the purpose. If the choice were between sleeping gas and napalm, which would Nagel pick?

The only possible conclusion from these considerations, other than a pacifism-in-practice, is that necessity can be affected by what weapons are available--that the troops may, in order to protect themselves or others, use lethal force where nonlethal force would do. But once we concede that the troops may, in some circumstances, use more force than is absolutely necessary (in Nagel's sense) to avoid the threat, then the entire concept of distinguishing between men-as-men and men-as-rock-throwers unravels. If we may use more force than is physically necessary to counter the immediate threat, then might not every weapon, even napalm, be acceptable under the proper conditions? And if Nagel is right, and the same doctrine explains both the limits on acceptable weaponry and the limits on acceptable targets, then are not the latter conclusions (no bombing of infrastructure, etc.) similarly suspect? The bounds on acceptable conduct still exist--one may not cause more harm than would produce the best consequences--but our intuitions begin to push us towards a doctrine of ends justifying means.

Perhaps, my brother suggests, one reason why this push is not immediately apparent is that the means we consider today are so different from those used in earlier conflicts. There have been massive advances in military technology over the past half-century. In World War II, leaving aside the direct assaults intended to break the will of a civilian population (e.g., Dresden and Tokyo), even attacks on purely military targets often required blind carpet-bombing in nighttime raids. Today, when we can sometimes achieve better results simply by attaching a GPS system to a block of concrete, such bombing (regardless of humanitarian concerns) would be considered woefully impractical. Similarly, the fighting in Iraq was primarily conducted by a handful of divisions; during World War II, the continent of Europe was the battlefield of millions of men under arms.

For the past decade, the wars in which the U.S. has been engaged (and those in which it is likely to be engaged in the future) have not been territorial conflicts between great powers, but wars against governments and warring factions who may or may not be supported by the people subject to their rule. The impact of conflict on civilians, far from being a new aspect of war, has instead been diminished (within living memory) by several orders of magnitude. By historical standards, we now fight wars with extraordinary accuracy and concern for civilian casualties; the use of carpet-bombing or nuclear weapons against civilian targets is near-unthinkable, in part because there are almost no military ends for which doing so would be an effective means. As a result, our moral assessment of certain tactics has changed--not necessarily because they have been recognized as unacceptable, regardless of the availability of alternatives, but instead because today we have more alternatives available.

Noting this change doesn't entirely answer our questions. In particular, beyond expressing a general optimism as to the progress of life-saving technology, it doesn't help the troops who have to decide what to do with the weapons they have. But it does remove some of the stigma attached to a consideration of ends and means, and gives us reason to think that even rules unconstrained by Nagel's distinction might provide for humane limits on war.

 

2:16 PM :: Stephen (contact)

That's "Parris" with two R's: Innocents Abroad has a long discussion of what has been called "an example of ethnic hate speech by Matthew Parris, in the London Times."

Readers with a taste for history, however, may prefer an earlier example of ethnic hate speech by Matthew Paris, in the Chronica Majora.

 

2:13 PM :: Stephen (contact)

What I've been working on: For the second year in a row, all students in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford have been required to complete an "IT Project" using statistical software. It's an absurd requirement, and academically indefensible. Not for the reasons that most are complaining about, that few students will ever need to perform a statistical analysis for their classes; it's useful for any educated person to understand a statistical argument, recognize common fallacies and know how to test for statistical significance. (I say this as someone who's pretty ignorant about the field and would appreciate learning more.)

Instead, the real problem is that the requirement doesn't teach anything about statistics. It only teaches how to use SPSS, a specific statistics package allegedly popular among social scientists. What's worse, the requirement doesn't even teach students how to use SPSS very well, since most of the program's commands require a detailed understanding of the statistical functions involved. (Quick--what's a "One-Way ANOVA"?) So all that we can do--and all that we're graded on, it seems--is try to fill our papers with pretty graphs. It's a classic example of a good idea filtered through enough Oxford bureaucracy to render it meaningless.

In any case, faced with the requirement, I tried to make something useful of it. Comparing the membership of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and historical data on political and civil liberties from Freedom House, I wrote a short report entitled "Sins of Commmission: Repressive Regimes and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights." Its basic conclusions are these:

• In the past three years, regimes with the worst or near-worst human rights records have been substantially over-represented on the Commission, a trend that is statistically significant and in certain ways historically unprecedented.
  
• This over-representation cannot be explained by the Commission's geographic distribution requirements, and holds true even within the geographic regions used for selection.
  
• There is no statistically significant evidence that Commission membership causes regimes to improve their behavior over time. In fact, membership may retard progess by sheltering regimes from the Commission's scrutiny.

None of this is particularly earth-shattering, but some may find it interesting. The zipped data files are also available for others to make better use of.

 

4:40 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Progressive taxation? Ugh! You know, from this description, you'd never think they were voting on child tax credits for low-income families...

Although almost every Senate Republican voted for the bill, some clearly were unhappy at having to do so under what they considered public pressure from liberal groups and Democrats. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi voted for the bill, but as he did so he stuck his tongue out, put his finger in his mouth and made a gagging sound, indicating his apparent distaste for the bill.

Or maybe you would. After all, it's Trent Lott.

 

12:41 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Petition signatures. I have nothing particularly original to say about the recent goings-on at the New York Times. But I have noticed something strange there lately, namely an unusual piece published on their op-ed page on April 9. Entitled "No New Tax Cuts," it was supposedly submitted by six influential figures in American economic policy: former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, Concord Coalition president and former Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson, and former Senators Bob Kerrey, Sam Nunn, and Warren Rudman. I generally agreed with the authors' position--the tax cut seems to have been a pretty lousy idea all round--but I was greatly surprised to see the Times allow all six of them to sign the same op-ed. When I was at The Crimson, we had a policy (still in effect, it seems) against printing "petition" signatures on op-eds or letters. Instead, "multiple authors (generally three or fewer) [would] only be listed if each individual contributed equally to the writing of the piece."

Personally, I think a policy of limiting signatures makes sense. The point of an op-ed is to present argument and information for the reader's consideration, not to attach a bunch of famous names to a banner headline (like "No New Tax Cuts"). Plenty of opinion pieces, it's true, serve to advance a position based on the celebrity of the author. Had only one of these notables submitted the op-ed, the byline would have still concealed the true author, who I'm sure was an anonymous staffer in one of their offices. And some op-eds, such as Kissinger's controversial (and famously opaque) Iraq piece in the Aug. 12 Washington Post, are more intended to reveal a famous author's position than to argue for its adoption.

But editors should always base their judgments on the content of the printed page. The policy stance of a famous person might be interesting to hear about, but an op-ed page with more bylines than content isn't quite as interesting to read. If Volcker et al. had wanted to advertise their views on the topic, they could have put out a joint press release that would be reported on the news pages--a list of names like theirs would get quite a bit of attention. Or for that matter, they could have just bought an ad.

This piece was unusual in part because, despite the petition signatures, the argument is pretty decent. Yet as a matter of policy, I would be concerned if the Times has decided to open the floodgates and allow any number of authors to sign on. The more effort that goes into collecting names of additional authors, the less effort will go toward a piece's logical and rhetorical force--which should be the core concern of any opinion page.

 

12:38 PM :: Stephen (contact)

More on France, part II: A friend (and proud New Zealander!) writes in to add to the
laundry list below...

Just a quick note on bad French things--it's not just about providing weapons! This one is dear to my heart....

In 1985, the French committed state-sponsored terrorism in New Zealand. French ''Security Services'' blew up Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, which was on a peaceful anti-nuke voyage to French territorial waters. The Rainbow Warrior had 12 people on it--one died, the rest escaped.

The French repeatedly denied having anything to do with the murder. However, after a massive investigation, two French spies pleaded guilty, the French Defence Minister resigned, and Prime Minister Laurent Fabius finally admitted they had ordered the attack.

Both spies were deported to Hao, a tropical island. But after just two years one of them, Alain Mafart, returned to Paris because of ''stomach pains'' and never came back. In 1993 he was promoted to colonel.

The other, Dominique Prieur, returned to France a year later... because she was pregnant. She never went back either--instead, she was promoted to Commandant.

Here's a general link. And another: Where are they now?

Check out her new New Zealand blog at NZPols.blogspot.com.

A philosophical footnote: another New Zealander, political theorist Jeremy Waldron, alleges that French officials may have urged their agents to perjure themselves in New Zealand courts, and generally "conspired to undermine the operation of the criminal justice system in New Zealand." In fact, he makes the incident a centerpiece of his essay on political obligation, illustrating the obligations that individuals might have to respect the just institutions of governments other than their own. (See "Special Ties and Natural Duties," Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (Winter 1993), pp. 3-30.)

 

12:35 PM :: Stephen (contact)

More on France, part I. A reader responded to the earlier discussion of France with a list of various actions taken by the U.S. "in support of tyranny" over the past 50 years. It included support for authoritarian regimes in Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina, as well as the intervention in Vietnam, provision of "massive economic assistance and arms" to Saudi Arabia, and "military assistance and technology transfer" to the People's Republic of China.

To be honest, I don't know enough about the first three to comment on them accurately. The second three, though, seem like strange examples to give. America's actions in Vietnam, reprehensible as they were, weren't necessarily in support of tyranny (especially in light of what happened in Vietnam after the North won). I'm not sure how much pure "military assistance" we ever gave to China, even in the friendliest years of the detente. And according to the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia does not receive any U.S. aid, although it does purchase billions of dollars a year in U.S. military equipment.

That said, I didn't mean to imply--as I noted in the case of Saddam--that France was alone in its generosity towards dictators. No nation has a monopoly on virtue. In general, I think that the U.S. has often erred by supporting antidemocratic regimes, and that the spread of democracy is more likely to serve American interests in the long run. That's partly why I support the efforts of the Oxford Democracy Forum in seeking to make democratization a top priority of the international community. Many of America's worst realpolitik days are thankfully behind it; but as the ongoing support of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan should remind us, these days aren't necessarily over, and the choices aren't necessarily easy.

(Which is why, I have to add, France's foreign policy decisions are so puzzling. I can understand an argument for going easy on Musharraf; although I'm not happy about it, we probably wouldn't have made much progress against Al Qaeda without his government's help. But how does giving the red-carpet treatment to the brutal Robert Mugabe, who's managed to turn a once-functional Zimbabwe into a complete basketcase, advance France's legitimate interests?)

 

3:55 PM :: Stephen (contact)

So that's the answer! Ever wonder why the modern world has so many problems? Because, the king of Swaziland says, we allow women to wear pants.

 

9:01 AM :: Stephen (contact)

A book is a terrible thing to waste. I recently had my first experience working in Duke Humfrey's Library, the special collections wing of Oxford's Bodleian library system. I went there a few days ago in search of a doctoral dissertation written in 2001. However, when I went to the desk to collect it, I was somewhat surprised by the procedure. Before the library staff allows patrons to view an Oxford dissertation, they require you to sign the following statement:

"I recognise that the copyright of this thesis rests with the author and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author."

The author of each dissertation signs a similar statement, agreeing to deposit a copy in the Bodleian and noting that this non-disclosure agreement will be enforced on all those reading it.

This requirement puzzles me. I can certainly understand a limit on republication of the work, for reasons of copyright. What I wonder is, wouldn't a general rule of non-disclosure be entirely counter to the purposes of scholarship? If the University is going to retain theses in its libraries, rather than destroy them, it's presumably doing so to facilitate their use by other scholars. But why would it then handicap those scholars, prohibiting them from quoting or deriving conclusions from a dissertation without the author's written permission?

There are only two situations I can think of where an author might reasonably deny such permission. First, the author could be embarrassed by some language used in the dissertation or some of the conclusions reached. But a dissertation is a pretty public thing anyway; it will be read and reviewed by a panel of academics, some of them less friendly than others. If you're not willing to subject your ideas to scrutiny, you probably shouldn't submit them in the first place.

Second, the author might intend to publish a book based on the dissertation, and would be unwilling to have his or her most important conclusions leaked to the academic community beforehand. In this situation, a dissertation is viewed as an unpublished manuscript to which scholars are briefly granted access as a favor, and it would be impolite of them to publish information or to quote from it and thereby steal the author's thunder. But why should the role of scholars consulting the dissertation be viewed in such a condescending way? A discovery in a new dissertation would be appropriately cited; academic communities already have rules against plagiarism, and conclusions aren't given much weight anyway unless the evidence supporting them has been published. Moreover, there's nothing preventing a reader from stealing the author's ideas or approaches to the material--only "information" is protected. And in any case, this problem could be solved by limiting the restriction to a simple "grace period" (say, 2 years), during which authors would have the opportunity to publish their work unmolested.

One might argue that it's unfair to change the policy when the author expected his or her work to be examined only in privacy. But the University gets to set the policy; and if it chose to require all future dissertation authors to open their works to public scrutiny, it could. And there may be real value in opening up these works to others' eyes. Not all dissertations will be published, and not all dissertations will have their importance recognized at the time they are written. If a dissertation containing a significant and previously unknown piece of evidence has languished in obscurity for decades, why should a scholar who locates it and wishes to cite its conclusions have to hunt down the author to seek written permission? (And what do you do if the author's dead? Max Weber's doctoral dissertation--which, I should note, discusses commercial law in medieval Europe--has recently been translated and published, and early works by famous authors are always of biographical interest.)

I don't think these concerns would be limited to wild-eyed hackers, pirating DVDs and screaming "Information wants to be free!" Making good information more widely available is the essence of scholarship, and there are only a handful of academic sins greater than unnecessarily keeping books and ideas behind locked doors.

But perhaps my concern is more parochial in its origins. Living in the U.S., I've grown accustomed to our strong tradition of fair use--guaranteed by the copyright law and rooted in the First Amendment--especially when academic research is involved. Maybe I should have realized that things might be different in Britain, given that this country doesn't have any Bill of Rights. (And don't give me that "Human Rights Act 1998" line; is the Queen in Parliament still sovereign, or isn't she?) So when I see that the non-circulating New Bodleian has a total of two photocopiers, or that British copyright regulations allow academics to copy only "5% [of a book] or one complete chapter, whichever is the greater," I start remembering why we fought the American Revolution.

The worst thing about the dissertation agreement, by the way, is that the restrictions are absurdly broad. In the U.S., at least in the context of libel, "publication" can mean simply communicating the statements to a third person, and almost all information relating to a work is "derived" from it in some way. So, all in all, the prohibition seems to cover my telling you that in 2001, Lucy Allais wrote her D.Phil. dissertation on Kant. I derived that information straight from the dissertation itself (though I could also have derived it from the publicly available title, "An interpretation and defence of Kant's transcendental idealism"). If Oxford wants to do anything about it, they know where to find me.

(I'd add, "Put that in your gown and smoke it," but doing so would violate the terms of the Bodleian Oath.)