6:01 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Leak of the Day: From the Washington Post:

IAEA Leader's Phone Tapped
U.S. Pores Over Transcripts to Try to Oust Nuclear Chief

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 12, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration has dozens of intercepts of Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls with Iranian diplomats and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials.

But the diplomatic offensive will not be easy. The administration has failed to come up with a candidate willing to oppose ElBaradei, who has run the agency since 1997, and there is disagreement among some senior officials over how hard to push for his removal, and what the diplomatic costs of a public campaign against him could be.

Although eavesdropping, even on allies, is considered a well-worn tool of national security and diplomacy, the efforts against ElBaradei demonstrate the lengths some within the administration are willing to go to replace a top international diplomat who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq and is now taking a cautious approach on Iran.

The intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei, according to three officials who have read them. But some within the administration believe they show ElBaradei lacks impartiality because he tried to help Iran navigate a diplomatic crisis over its nuclear programs. Others argue the transcripts demonstrate nothing more than standard telephone diplomacy.

"Some people think he sounds way too soft on the Iranians, but that's about it," said one official with access to the intercepts.

I'm sure this sort of thing goes on all the time. In fact, if the U.S. didn't tap ElBaradei's phone, I think it would be almost criminal negligence on the part of our diplomatic services. But it can't look good for our international image when we wiretap the IAEA, or spy on the Security Council.

So how did this get on the front page of the Post? The article makes it pretty clear that those in favor of keeping ElBaradei leaked the information, not to stop an unethical practice (cf. the Pentagon Papers), but rather to embarrass the other side in an intragovernmental policy debate. And that seems inexcusable to me. You can't run a State Department with every piece of information you collect on the front page of the Post the next morning. The organization claims to have blown it off ("'We've always assumed that this kind of thing goes on,' IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said"), but foreign publics aren't likely to react the same way -- and the Post doesn't put many non-stories on A1.

If the transcripts are really that inconclusive, could the benefits from the leak possibly have outweighed the danger that we'd push for a replacement? Whoever leaked to the Post ought to be fired, and quickly. We've got enough to worry about in stopping Iran's nuclear programs without our own officials sabotaging our intelligence.

 

11:19 AM :: Stephen (contact)

In the Immortal Words of Stan Marsh: Dude, what the %$&*! is wrong with German people?

UPDATE (12/13): I rest my case.

 

1:15 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Thought for the Day: From Federico Fellini:

I wonder what . . . kind of evil spell could have fallen upon our generation, to explain how we started, all of a sudden, to look at the young as the messengers of who knows what absolute truth. The young, the young, the young . . . you would have thought that they had just arrived from outer space. . . . Only some form of collective madness could have made us consider children of fifteen . . . the master guardians of all truths.

(Quoted in Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time 34.)

 

1:11 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Spiderman to the Rescue: Ever wonder what insightful political analysis the bloggers are keeping to themselves? Here's this morning's instant-message discussion with Josh Chafetz:

S: http://nytimes.com/2004/12/08/
opinion/08simmons.html

S: Spiderman will save the Dems!

J: "the first competitive contest for party leader since 1988," ???

S: has the DNC been contested much?

J: oh, by "party leader", he means DNC chair?

S: yeah -- that's the election coming up

J: that's kinda absurd

S: true

J: someone should tell that guy that spiderman's a republican

J: I mean, why else would he keep wrapping himself in the flag

S: and wear a RED suit

J: with a spider on it! everyone knows all the voracious insects are republicans!

S: and basilisks vote democrat

J: exactly

S: only democrats speak parseltongue

J: actually, only wes clark speaks parseltongue

S: yesssssss...

S: wait -- but aren't fundamentalist snake handlers republicans?

J: exactly -- they *handle* the snakes

J: beat them

J: abuse them

J: don't identify with them

J: blue snakes

J: red snake handlers

S: what about the swing snakes?

J: the dangerous, but -- for obvious reasons -- endangered purple grass snake

 

1:55 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Updating "The Jumbler": Following the kind suggestion of a YLS classmate (to wit: "your word jumbler is junk and needs work"), I've decided to update the text-jumbling GAWK script to a new version. (Read about the program here.) Although the new code is slightly less elegant than the old, it now makes sure that the randomly jumbled word always differs from the original word, with a minor exception for repeated strings like "aaaa". I usually prioritize elegance over functionality, but as they say, the customer is always king...

 

4:59 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Two Years On: Well, after a prolonged absence, I've returned to posting, to note this blog's birthday (and mine). I think it's been a good two years thus far. The blog has risen far from its humble beginnings; it's been alternately described as a "blog to add," "utterly childish," in "plain error," etc. And these are somewhat happier times than last year, when I spent my birthday sick as a dog.

Unfortunately, I've found the blog much more difficult to maintain now that I'm out of Oxford and in law school, where we have actual work to do. Hopefully, though, I'll find time to post more often. I'll be using the holiday to stock up on food, reading, and much-needed sleep. Back on Monday.

 

6:35 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Letter to the Editor: Just published in Harvard Magazine:

To the Editor:

I am astounded that [Professor Lisa L.] Martin can write an article on unilateralism and fail to mention Kosovo ["Self-Binding," September-October, p. 33]. Unlike the United States-led invasion of Iraq, which could plausibly claim to enforce past UN resolutions, the NATO campaign against Serbia lacked even the shadow of UN authorization. I, for one, thought the Kosovo campaign was just and necessary, and that it illustrated the occasional need to step beyond multilateral bonds in protecting peace and security. Yet Martin's failure to mention it, even as she accuses the current administration of merely "go[ing] through the motions" of seeking UN support, makes me wonder whether her "multilateralism" is simply another word for the approval of France and Germany.

Stephen E. Sachs '02
New Haven, Conn.

 

1:21 PM :: Stephen (contact)

A Tax Epiphany: I just realized something I should have understood four years ago. Ever since the Bush tax cuts were first discussed in the 2000 campaign, I've been persuaded by claims like the following:

CBO Report: Bush Tax Cuts Tilted to Rich
By Vicki Allen
Reuters

Saturday 14 August 2004

WASHINGTON - One-third of President Bush's tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, shifting more burden to middle-income taxpayers, congressional analysts said on Friday.

The report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and calculations by congressional Democrats based on the CBO findings fueled the debate over the cuts between Bush and his Democratic challenger in November, Sen. John Kerry.

 Using the CBO's figures, Democrats in Congress said the top 1 percent, with incomes averaging $1.2 million per year, will receive an average tax cut of $78,460 this year...

In contrast, the report showed that households in the middle 20 percent, with incomes averaging $57,000 per year, will receive an average cut of $1,090...

The CBO report said about two-thirds of the benefits from the cuts went to households in the top 20 percent, with an average income of $203,740...

Democrats said the CBO calculations, which they requested, confirm the view of independent tax analysts that the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 have heavily favored the wealthiest taxpayers.

Let's consider a thought experiment where the government decides to cut the income tax by 50%. In particular, it decides to cut everyone's income tax burden in half, so that everybody pays only half as much in income tax as they used to. The multi-gazillionaire who paid $4 gazillion in income taxes now pays $2 gazillion less; the working family that paid $1,000 gets a tax cut of only $500. As above, it seems like the gazillionaire gets a pretty sweet deal, and "the rich" (suitably defined) may very well receive most of the benefits.

What's important to see, however, is that the new system may be just as progressive as the old. If before the cuts, the top 1 percent of income tax payers paid as much as the bottom 20 percent, then after the cuts, they'll still pay as much as the bottom 20 percent--both tax burdens will just be half as much as before. In terms of the total tax burden, since everyone's fell by half, the proportion borne by the top 1 percent will be unchanged. In other words, a tax cut which offers disproportionate benefits to the wealthy, in absolute terms, may be perfectly equal in relative terms, and may represent a progressivity-neutral change to the tax code. The absolute benefits are disproportionate only because the wealthy's tax payments were disproportionately large to begin with.

That's why, for example, the Bush tax cuts can plausibly be described as progressive--as long as one is looking solely at the income tax. (More on this below.) The rich may receive much greater absolute amounts than the poor, but that doesn't imply anything about their share of the tax burden. And according to other analyses of the CBO figures, the share of the income tax burden borne by the wealthy in fact shifted slightly upward, and that of the poor fell.



I came to these conclusions after reading Steven Landsburg's piece in Slate, which has provoked an energetic response by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber. Quiggin, as I understand him, makes three (non-ad-hominem) arguments against Landsburg's analysis.

One argument is that Landsburg's piece is "hopelessly biased" because it employs the "presentational trick" of separating relative and absolute reductions in taxes. Suppose the wealthy pay a 40 percent income tax, and the poor pay 10 percent; these rates are then cut to 30 and 5, respectively. Quiggin notes that the high-earners have "[c]learly . . . gained twice as much, relative to pretax income"; their rate fell by 10 points, while the poor's tax rate fell by only 5 points. But that's just another way of restating the initial claim. What Quiggin doesn't accept is that the wealthy's share of the tax burden has increased; they're still paying three-fourths of their previous tax bill, while the poor are only paying half. This result is made even more clear if we cut the rates further, to 20 and 0. The wealthy have still saved twice as much as the poor, relative to pretax income--but since they now bear all of the tax burden, it's hard to describe that as deeply unfair.

A second argument, which Quiggin mentions in passing, is that the rich pay less in taxes than the rates would imply, because they have more access to sharp lawyers and tax loopholes. That's true, and that's a problem, but it also doesn't imply anything at all about a change in the tax system--which may or may not increase cheating. If the wealthy only paid 2/3 of what they were supposed to before, then after a proportional change they'll still be paying 2/3 of what they're supposed to--which means their actual share of the tax burden will be unchanged. (Lowering marginal tax rates on the wealthy would, if anything, diminish this effect, since it reduces the financial incentive to cheat.)

A third argument, and ultimately the only successful one, is that the income tax doesn't tell the whole story. The taxes that have been cut in recent years--on Income, corporate income, and capital gains--are borne primarily by the rich, while the taxes that weigh most heavily on the poor, like sales taxes and the Social Security payroll tax, have largely been left unchanged. Thus, no matter how progressive your income tax cuts might be, the net result to the system might be a greater burden on the poor. In fact, if you fill in the ellipses from the Reuters report above, the Congressional Democrats found that the share of the tax burden of the top 1 percent has fallen by about 2 points to 20.1 percent, while the share of the middle quintile of taxpayers has risen from 10.4 to 10.5 percent. So the Bush tax cuts were slightly imbalanced in their effects--but not dramatically so, as Landsburg's graph shows here.

None of this is to say that equal absolute reductions, like cutting everyone an equal $300 check, would necessarily be wrong. In fact, I thought the $300 rebate was the best part (some would say the only good part) of the Bush tax cuts. But we can't pretend that equal absolute reductions are the only neutral way to cut taxes. The fallacy here is to look at the tax cut as if it were a spending program, cutting $78,000 checks to the wealthy and $1,000 checks to the poor; if we assume a completely neutral tax system beforehand, such a spending program would rightly be reviled. Under our system, though, the revulsion ignores the fact that we're starting from an already-progressive base. Since we're already extracting more money from the rich, giving everyone an equal check isn't a neutral change--it increases the redistributive aspects of the system, shifting money from rich to poor.

Again, more redistribution may be a good idea. (Under certain limits, since high marginal rates have distortionary effects.) But it's one thing to say that the tax system ought to be more progressive than it is now; it's quite another to assume that equal proportional reductions will make it worse.

 

11:32 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Two Thoughts on Art: I spent Sunday and part of Monday in New York City, where I learned two things:

1. The art in the Metropolitan Museum is really good. Giovanni Bellini is one of my favorite artists of all time. I've long been enamored of his San Zaccaria Altarpiece, which is even more impressive seen in context -- the altarpiece isn't so much in the church as part of the church, as San Zaccaria's architecture continues unbroken into the painted space. (And when you put the 50-Euro-cent coin into the slot and turn on the lights nearby, the details are extraordinary.)






In any case, after briefly getting lost in the Metropolitan Museum this weekend (reminding me of one of my favorite childhood Sesame Street specials), I noticed a Bellini Madonna and Child in the Met collection.


The focus here is clearly on the Madonna -- the child might as well have been a vase of flowers or a loaf of bread for how her hands are placed -- but the Internet image doesn't do justice to the lifelike glow of her appearance, or the humanity of her expression. It's amazing how you can walk through a room of painted figures, even some beautifully rendered, but then you suddenly stare at one of them and get the feeling that another soul is staring back.

2. The art at the U.N. is really bad. As longtime readers will know, I'm no fan of socialist realism. But the U.N. walls are covered with Symbolic Murals done largely in that style, depicting muscular Workers, women Pursuing the Arts of Peace, children Displaced By War, etc. Many of the murals require substantial explanation, which I overheard helpful U.N. tour guides providing. (Explanations are also available on the website: "The blue and gold silk tapestry on the walls and in the draperies by the East River windows features the anchor of faith, the growing wheat of hope, and the heart of charity.")

I understand--and in a general sense, agree with--the message of "Food Not Bombs" which the art conveys. But surely the U.N., as an organization, should be committed to the principle that sometimes you need to use the bombs, in order that others may provide the food. (Cf. the wall posters with statistics on military spending--which reminded me of something I'd seen before.) Don't get me wrong; the art at the U.S. Capitol building can be pretty terrible too. But at a certain point, the self-important allegory gets a little top-heavy, especially if the political content is questionable as well.

 

12:17 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The Benlolo Brothers: A reader points out a new development in the Domain Name Registry of America scam I wrote about in July 2003. According to the Globe and Mail (subscription required), the authors of the scam, the Benlolo brothers, have received their just deserts for a different offense:

Pair trade mansions for prison:
Brothers who stole $4-million in scams believe they did nothing wrong

The Globe and Mail
Saturday, October 2, 2004
By Gay Abbate

Alan and Elliot Benlolo were living a good life with their mansions, flashy vehicles and a seemingly endless supply of money. But yesterday, the brothers were forced to exchange their palatial homes for cells in a federal penitentiary, for running two scams that netted them about $4-million.

They were also ordered to pay $2.3-million in fines and restitution.

. . .

The Ontario Superior Court judge sentenced each brother to 42 months in prison for a stock-swap fraud and to three years for their latest venture, a phony telephone invoice venture. They will serve the two sentences concurrently and be eligible for parole after 14 months.

. . .

The stock swap offered investors around the world stock in non-existent microchip companies in 1999 and 2000. The brothers had pleaded guilty in July to being part of a fraudulent international scheme.

For their phone-invoice scheme, they enlisted their younger brother Simon and a friend, Victor Serfaty. They mailed out thousands of phony invoices in 2000, telling small businesses they owed $25.52 for advertising on their yellow-page Internet directory.

Only those reading the fine print would realize the invoice was not real.

. . .

Alan served six months in a United States jail in 1999 for mail fraud. The U.S. government is still trying to collect a $1-million judgment from a civil lawsuit.

 

1:48 PM :: Stephen (contact)

"I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Underlings": From the Associated Press:

U.N.: Robot Use to Surge Sevenfold by 2007

GENEVA (AP) -- The use of robots around the home to mow lawns, vacuum floors, pull guard duty and perform other chores is set to surge sevenfold by 2007, says a new U.N. survey, which credits dropping prices for the robot boom.

The increase in domestic robots coincides with record orders for industrial robots, the U.N.'s annual World Robotics Survey adds.

. . .

By the end of 2007, some 4.1 million domestic robots will likely be in use, the study says. Vacuum cleaners will still make up the majority, but sales of window-washing and pool-cleaning robots are also set to take off, it predicts.

Hey, as long as they're not eating old people's medicine for food. (The URL itself is also great: "http://nytimes.com/aponline/
international/AP-Robots-Among-Us.html".)

 

1:07 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Making Apologies: Faced with pictures like this, I'm not sure what to say:



One correspondent, however, offers an apology of his own:

Dear Iraqis,

Please accept our apologies for liberating you from a murderous tyrant who gassed civilians, systematically starved his own people, started and lost two wars with neighbors, and became a pariah in the world community.

As a token of our regret, please accept these Baathist thugs and Islamic fundamentalists from Iran and Jordan.

We're so sorry that, if you must know, we're packing up and going home, so France and Germany (who your deposed leader successfully bribed) will cease to be mad at us.

Good luck building a democracy without anyone's help!

Sincerely,

People of the United States

 

10:12 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Cutting-Edge Legal Research: From the Berkeley Technology Law Journal:

"I keep hearing all this talk lately about trolls, and at first I thought, 'I do not need to pay any attention to this, I am from Iowa and we have no trolls there.'"

Mark Janis, Symposium Transcript, 19 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1053, 1101 (2004).

 

11:46 AM :: Stephen (contact)

News Inflation: The A.P. ran a story a few days ago reporting that oil prices had pushed past $50 a barrel:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, will raise its production capacity by nearly 5 percent to 11 million barrels a day in an attempt to rein in prices that topped $50 a barrel for the first time, the oil ministry said Tuesday. . . .

Word of the decision came as crude oil topped $50 per barrel on Tuesday, pushing past the psychological milestone for the first time.

Traders bid oil over $50 a barrel in Asian trading after the November crude contract settled at a 21-year high of $49.64 on Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange in a reaction to the slow recovery of U.S. oil production that was damaged by Hurricane Ivan and unrest and terrorism fears in key producers Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Nigeria.

To their credit, in the very last paragraph, they also note that the $50-a-barrel figure (and the talk of a "21-year high") is historically meaningless:

Still, adjusting for inflation, today's prices are still more than $30 a barrel below the level reached in 1981 after the Iranian revolution. Economists also point out that the country is more energy efficient than it was two decades ago -- due to conservation measures taken after prices skyrocketed and because the industrial sector has shrunk dramatically.

This sort of thing has bothered me for a long time. I'm not sure why reporters and editors--who should know better--continue to write breathless articles on large nominal figures (the most expensive hurricane in history, etc.), even when the real figures are completely unexceptional. Or, for that matter, why they repeat claims that the deficit is "the largest in history," when what really matters is deficit as a share of GDP. In many ways, this "news" is only news to people who've never heard about inflation.

I'm sure it makes for good copy, and probably sells more papers than "Deficit Large, But Not Unprecedented." Maybe the news value is in the fact that other people pay attention to nominal values--the "psychological milestone." (But isn't that psychology itself a creature of the media?) And it's also a perennial source of scare headlines, since as inflation continues, virtually any monetary quantity will eventually become "the largest in history." But aren't there some editors out there sufficiently committed to accuracy to keep these non-stories from running?

 

5:51 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Adventures in Contract Enforcement: It all started as an uneventful Halloween. Then Cookie Monster repossessed our television...

On Halloween night in 1991, three Rent-A-Center employees in Utica, N.Y., dressed up, respectively, as the Cookie Monster, a gorilla and an alien life form and knocked on a customer's door. Once inside, they successfully repossessed a home-entertainment system on which payments hadn't been made in almost three months. Gary Gerhardt, the store manager who blessed this plan, calls the ruse "a last-ditch effort," adding, "it was the only way we could think to get someone in the door."

From Alix M. Freedman, A Marketing Giant Uses its Sales Prowess to Profit on Poverty, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22, 1993, p. A12.

 

1:14 PM :: Stephen (contact)

We Will Not Tolerate a Nuclear Bhutan:Josh notes that Lichtenstein has now ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and we can all sleep more soundly. (This presumably comes after that nation's first nuclear test rendered much of the small principality uninhabitable.) A number of nations, such as Cuba and North Korea, have never even signed the treaty. Other non-signatories to the treaty, however, include:

• The Bahamas.


• Barbados.


• Bhutan.


• Dominica. (No, not the Dominican Republic, but Dominica. According to its official website, "The youngest island in the Caribbean, erosion has yet to dull the sharpness of her terrain. Beautiful dramatic angles are everywhere. Energetic rivers run vigorously." On nuclear power, perhaps? For why else would the first item under "Things to See & Do" be "Our Boiling Lake"?)


• Niue. (Don't believe this one exists? It's not surprising -- the Niue Tourism Office describes it as "undiscovered," "unspoiled," and "unbelievable.")


• St. Vincent and the Grenadines.


• Tonga.


• Trinidad and Tobago.

All in all, I'd say Lichtenstein's the least of our problems. We're looking at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Caribbean any day now. And as Tom Lehrer wrote,

Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.

 

3:23 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Thought for the Day: From Hannah Arendt's On Violence:

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi's enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy -- Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England -- the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint. Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its 'solution' to the Czechoslovak problem...

 

3:44 PM :: Stephen (contact)

The Many Perils: I received my renter's insurance policy in the mail this morning, and was surprised to learn of the various "perils" against which my apartment is now protected. I had no idea the world was so perilous a place. Among the standard set -- fire, lightning, theft, windstorm, hail (except for "loss to watercraft") -- I'm also protected against "Explosion," "Vehicles," and "Riot or Civil Commotion, including pillage and looting" (should the Vikings return, and their dragon-prowed ships drop anchor in the port of New Haven).

Another clause offers coverage for damage caused by "Aircraft, including self-propelled missiles and spacecraft." I wonder which Allstate actuary sat down and calculated the chances of damage due to falling spacecraft; yet it's comforting to know, in case I end up with a chunk of Mir sticking out of my apartment, that I'll be insured. (There's no limitation on the spacecraft's initial point of departure, so presumably I'm also protected against any UFOs that should make crash landings in Connecticut. A full-scale alien invasion, of course, would be outside the coverage limit, which does not include "War or warlike acts, including but not limited to insurrection, rebellion or revolution," unless the aliens are sufficiently playful as to be categorized under "Vandalism and Malicious Mischief." I'd also be out of luck if the aliens use their toxic chemicals on us, since the policy does not cover "any bodily injury which results in any manner from the discharge, dispersal, release, or escape of vapors, fumes, acids, toxic chemicals, toxic gases, toxic liquids, toxic solids, waste materials or other irritants, contaminants or pollutants." Unless, of course, "such discharge . . . is sudden and accidental." No comment.)

A few other miscellaneous perils go uncovered, including "Nuclear action, meaning nuclear reaction, discharge, radiation or radioactive contamination," which will not be considered "loss by fire, explosion or smoke." Nor am I protected against "Earth movement of any type, including but not limited to earthquake, volcanic eruption, lava flow, landslide, subsidence, mudflow, pressure, sinkhole, erosion, or the sinking, rising, shifting, creeping (!), expanding, bulging, cracking, settling, or contracting (!!) of the earth." (Damage caused by the expansion or contraction of the universe receives no mention.) Finally, there's no information on whether I'm insured against damage caused by asteroids (unless considered "Falling Objects"), ravenous wolves, monster attacks, or a giant swarm of bees. I'll be on the phone to Allstate first thing Monday morning.

UPDATE: My brother writes to remind me that there's another grave peril Allstate doesn't cover: Robots. Attack by Robots.

 

2:27 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Stranger Than Fiction: At the Weekly Standard, life imitates art.

 

5:08 PM :: Stephen (contact)

The Alchemy of Parental Choice, Part II: Steve Wu comments on the post below, noting the distinction between a voucher program designed to achieve a secular goal (like improving education) and one designed to funnel government money to religious institutions, as an end run around the First Amendment.

I don't know anything about the relevant First Amendment jurisprudence, but on a moral level, I'm not sure what to make of this objection. For one thing, it seems like there will always be some secular goal that could reasonably be advanced by a voucher program. Assume that in a given town, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, there is only one public school and one Catholic school. A voucher program would thus be identical in practice to a direct subsidy of Catholic education. Even then, however, the Catholic school might be very good, with vouchers serving the secular goal of improving education for children; or the inter-school competition might be said to spur improvements in the public school, serving a similar goal; or families may just like the Catholic school better, serving a value-neutral goal of preference satisfaction. Why should it matter if the government intentionally uses the citizens as "middlemen," so long as those citizens remain free to shift their loyalties elsewhere? When governments offer food stamps, are they making their citizens "middlemen" for a subsidy to the food industry? If the parents place great value on a religious education for their children, and if their enhanced options would promote the general welfare, why should we be concerned at their use of facially neutral state aid for a religious purpose?

Of course, it could be claimed that the facial neutrality is irrelevant -- in this two-school thought experiment, it can only be used for religious ends. If the students don't go to religious schools, they lose the money. But then it's worth remembering that in the real world, where there are a wide variety of private schools in even mid-size towns (and where new ones can always be built, should the need arise), the choices will rarely be this stark. In fact, even in our two-school model, there's no reason why those families that prefer secular private education couldn't band together to fund a school of their own. If the demand for such a school is insufficient, that's hardly the fault of the government, which has already done a great deal to help such plans along. (Perhaps the First Amendment concerns rely on a picture of "taking" money from the public schools and "giving" it to the religious ones. The government, however, need not produce education at all in order to provide it. Why not view a voucher policy as a general subsidy for all types of education, with government entities--i.e., the public schools--competing alongside all others who manage to stay in business? Replacing a public-only system with a general-subsidy system could always be justified on secular grounds of utility maximization.) The same analysis would apply if the town possessed no charitable institutions other than the Church; a local tax deduction for charitable contributions would not be rendered illegitimate simply because of insufficient secular demand.

Steve also points out an email by Marv Lederman, who worries that Bush's drug counseling voucher plan may "assert[] the bona fides of religious means of addressing social problems, and . . . structur[e] an aid program precisely in order to facilitate the use of such religious means." Bush, according to Lederman, claims that faith-intensive programs work well, and should be supported for that very reason. I haven't had a chance to read through the cases he cites, but my initial reaction is that such a plan is designed specifically to achieve a secular goal -- namely a reduction in drug use. Bush's argument that religious institutions are more effective for this purpose, if true, would only make it more sensible for the government to allow religiously-inclined drug addicts to seek treatment there. Why should the "instrumental value of religion," if it exists, be off-limits to the recipients of government aid?

 

11:11 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 2002 Speech: Finally, a selection from Kerry's speech before voting to authorize the Iraq war in 2002. The whole thing is very long, but I think this is the most important passage. (Analysis of the three speeches below will follow once I have time.)

Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.

In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.

If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize "imminent"--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has recognized a similar need to distinguish how we approach this. He has said that he believes we should move in concert with allies, and he has promised his own party that he will not do so otherwise. The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. And it is what can be done. If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed.

Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.

In voting to grant the President the authority, I am not giving him carte blanche to run roughshod over every country that poses or may pose some kind of potential threat to the United States. Every nation has the right to act preemptively, if it faces an imminent and grave threat, for its self-defense under the standards of law. The threat we face today with Iraq does not meet that test yet. I emphasize "yet." Yes, it is grave because of the deadliness of Saddam Hussein's arsenal and the very high probability that he might use these weapons one day if not disarmed. But it is not imminent, and no one in the CIA, no intelligence briefing we have had suggests it is imminent. None of our intelligence reports suggest that he is about to launch an attack.

The argument for going to war against Iraq is rooted in enforcement of the international community's demand that he disarm. It is not rooted in the doctrine of preemption. Nor is the grant of authority in this resolution an acknowledgment that Congress accepts or agrees with the President's new strategic doctrine of preemption. Just the opposite. This resolution clearly limits the authority given to the President to use force in Iraq, and Iraq only, and for the specific purpose of defending the United States against the threat posed by Iraq and enforcing relevant Security Council resolutions.

 

10:50 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 1997 Speech: Regarding unilateral and multilateral action; it's long, but worth reading. (No permalink, unfortunately.)

WE MUST BE FIRM WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN (Senate - November 09, 1997)

[105th Congress, Pages S12254-56]

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will speak tomorrow on the subject of fast track. I wish to talk this evening about another subject that has not received as much conversation on the floor of the Senate as it merits--because, while we have been focused on fast track and on a lot of loose ends which must be tied up before this first session of the 105th Congress can be brought to a close, a very troubling situation has developed in the Middle East that has ominous implications, not just for our national security but literally for the security of all civilized and law-abiding areas of the world.

Even after the overwhelming defeat that the coalition forces visited upon Iraq in and near Kuwait in the Desert Storm conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's truculence has continued unabated. In the final days of that conflict, a fateful decision was made not to utterly vanquish the Iraqi Government and armed forces, on the grounds that to do so would leave a risky vacuum, as some then referred to it, in the Middle East which Iran or Syria or other destabilizing elements might move to fill.

But instead of reforming his behavior after he was handed an historic defeat, Saddam Hussein has continued to push international patience to the very edge. The United Nations, even with many member nations which strongly favor commerce over conflict, has established and maintained sanctions designed to isolate Iraq, keep it too weak to threaten other nations, and push Saddam Hussein to abide by accepted norms of national behavior. These sanctions have cost Iraq over $100 billion and have significantly restrained his economy. They unavoidably also have exacted a very high price from the Iraqi people, but this has not appeared to bother Saddam Hussein in the least. Nor have the sanctions succeeded in obtaining acceptable behavior from Saddam.

Now, during the past 2 weeks, Saddam again has raised his obstinately uncooperative profile. We all know of his announcement that he will no longer permit United States citizens to participate in the U.N. inspection team searching Iraq for violations of the U.N. requirement that Iraq not build or store weapons of mass destruction. And he has made good on his announcement. The UNSCOM inspection team, that is, the United Nations Special Commission team, has been refused access to its inspection targets throughout the week and once again today because it has Americans as team members. While it is not certain, it is not unreasonable to assume that Saddam's action may have been precipitated by the fear that the U.N. inspectors were getting uncomfortably close to discovering some caches of reprehensible weapons of mass destruction, or facilities to manufacture them, that many have long feared he is doing everything in his power to build, hide, and hoard.

Another reason may be that Saddam Hussein, who unquestionably has demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections. This latest action may, indeed, be his warped idea of an acid test of that conclusion.

We should all be encouraged by the reactions of many of our allies, who are evincing the same objections to Iraq's course that are prevalent here in the United States. There is an inescapable reality that, after all of the effort of recent years, Saddam Hussein remains the international outlaw he was when he invaded Kuwait. For most of a decade he has set himself outside international law, and he has sought to avoid the efforts of the international community to insist that his nation comport itself with reasonable standards of behavior and, specifically, not equip itself with implements of mass destruction which it has shown the willingness to use in previous conflicts.

Plainly and simply, Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to get away with his antics, or with this latest excuse for avoidance of international responsibility.

This is especially true when only days earlier, after months of negotiations, the administration extracted some very serious commitments from China, during President Jiang Zemin's state visit to Washington, to halt several types of proliferation activities. It is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a renegade such as Saddam Hussein, who has demonstrated a willingness to engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and other nations.

Let me say that I agree with the determination by the administration, at the outset of this development, to take a measured and multilateral approach to this latest provocation. It is of vital importance to let the United Nations first respond to Saddam's actions. After all, those actions are first and foremost an affront to the United Nations and all its membership which has, in a too-rare example of unity in the face of belligerent threats from a rogue State, managed to maintain its determination to keep Iraq isolated via a regime of sanctions and inspections.

I think we should commend the resolve of the Chief U.N. Inspector, UNSCOM head Richard Butler, who has refused to bend or budge in the face of Saddam's intransigence. Again and again he has assembled the inspection team, including the U.S. citizens who are part of it, and presented it to do its work, despite being refused access by Iraq.

He rejected taking the easy way out by asking the U.S. participants simply to step aside until the problem is resolved so that the inspections could go forward. He has painstakingly documented what is occurring, and has filed regular reports to the Security Council. He clearly recognizes this situation to be the matter of vital principle that we believe it to be.

The Security Council correctly wants to resolve this matter if it is possible to do so without plunging into armed conflict, be it great or small. So it sent a negotiating team to Baghdad to try to resolve the dispute and secure appropriate access for UNSCOM's inspection team. To remove a point of possible contention as the negotiators sought to accomplish their mission, the United Nations asked that the U.S. temporarily suspend reconnaissance flights over Iraq that are conducted with our U-2 aircraft under U.N. auspices, and we complied. At that time, in my judgment this was the appropriate and responsible course.

But now we know that Saddam Hussein has chosen to blow off the negotiating team entirely. It has returned emptyhanded to report to the Security Council tomorrow. That is why I have come to the floor this evening to speak about this matter, to express what I think is the feeling of many Senators and other Americans as the Security Council convenes tomorrow.

We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, an obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent--and that the United States should support and participate in those steps.

The suspended reconnaissance flights should be resumed beginning tomorrow, and it is my understanding they will be. Should Saddam be so foolish as to take any action intended to endanger those aircraft or interrupt their mission, then we should, and I am confident we will, be prepared to take the necessary actions to either eliminate that threat before it can be realized, or take actions of retribution.

When it meets tomorrow to receive the negotiators' report and to determine its future course of action, it is vital that the Security Council treat this situation as seriously as it warrants.

In my judgment, the Security Council should authorize a strong U.N. military response that will materially damage, if not totally destroy, as much as possible of the suspected infrastructure for developing and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, as well as key military command and control nodes. Saddam Hussein should pay a grave price, in a currency that he understands and values, for his unacceptable behavior.

This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. But how long this military action might continue and how it may escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.

Of course, Mr. President, the greatest care must be taken to reduce collateral damage to the maximum extent possible, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein cynically and cold-heartedly has made that a difficult challenge by ringing most high-value military targets with civilians.

As the Security Council confronts this, I believe it is important for it to keep prominently in mind the main objective we all should have, which is maintaining an effective, thorough, competent inspection process that will locate and unveil any covert prohibited weapons activity underway in Iraq . If an inspection process acceptable to the United States and the rest of the Security Council can be rapidly reinstituted, it might be possible to vitiate military action.

Should the resolve of our allies wane to pursue this matter until an acceptable inspection process has been reinstituted--which I hope will not occur and which I am pleased to say at this moment does not seem to have even begun--the United States must not lose its resolve to take action. But I think there is strong reason to believe that the multilateral resolve will persist.

To date, there have been nine material breaches by Iraq of U.N. requirements. The United Nations has directed some form of responsive action in five of those nine cases, and I believe it will do so in this case.

The job of the administration in the next 24 hours and in the days to follow is to effectively present the case that this is not just an insidious challenge to U.N. authority. It is a threat to peace and to long-term stability in the tinder-dry atmosphere of the Middle East, and it is an unaffordable affront to international norms of decent and acceptable national behavior.

We must not presume that these conclusions automatically will be accepted by every one of our allies, some of which have different interests both in the region and elsewhere, or will be of the same degree of concern to them that they are to the U.S. But it is my belief that we have the ability to persuade them of how serious this is and that the U.N. must not be diverted or bullied.

The reality, Mr. President, is that Saddam Hussein has intentionally or inadvertently set up a test which the entire world will be watching, and if he gets away with this arrogant ploy, he will have terminated a most important multilateral effort to defuse a legitimate threat to global security--to defuse it by tying the hands of a rogue who thinks nothing of ordering widespread, indiscriminate death and destruction in pursuit of power.

If he succeeds, he also will have overwhelmed the willingness of the world's leading nations to enforce a principle on which all agree: that a nation should not be permitted to grossly violate even rudimentary standards of national behavior in ways that threaten the sovereignty and well-being of other nations and their people.

I believe that we should aspire to higher standards of international behavior than Saddam Hussein has offered us, and the enforcement action of the United Nations pursues such a higher standard.

We know from our largely unsuccessful attempts to enlist the cooperation of other nations, especially industrialized trading nations, in efforts to impose and enforce somewhat more ambitious standards on nations such as Iran, China, Burma, and Syria that the willingness of most other nations--including a number who are joined in the sanctions to isolate Iraq--is neither wide nor deep to join in imposing sanctions on a sovereign nation to spur it to `clean up its act' and comport its actions with accepted international norms. It would be a monumental tragedy to see such willingness evaporate in one place where so far it has survived and arguably succeeded to date, especially at a time when it is being subjected to such a critical test as that which Iraq presents.

In a more practical vein, Mr. President, I submit that the old adage `pay now or pay later' applies perfectly in this situation. If Saddam Hussein is permitted to go about his effort to build weapons of mass destruction and to avoid the accountability of the United Nations, we will surely reap a confrontation of greater consequence in the future. The Security Council and the United States obviously have to think seriously and soberly about the plausible scenarios that could play out if he were permitted to continue his weapons development work after shutting out U.N. inspectors.

There can be little or no question that Saddam has no compunctions about using the most reprehensible weapons--on civilians as readily as on military forces. He has used poison gas against Iranian troops and civilians in the Iran-Iraq border conflict. He has launched Scud missiles against Israel and against coalition troops based in Saudi Arabia during the gulf war.

It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully militarize and deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the capability to exterminate the entire population of cities the size of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice. If Saddam were to develop and then deploy usable atomic weapons, the same holds true.

Were he to do either, much less both, the entire balance of power in the Middle East changes fundamentally, raising geometrically the already sky-high risk of conflagration in the region. His ability to bluff and bully would soar. The willingness of those nations which participated in the gulf war coalition to confront him again if he takes a course of expansionism or adventurism may be greatly diminished if they believe that their own citizens would be threatened directly by such weapons of mass destruction.

The posture of Saudi Arabia, in particular, could be dramatically altered in such a situation. Saudi Arabia, of course, was absolutely indispensable as a staging and basing area for Desert Storm which dislodged Saddam's troops from Kuwait, and it remains one of the two or three most important locations of U.S. bases in the Middle East.

Were its willingness to serve in these respects to diminish or vanish because of the ability of Saddam to brandish these weapons, then the ability of the United Nations or remnants of the gulf war coalition, or even the United States acting alone, to confront and halt Iraqi aggression would be gravely damaged.

Were Israel to find itself under constant threat of potent biological or nuclear attack, the current low threshold for armed conflict in the Middle East that easily could escalate into a world-threatening inferno would become even more of a hair trigger.

Indeed, one can easily anticipate that Israel would find even the prospect of such a situation entirely untenable and unacceptable and would take preemptive military action. Such action would, at the very least, totally derail the Middle East peace process which is already at risk. It could draw new geopolitical lines in the sand, with the possibility of Arab nations which have been willing to oppose Saddam's extreme actions either moving into a pan-Arab column supporting him against Israel and its allies or, at least, becoming neutral.

Either course would significantly alter the region's balance of power and make the preservation and advancement of U.S. national security objectives in the region unattainable--and would tremendously increase the risk that our Nation, our young people, ultimately would be sucked into yet another military conflict, this time without the warning time and the staging area that enabled Desert Storm to have such little cost in U.S. and other allied troop casualties.

Finally, we must consider the ultimate nightmare. Surely, if Saddam's efforts are permitted to continue unabated, we will eventually face more aggression by Saddam, quite conceivably including an attack on Israel, or on other nations in the region as he seeks predominance within the Arab community. If he has such weapons, his attack is likely to employ weapons of unspeakable and indiscriminate destructiveness and torturous effects on civilians and military alike. What that would unleash is simply too horrendous to contemplate, but the United States inevitably would be drawn into that conflict.

Mr. President, I could explore other possible ominous consequences of letting Saddam Hussein proceed unchecked. The possible scenarios I have referenced really are only the most obvious possibilities. What is vital is that Americans understand, and that the Security Council understand, that there is no good outcome possible if he is permitted to do anything other than acquiesce to continuation of U.N. inspections.

As the world's only current superpower, we have the enormous responsibility not to exhibit arrogance, not to take any unwitting or unnecessary risks, and not to employ armed force casually. But at the same time it is our responsibility not to shy away from those confrontations that really matter in the long run. And this matters in the long run.

While our actions should be thoughtfully and carefully determined and structured, while we should always seek to use peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve serious problems before resorting to force, and while we should always seek to take significant international actions on a multilateral rather than a unilateral basis whenever that is possible, if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave threat to the well-being of our Nation or the entire world and it cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we believe is right and wise.

I believe this is such a situation, Mr. President. It is a time for resolve. Tomorrow we must make that clear to the Security Council and to the world.

I yield back the balance of my time.

 

10:40 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Kerry's 1991 Speech: Taking a break from thesis-editing, I decided to look up a few of Kerry's actual statements. Here's his speech from 1991 on the Persian Gulf War. I couldn't get a permalink from THOMAS, but here's the text, highlighting certain passages of note.

AUTHORIZING USE OF U.S. ARMED FORCES PURSUANT TO U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION (Senate - January 12, 1991)

[102nd Congress, Page S396]

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I do not believe our Nation is prepared for war. But I am absolutely convinced our Nation does not believe that war is necessary. Nevertheless, this body may vote momentarily to permit it.

When I returned from Vietnam, I wrote then I was willing personally, in the future, to fight and possibly die for my country. But I said then it must be when the Nation as a whole has decided that there is a real threat and that the Nation as a whole has decided that we all must go.

I do not believe this test has been met. There is no consensus in America for war and, therefore, the Congress should not vote to authorize war.

If we go to war in the next few days, it will not be because our immediate vital interests are so threatened and we have no other choice. It is not because of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons when, after all, Saddam Hussein had all those abilities or was working toward them for years--even while we armed him and refused to hold him accountable for using some of them. It will be because we set an artificial deadline. As we know, those who have been in war, there is no artificial wound, no artificial consequence of war.

Most important, we must balance that against the fact that we have an alternative, an alternative that would allow us to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, an accomplishment that we all want to achieve.

I still believe that notwithstanding the outcome of this vote, we can have a peaceful resolution. I think it most likely. If we do, for a long time, people will argue in America about whether this vote made it possible.

Many of us will always remain convinced that a similar result could have come about without such a high-risk high-stakes throw away of our constitutional power.

If not, if we do go to war, for years people will ask why Congress gave in. They will ask why there was such a rush to so much death and destruction when it did not have to happen.

It does not have to happen if we do our job.

So I ask my colleagues if we are really once again so willing to have our young and our innocent bear the price of our impatience.

I personally believe, and I have heard countless of my colleagues say, that they think the President made a mistake to unilaterally increase troops, set a date and make war so probable. I ask my colleagues if we are once again so willing to risk people dying from a mistake.

 

10:38 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Thoughts on the RNC: Picking up where Josh left off, I concur on the admiration of McCain's speech and the dislike of Giuliani's. The statements of the 9/11 relatives were incredibly powerful, reminding us of the preciousness of those lives that were lost. And then Rudy followed with a poorly-organized collection of red meat and laugh lines.

A second thought: both McCain and Giuliani described the remaining mission in Iraq in terms of democracy promotion. Even the ineloquent woman from Iowa interviewed by Ray Suarez on PBS emphasized "freedom" as the message of the GOP, at home and abroad. Have the neocons succeeded at capturing the heart and soul of the party (I hope so), or, as Josh suggested, is their rhetoric just better?

The pool game and convention-watching followed a long discussion that evening about Kerry, who thus far has been maddeningly vague about what his foreign policy intentions are. I write this as someone who agrees with many of Bush's foreign policy goals, but is very frustrated with the administration's record in implementing them. (To my mind, some of the most dangerous consequences of failure in Iraq are that it would (1) equate democracy with chaos in the minds of millions in the Middle East; (2) discredit the cause of humanitarian intervention elsewhere, creating a sense that "nobody wants to do this again"; (3) destroy the credibility of our intelligence, so that no one will believe us when someone actually has WMD; and (4) make it impossible, while we're tied down, to pose any real threat to adversaries like Iran or North Korea.)

The war is very important to me, and I'd feel happier voting for Kerry if I thought he'd conduct it better. I'm glad that someone on Kerry's team worries a lot about suitcase nukes; I'm glad that they're at least trying to outflank Bush on the right. In fact, that's what the military-friendly convention was designed to show -- that "we want the same things Bush wants, but we'll do it better."

But frankly, I don't know whether to believe him. Since 9/11, Kerry has tried to have it both ways on some very important questions. I think the line that "he voted against the $87 billion" is in some ways unfair; people vote for amended bills and against the final versions all the time. But his vote came at a time when a lot of people just didn't want to spend the extra money, and when it actually wasn't clear whether Bush would have enough support to get the aid package through. Other candidates, such as Gephardt, took the political risk, and paid the price. And Kerry's "firehouses in Baghdad" line, which Christopher Hitchens rightly excoriates, doesn't give me much confidence.

In some ways, I agree with Andrew Sullivan's description of the Democrats as a war party with the wrong general. Joe Lieberman--who, as far as I know, never went to Vietnam--could make the arguments Kerry's making and be believed; he's been out in front on democratizing the Middle East for a long time. He would have been able to focus the debate on the administration's competence, and not its goals, which are far easier to defend. But Lieberman, in the Bizarro World in which he gets elected, would also have had a mandate to finish the job in Iraq, to stay the course until we can build a stable and democratic government. It's hard to know just what Kerry's mandate would look like, or what the political pressures on his administration would be, especially now that he's expressed a desire to bring some troops home after six months. (Which is, incidentally, one of the worst things he could have said before the election. How committed to the mission will our troops be, if they know they're only marking time? How many terrorist groups will step up their attacks in month five, knowing that they don't have long to wait? It's like Sonny Corleone spilling the beans in front of Sollozzo -- "Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking again!")

The main pressure on a President Kerry would come from the left, especially if his unrealistic expectations on allied help aren't met. (There won't be a single French soldier stationed in Falluja anytime soon, regardless of who's in the White House.) And the reactive, rather than proactive, tone of his convention speech--as well as his explicit endorsement of stability over democracy in Iraq--makes me worry that he might be ready to cut things short.

Maybe this is the wrong way to look at things; maybe a more restrained foreign policy would be more achievable, and better serve American interests. Perhaps George Will is right to say that some things are beyond our power, and we just aren't strong enough to remake the Middle East. Perhaps we can, as so many European commentators have urged us to, just accept living in a world with a little less security.

But then I read about two more busloads of murder victims in Israel, and I'm not ready to "accept" that yet. If we're too weak to remake the Middle East, let's at least find out by trying. I wish I knew if Kerry feels the same way.

 

9:45 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The Alchemy of Parental Choice: Dalia Lithwick, whose work I generally enjoy, has the following curious passage in a recent NYT guest column:

To be sure, the courts have made a hash of the First Amendment religion jurisprudence. A crèche on government property is constitutional so long as the manger includes a Malibu Barbie; and state aid to religious schools is constitutional if it's triangulated through the alchemy of parental choice.

I can't comment on crèche law, but what's so occult and mysterious about "the alchemy of parental choice"? The fact that parents do the choosing makes an enormous (and obvious) difference. The left has generally resisted attempts to micromanage the lives of the poor, arguing that recipients of public aid should be allowed the dignity of making their own decisions. Those who receive a government check could choose to spend it, in Robert Nozick's formulation, "on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Monthly Review." So why not on religious education? We don't prohibit parents from using their tax cuts to pay for Sunday school, even though the state would be prohibited from paying for it directly. We don't prevent the elderly from endorsing their Social Security checks to the Salvation Army--nor, as I've mentioned before, do we stop welfare recipients from donating to religious charities, lest taxpayer dollars somehow find their way into the collection plate.

In the context of education, those parents who can't afford private school (and who would be the target of any likely voucher plan) might wish to send their children to Catholic schools or yeshivas; schools with strict discipline or hippy classes taught under trees; schools that emphasize science, the arts, or ancient Greek. So long as all of them meet basic educational standards, why should the state be concerned with which they choose? And why should the First Amendment be endangered, given that the choice is made by individuals rather than state officials?

The concern Lithwick feels, to paraphrase George Will, seems to be that the poor are insufficiently materialistic. If parents wanted to give their kids candy bars, they're free to choose; but if they want to give them religion, suddenly it's alchemy.

 

8:59 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Lapham's Clairvoyance, Part II: (See original post above.) Harper's Magazine has decided to take Eugene Volokh's advice and post a correction to its website:

Lewis Lapham responds:

As Mr. Ostrowski properly notes, the rhetorical invention was silly. The mistake, however, is a serious one, and if I'd had my wits about me as an editor, I wouldn't have let the author mix up his tenses in manuscript or allowed him in page proof to lapse into poetic license. Both of us regret the injury done to the magazine and apologize, wholeheartedly, to its readers.

Apology accepted -- but am I the only one who finds the causal explanation for this error a little thin? The issue is the poetic license, not the verb tenses, and it speaks to a certain willingness to let political preconceptions stand in for facts. (And couldn't Lapham have done without the conceit of treating the "author" and "editor" as separate persons, given that he was both?)

 

10:21 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Lapham's Clairvoyance: Josh Chafetz asks how Lewis Lapham's invented account of what he heard and thought during the Republican National Convention (which hasn't yet taken place) is different from anything Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass came up with. I agree, but I also wonder how the passage, which is obviously false to any attentive reader, could possibly have gotten through Harper's editorial process. True, Lapham may be the editor of Harper's (and thus harder to fire than Jayson Blair). But surely someone looks at his copy before it prints. Did the copy editors forget that the RNC hasn't happened yet, or did they realize it was false and let it go?

Eugene Volokh was told on the phone that the magazine recognized its error and would be printing an explanation in October. But I'm not quite sure what a reasonable explanation would be. Lapham specifically recounts thoughts he supposedly had during the convention--something that can't just be a grammar mistake. Perhaps the article wasn't actually meant to go to press? Or the readers just weren't meant to catch it?

 

10:19 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Cats! How the mighty have fallen. Steve Wu is resorting to catblogging. (The real question is, can they do the Cat Meow Boogie?)

 

10:18 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Now in New Haven: After the longest hiatus in this blog's short history, I've returned to posting, after moving from St. Louis to New Haven to start law school. After a week in a sparsely furnished apartment, I now have a desk to type on -- as well as broadband Internet access, thanks to the handily unsecured wireless network of someone in my apartment building. Posting will be light as the moving process continues, but at least there won't be total silence.

 

4:38 PM :: Stephen (contact)

A Good-Timin' Man: In my last few days in Oxford, my friend Rhett introduced me to the music of country legend Waylon Jennings. It's just terrific -- there's a foot-stomping joy in each song that I hadn't heard in a while. You can listen for the nuggets of earthy wisdom in "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)":

The only two things in life that make it worth livin'
Is guitars that tune good and firm-feelin' women

Or for the grasp of human character in "Good-Hearted Woman":

She's a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin' man
She loves him in spite of his ways she don't understand
Through teardrops and laughter they pass through this world hand in hand
A good-hearted woman, lovin' her good-timin man

He likes the bright lights and night life and good-timin' friends
When the party's all over she'll welcome him back home again
Lord knows she don't understand him but she does the best that she can
This good-hearted woman lovin' a good timin' man

Or just for the fun of singing along with Waylon and Willie Nelson in "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys":

Cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings
Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night.
Them that don't know him won't like him and them that do
Sometimes won't know how to take him.
He ain't wrong, he's just different, but his pride won't let him
Do things to make you think he's right.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks.
Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
'Cause they'll never stay home and they're always alone.
Even with someone they love.

If you see Josh and me on the New Haven Green next year, playing croquet, drinking Pimm's, and belting out "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to cowboys!", now you'll know why.

 

4:37 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Back in Town: Just returned to St. Louis, with two long years in the United Kingdom now behind me. It was a very unusual feeling, on the ride to Heathrow, when I realized that I was no longer coming back for a visit -- I was coming home. I won't try to sum up my Oxford experience in a single post, but I can say that although I wasn't looking forward to leaving, I'm definitely glad to be back.

It does seem like a lot's changed in the past two years, though, and some of the changes weren't entirely expected. (Like the triumph of Atkins: when I got lunch today at a local sandwich shop, I noticed that they were selling "low-carb bread.") The next few weeks will be pretty busy, but I'll try to keep posting now and then, before I head up to New Haven and change location yet again...

 

7:17 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Collective Responsibility: From Thom Ringer:

You've been cited! See footnote #1. Apologies if I have sent this to you already. It's being considered for publication in J.Soc.Pol.Thought.

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball1843/
mphil/papers/jspot_submission.pdf

As I replied to Thom, "Woo hoo! Fame and fortune await."

Thom's very interesting article examines the collective responsibility of group actors, such as corporations or states; it critiques three different approaches before ultimately recommending a fourth. I'll describe the approaches here before adding my own thoughts.

The first view considered is the "mereological view" (MV), which finds its name in what he calls "Sachs' Question" (from a discussion we once had): "Aren't collectives just mereological sums"--the simple aggregates--"of their constituent members?" On this view, the idea of collective action is just a convenient shorthand for the related actions of lots of different individuals. These individuals may have certain expectations, practices, voluntary rules of conduct, etc., and it may be useful sometimes to describe the group as a single actor. But when a collective is said to have acted, nothing occurs over and above a bundle of individual actions. For instance, if we say that "The Army destroyed the bridge," nothing occurred over and above a complex bundle of actions by individual soldiers and officers, which together brought about the bridge's destruction. Thus, when a collective is said to be responsible for a given event, no moral responsibility can be assigned over and above that assigned to various individuals. In the example of the bridge, there are a large number of soldiers who are responsible for helping destroy it, but no separate entity called "The Army" which bears a new kind of collective responsibility.

The second view is the "official conglomerate view" (OCV), which views collective responsibility and individual responsibility as very different things. According to OCV, collectives are groups of individuals that possess "goal-oriented decision-making procedures" which allow them to declare and act upon collective intentions, which are separate from the intentions of the constituent individuals. (For instance, if the Joint Chiefs of Staff decide to destroy the bridge, this desire doesn't need to be shared by all--or even most--of those in the ranks to be considered a collective intention of the military.) According to OCV, collectives can be held responsible for their actions and intentions, in a manner distinct from how we hold individuals responsible for what they do within this framework of collective action.

The third view is the "social wholes view" (SWV), which does not view collectives as groups of individuals at all. Instead, collectives are "non-additive aggregates" of their constituent individuals--the whole is more than the mereological sum of the parts. On this view, a state or corporation is indeed something over and above all the individuals who compose it. It has an independent existence, not merely as a binding framework for coordinated action (as in OCV) or an unstructured bundle of individuals; it adopts a Rousseauian general will that can be entirely distinct from the will of all. The group can act 'on its own,' in a sense, and thus may deserve collective praise or blame for its collective actions.

Finally, Ringer offers, if not a full-fledged account of collective responsibility, a necessary condition for it. A group may properly be described as a collective actor, he claims, only if it is an "epistemic agent" concerning the outcome of its actions. Members of collectives may bear collective responsibility "when they act with a singularity of belief and knowledge about their action such that they can be said to have collectively intended the same outcome." Where such common beliefs are absent, we cannot consider the group to be a true collective; but where they are shared, we can honestly hold the group responsible as a group for its collective actions.

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If these issues interest you, I'd encourage you to read Thom's paper, which I've thought about a good deal since he sent it to me. Otherwise, I'd stop reading now, since what follows won't make any sense at all.

Unfortunately, as the putative defender of the mereological view :), I wonder whether the position Thom criticizes isn't actually something of a straw man. To my mind, MV is far more sophisticated and reasonable than it might appear. Moreover, after rejecting the social wholes view and the official conglomerate view, there's not much else left -- not because there aren't any logical alternatives, which there are, but because the motivations behind the rejections of these views don't allow anything short of a full commitment to MV. I'd respectfully argue that the approach Thom suggests in his conclusion is in fact a version of MV, which appreciates some of the benefits that it possesses and that the cruder interpretation may lack. (I've sent a version of what follows to Thom, but thought I'd post it here as well.)


I. The argument against MV

Thom's criticism of MV is that it is "thin" and "inauthentic" as an account of collective action. As an example, he uses Tuomela's case of a full-blown intentional joint action (IJA). In this case, a group of individuals embark on a joint action aware of each other's intentions--and, more importantly, cognizant of this common awareness. Clearly, our moral evaluation of an individual actor

cannot be completely separated from their ... knowledge or speculation about the actions of other participants. To understand the significance of what they did, we have to understand how their intentions were supervened upon by [or themselves supervene on] what they believed or had been led to believe about the actions of other parties. The proponents of MV appear to conflate physical coincidence and epistemic coordination; a superior account, as the examples suggest, will have to say something meaningful about the latter.

I agree fully that an account of collective responsibility must take account of such factors in order to be plausible. Yet I'd also contend that the same condition must be met by plausible accounts of individual responsibility, completely outside of the context of collective action. If Joe purposefully holds down Sam's legs, so that Sam will be unable to escape from a rolling boulder, we can easily assign Joe individual moral responsibility for Sam's death; there is no question of collective responsibility here. Yet if Joe is an innocent bystander who is thrown out of a window and unintentionally falls on Sam's legs, temporarily pinning them to the ground, his moral responsibility is much reduced. The merely physical description of the action is not sufficient to determine our moral evaluation; we need some description of the relevant intentions as well.

Given this background, I see no reason at all why MV cannot, in its moral evaluation of joint actions, take similar account of the intentions, desires, beliefs, states of mind, etc. of those involved. The mere process of "cashing out" collective actions into mereological sums does nothing to eliminate intention. Consider the example Thom provides of "two people raising their glasses" <--> "a toast". Suppose that two people have recently emigrated from a land where the practice of toasting is unknown. After seeing the couples at the tables around them lift their wine glasses, however, the immigrants also raise theirs to the light, in order (as they assume the others have done) to better search for floating insects. This event certainly should not be described as a toast, but the reason has nothing to do with any conglomerate interpretation of toasting. (The idea of a goal-oriented decision-making procedure here would be absurd.) Rather, this is not "a toast" simply because "a toast" requires a common intention to participate in a certain social practice, an intention lacking in the present example. Even after we cash out a supposedly collective action--nothing has occurred here over and above the actions of two individuals--those individuals' intentions and states of mind can still be relevant.

If this last statement is true of mere descriptive accounts (e.g., of a toast), it is even more true of normative accounts. Contra Tuomela, MV has no trouble whatsoever in cases of full-blown intentional joint actions. These would be cashed out into a complex bundle of individual acts, each of which would take place with an intention that depends in a certain way on the intentions of others. (In fact, Tuomela's definition of an IJA constitutes such a cashing-out.) The individual actions of one participant in an IJA could be individually evaluated, if necessary, and this evaluation would quite correctly make reference to their intentions given their beliefs about the actions of others. What makes the collective-action shorthand particularly useful in such situations is that all the parties to an IJA are similarly situated from the standpoint of moral evaluation. We can easily assign moral responsibility to Joe if he purposefully holds down Sam's legs, with the intention that Lucille may then inject Sam with poison. Physically, Joe may have done nothing worse than hold down Sam's legs for a few moments; morally, he quite obviously shares responsibility for the murder, having known in advance what effect his actions would have. The situation is not radically changed if Lucille were aware of Joe's intentions, or if they had discussed the plan for the murder beforehand. Thus, there is no difficulty in asserting that "Joe and Lucille murdered Sam," even though we do not think that anything has occurred beyond the confluence of individual actions, appropriately described. We might think that such pre-meditated, coordinated action is worse than mere awareness of the other's intentions (conspiracy to murder is also a crime), but that does not mean it cannot be cashed out in individual terms. The concept of "collective responsibility" may be convenient in describing such phenomena, especially when the IJA itself is more complicated and involves many participants, but one does not need to invoke a new kind of responsibility or a new kind of entity (such as a collective) to bear it.

More importantly, this understanding of the MV also allows us to explain why we are reluctant to assign moral responsibility to an individual who lacks the requisite intentions, despite his or her participation in a joint act. (I use "intentions" as a catchall phrase, without meaning to require an active will to harm. For instance, if Officer Winky is aware of Joe and Lucille's murder plot, but is indifferent to the outcome and so walks whistling by the scene of the crime, she clearly bears some responsibility for failing to intervene and save Sam's life.) Where these intentions are absent, certain judgments of responsibility should be withheld. MV would not assign responsibility to Joe had he been thrown out of a window and fallen on Sam, pinning his legs to the ground while Lucille injected the poison. Nor would it necessarily assign the same kind of responsibility to Joe if he had been led to believe (with a given level of justification) that Sam was an epileptic who must be restrained during his seizure, and that Lucille was a paramedic injecting Sam with lifesaving medication. (Nor, again, if Joe and Lucille actually were paramedics, and the needles had been switched at the last minute by a nefarious fourth party.) Far from "conflat[ing] physical coincidence and epistemic coordination," MV is perfectly capable of distinguishing the two, and of properly allocating responsibility.


II. The lessons of the alternatives (OCV & SWV)

As I understand it, MV relies on two underlying assumptions:

(1) Ontological individualism: collectives are not ontologically distinct entities from their members. Collectives are constructs. Propositions about collectives are really just shorthand for complicated bundles of propositions about their members.
(2) A Kantian approach to moral evaluation: whether it is appropriate to assign moral praise, blame, or responsibility (of any kind) to individuals depends only on their own voluntary actions, intentions, desires, beliefs, states of mind, etc.

I would infer from Thom's various arguments that he accepts (1) as a metaphysical premise. Certainly it is an appropriate description, as Tuomela notes, of various joint actors such as spontaneous mobs or fluid terrorist cells. (When Qaddafi donated arms to the IRA, he became complicit in their campaigns of terror without becoming the member of any social whole.)

Additionally, I would infer that Thom also accepts (2) in making assignments of responsibility. He criticizes SWV on the grounds that it would overwhelm any relation between responsibility and individual action. (Are babies, or the unconscious, in any way responsible for the current actions of their governments? Yet they make up a part of the social whole.) The criticisms of OCV similarly focus on the unjust assignment of responsibility (good or bad) to those who took no part in the decision-making process for a rule-governed action. The actions of Hugh Thompson, who airlifted civilians at My Lai to safety, would surely seem to exempt him from some degree of collective responsibility. The same could be true of low-level functionaries in Saddam's Iraq who might have collected taxes to support the regime, not merely "under orders" (like Eichmann) but out of personal fear. As Thom notes,

Grudging rulefollowers, particularly those who, in following collective rules, do great harm to others, are morally culpable. But I would argue that they are not morally culpable in the same way as those who enthusiastically followed the collective rules for a single, nefariously focused purpose. It may be that the 'grudgers' are as blameworthy as the 'enthusiastic conformists,' but this is not at all the same as saying that it makes sense to lump both groups together as if they acted collectively and with a singularity of intention.

The only rationale I can see for distinguishing these two cases is that the grudging rulefollowers possess different beliefs or purposes from the enthusiastic participants, and that it would be wrong to hold them responsible in the same way when the requisite intentions are missing.

Of course, these two positions only show that moral evaluation depends in part on intention, not that intentions, states of mind, etc. are the only grounds for assigning responsibility. Yet it seems difficult to explain why some forms of responsibility (call them "individual") may only be assigned given the requisite intentions or beliefs, while others (call them "collective") may be radically independent of our own voluntary actions. What distinguishes the latter types of responsibility from the former? When can an individually blameless person be held collectively responsible?

I can think of only three types of cases where collective responsibility might usefully be distinguished from individual moral evaluation. The first type is collective legal responsibility, such as that of a corporation which faces strict liability for (say) the environmental damage caused by its pollution. This doctrine, however, is quite separate from a doctrine of collective moral responsibility, since legal liability could be assigned, even to blameless individuals, for reasons that have nothing to do with the moral evaluation of a particular case. (For instance, we might want to give the right incentives for due dilligence to future polluters, and thus still hold responsible those who had no scientific reason to fear that the chemicals they emitted might be toxic.)

The second type might be called "corporate" responsibility, where the voluntary members of an institution can be expected to share in the praise or blame it incurs through its coordinated actions. If Coca-Cola violates a contract with a supplier, we think it entirely proper that the money for damages come from the corporate treasury, rather than from the pocket of the person who ordered the contract violation. This is true not only for legal or societal reasons (the incentive effects mentioned above), but also because the institution exists in part in order to be used as a contractual agent. The shareholders, who are the ultimate owners of the corporate treasury, have agreed to bind up their fortunes and entrust them to the managers; they have, in a sense, willingly signed up for a share of responsibility in what comes next. (Such a position might be called a "social-whole-ish" view, given that individuals have agreed to be treated as if they were constituent parts of a given whole.) Even a director who fought the decision before the Board, who campaigned against it at the annual meeting, who has done all an individual could reasonably be expected to do in order to prevent the violation, can have no claim of injustice when, due to the decisions of other shareholders (for which she is blameless), the value of her stock is decreased.

Finally, the third type might be called "unavoidable" corporate responsibility. The model I have in mind here is that of a state, such as the U.S., accepting responsibility for the actions of its officers -- such as by making reparation payments to those forced into Japanese internment camps during World War II. Here again, we think it proper that the money for reparations come from America, from the general taxpayer, rather than from the pocket of those who supported, voted for, or implemented the policy. ("It is America that incarcerated them," one might think, "and America should pay the price.") Yet I would argue that this judgment is more guided by prudence than by morality. Why should someone who emigrated to the U.S. 50 years after the fact, and in ignorance of the World War II-era actions of the government (say, as an illiterate young refugee from genocide), be taxed in order to pay for the misdeeds of prior generations? Assume that it were possible to identify, with perfect certainty, all those who had supported, contributed to, campaigned for, implemented, or just were knowingly indifferent to and accepted the immoral policy; assume further that all of them were still alive, and that they could afford (as a group) the cost of the reparations. Wouldn't it be obviously better to punish only those individuals, according to the degree of their individual responsibility? And wouldn't it be obviously worse to punish, given our perfect knowledge, the young refugee, or the saintly human-rights activist who had taken every morally acceptable measure to prevent the internment camps from being built? (In fact, thinking in terms of moral praise and blame, wouldn't it be just bizarre to place any kind of blame, collective or otherwise, on the refugee? If there is no ontologically distinct entity known as "America" that can be the proper object of blame, then when we say that "America must take the blame," aren't we really just making a complicated assignment of blame to a large number of (perhaps unknown) individual Americans?)

A social-contract theorist might dispute this view, by comparing the state with the corporation in the previous example -- as an institution that one consents, even if only tacitly, to join and defend. (This may be, for instance, why those who take pride in their country -- which no one is forced to do -- sometimes feel as if they should also accept responsibility for its actions. An Iraqi who despised the Ba'athist regime would feel no such compunctions.) But if one does not view these obligations as having been consented to, and if one does not view the nation-state as an ontological social whole, what could possibly be achieved by punishing the blameless in this state of perfect knowledge? Finally, if it is only our lack of knowledge (or the inconvenient death or impoverishment of those responsible) that justifies the use of the general treasury, then this sense that "America must pay the price" does not reveal any new form of responsibility. It is only because of our ignorance and our mortality, not our moral commitments, that the innocent must share the burden.

Thus, unless some additional model for collective responsibility can be found, I can see no reason to saddle the innocent with any form of responsibility that is indifferent to the moral quality of their actions. Whatever Kantian intuitions we might possess against the existence of moral luck should lead us to reject such a notion of collective responsibility which is not reducible to the responsibility of various individuals, or which has not been voluntarily accepted by them. I'm well aware that many people accept the notion of moral luck in theory, and have no difficulty with assigning moral praise or blame to individuals for events entirely beyond their control. Yet without a well-grounded account of why individuals should accept responsibility for particular kinds of moral luck, even when they might have done all they reasonably could to avoid them, assignments of collective guilt to the individually innocent will always appear arbitrary and unjust.

Let's go back to the two claims from the beginning of this section:

(1) Ontological individualism: collectives are not ontologically distinct entities from their members. Collectives are constructs. Propositions about collectives are really just shorthand for complicated bundles of propositions about their members.
(2) A Kantian approach to moral evaluation: whether it is appropriate to assign moral praise, blame, or responsibility (of any kind) to individuals depends only on their own voluntary actions, intentions, desires, beliefs, states of mind, etc.

These assumptions imply that no process of collective organization can impute responsibility to those who are free of such responsibility in their own voluntary actions and intentions. Any attempt to add circumstances under which the innocent can be held responsible, "collectively" or otherwise (e.g., if they are part of a decision-making process, as in the OCV) will fail. A collective is responsible if and only if its members are. As a result, I would contend, these two claims entail a third:

(3) Moral individualism: the only entities that can be assigned moral praise, blame, or responsibility are individuals. Moral statements about collectives are really just shorthand for complicated bundles of such statements about their members. In other words, the mereological view is true.

III. The suggested alternative

At the end of Thom'spaper, he suggests that the key element of collective responsibility is "collective epistemic agency"; that joint actions only entail collective responsibility when the individuals act "with a singularity of belief and knowledge about their action such that they can be said to have collectively intended the same outcome." Thus, the naive chemical engineer, unaware of the deadly uses to which her work will be put, does not share in the same degree of collective responsibility as the rapacious corporate managers who delight in selling weapons to murderous regimes.

Such an account of collective action is very reasonable, but would raise two issues in light of the previous discussion. First, what is the difference between such acts and the full-blown IJAs described by Tuomela? It would seem that if the group were not displaying collective epistemic agency, then it could not be an IJA, for then someone in the group would fail to share the intentions or relevant beliefs of another. And similarly, if the act were not an IJA, it would seem that the condition of collective epistemic agency -- the "singularity of belief and knowledge about their action" -- would be absent. (Perhaps an exception can be found in the case of individuals who intend the same outcome by their actions, but have no knowledge of each other. For instance, suppose there were two independent gunmen on two different grassy knolls, each intending the same outcome and having the exact same beliefs -- such as the belief that "I am the only assassin here." Yet it would seem that the resulting (over-determined) murder is not a case of "collective" action unless they are sufficiently aware of each other's plans; the gunmen might each be guilty of murder, but not of conspiracy thereto.)

Second, if there are no distinctions between acts displaying collective epistemic agency and those that can be described as IJAs, why is the conclusion not merely an endorsement of the mereological view? As argued above, MV can easily accommodate IJAs, because they provide an easy case in which every individual's actions are subject to similar moral evaluation. What is meant by asserting that a group engaged in an IJA has "collective responsibility," over and above the fact that each member already bears a clear individual responsibility for the result? If no one can be collectively responsible without also being individually responsible -- indeed, if the degree of collective responsibility must always be proportionate to that of individual responsibility -- why not accept that the former is merely a convenient means of expressing the latter?

The mereological view is committed to interpreting the actions of collectives as complex bundles of the actions of individuals. In doing so, however, it need not ignore those individuals' beliefs, intentions, desires, or states of mind; indeed, that is why the bundles are often so complex. Accepting such an interpretation on a metaphysical level, and refusing to accept the allocation of praise and blame independent of individual desert, entails a commitment to individualized moral assessment -- to assigning responsibility only to individuals, and not tarring them with their fellows' misdeeds (or praising them for their fellows' wisdom). Our strong intuitive resistance to arbitrary or unjust assignments of responsibility should push us towards a view where individuals are only as responsible as they deserve to be; or, in other words, to the mereological view.