The Bleak Future Of Boycotts

You’ve probably been there yourself. I know I have. A news story comes out about a company doing some nefarious thing and you decide to express your dissatisfaction by boycotting them. When I was a kid there was something about Nestlé and baby milk, and I suddenly found out just how many things are made by Nestlé. Every so often there’s one about McDonald’s, and more recently there have been boycott-inducing stories about Uber and Byron Burgers. I don’t know whether it achieves what it’s supposed to achieve. I joined in with the Byron Burgers thing, and I didn’t have to decide about the Uber one because I don’t have a smartphone.

It seems like a good idea in principle. A company does something you disapprove of, and you try to stop them doing it by withholding your custom. Or maybe you’re not trying to change their behaviour but you just don’t want to give these ne’erdowells the benefit of your custom, even if it means forgoing their products and services. Cutting off one’s nose to spite someone else’s face makes a certain amount of sense.

Lately I’ve noticed some boycotts being encouraged to protest more mainstream associations like Donald Trump and the Daily Mail. The idea is that if you don’t like Trump then you boycott companies run by people that do, and if you don’t like the Daily Mail then you boycott companies that advertise in the Mail.

In principle this doesn’t make any less sense than using boycotts to protest less controversially awful things. If you think advertising in the Daily Mail is as bad as whatever Nestlé and Byron Burgers did, then it doesn’t really matter that lots of people think the Daily Mail is great. But I worry about where it leads.

It seems to be the received wisdom that politics, at least in America, is becoming more polarized and tribal. If members of one tribe boycott a lot of the companies belonging to the other, the way they already kind of do with media outlets, then you’ll end up with two parallel economies. That’s bad for competition, presumably, but it also might lead to governments from one tribe punishing companies from the other. That sounds bad. I hope it doesn’t happen.

Philosophy Books For Beginners

One thing you sometimes hear is that when you're starting out with philosophy you can't do better than reading the classics. Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. That sort of thing. I think this is terrible advice. I didn't mention Spinoza, because I thought you might think I was exaggerating, but people do in fact recommend Spinoza's Ethics to beginners. Don't recommend Spinoza's Ethics to beginners!

One thing that is probably unusual about philosophy is that reading the classics genuinely is useful for something other than curiosity and recreation. Physicists don't need to read Newton and Copernicus. Doctors don't need to read Galen and Avicenna. There are probably exceptions to this - biologists seem to benefit from reading Darwin - but philosophy probably has more exceptions than other subjects. Experts and laypeople can get serious insight from reading philosophy books written hundreds or thousands of years ago.

But with a few exceptions, I still wouldn't recommend them to beginners. They're too hard, and even if you get through them it isn't the best preparation for reading other philosophy books. It's some preparation, but it's not the best. When you're starting out learning about philosophy, three main things are important. Maybe more, but right now I can think of three. You want to get a sense of its subject matter, its style, and its history.

By its subject matter, I mean the kind of questions philosophers are interested in. There's a lot of ignorance among the general public about what philosophers actually study, maybe because philosophy isn't taught much in schools. Philosophers also study lots of different things which you probably wouldn't have guessed were parts of the same subject. If you want to get into philosophy, you need to find out what philosophy is.

By style, I mean the way philosophers approach the questions they study. Philosophy is and has been done in different styles in different places. I'm from the analytic tradition, so the style I'm most familiar with is the one where people put forward ideas and arguments, come up with counterexamples or other objections, refine the ideas or patch up the arguments, repeat, step back and try to work out why they're not getting anywhere, look for analogies with things they already think they understand, look at what someone else had to say about it, and so on. It's a skill and a culture and you need to learn the skills and get used to the culture.

By history, I mean learning who all these people are. Descartes, Plato, that crowd. They come up a lot and you'll want to know. If you don't, you won't know what philosophers are talking about half the time. Learning some of the history also helps you get a sense of the subject matter and how different bits of it fit together.

With these goals in mind, some people will probably still tell the beginner to go off and read the Critique of Pure Reason. Well, I haven't read it myself, so I won't comment further on the wisdom of that. But I'll mention some things I have read that I might recommend to beginners who want to get a sense of the style, subject matter and history of philosophy.

The Philosophy Files, by Stephen Law.

This was always going to be top of the list. It's the best book I've read by a long way for teaching the style. It also gives you a sense of the subject matter. I've read it maybe ten times myself, and I lent it to people who wanted an introductory philosophy book until someone didn't return it. Then I bought another copy so I could start reading and lending it again. It's fantastic. It's written as if it's for children and has funny pictures, but it's still the first one I'd recommend to an adult. It's got short chapters, and each one introduces a philosophical issue and takes the reader through it in a lighthearted way that lets you think about the issue yourself and also shows you some of the standard moves. It gives a great sense of the weird combination of intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility that makes analytic philosophers so charming.

The Bluffer's Guide to Philosophy, by Jim Hankinson

This covers a lot of ground pretty quickly with respect to the history and the subject matter. It's short, it's funny, and when you've finished it you'll know what philosophers talk about and you'll have met a lot of the names. I've read this one several times too.

Those are the first two I'd tell someone to read. What next? Well, you could do worse than reading those again. It won't take long, and it's great fun. But eventually you'll want to read something else.

Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder
The Great Philosophers, by Stephen Law

The Story of Philosophy, by Jeremy Stangroom and James Garvey

A Little History of Philosophy, by Nigel Warburton

All these basically do the same thing, in various ways. They tell the story of Western philosophy from Ancient Greece more or less to the present. It's a great story and it's worth hearing it over and over from different people. The more you hear it the more familiar the characters and their ideas will become, and the better you'll understand all the other stuff.

Sophie's World is a novel structured around a weird old dude giving a course in the history of Western philosophy to a 14 year old Norwegian girl. The Great Philosophers takes you through a lot of the big names in chronological order, focusing mainly on one idea each of them had. The other two basically just tell the story and present the ideas. I didn't love any of them, except Sophie's World, and I expect that's because it was the first one I'd read. I was two years into a degree in philosophy (and French) at the time, but most of the stuff in it was still new to me. They're all good though, and I really do think it's important to get a grip on who all these famous dead philosophers are. They keep coming up, and a lot of the big ideas nowadays are refinements of their ideas.

An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, by John Hospers

This is the only one that plays the same role as The Philosophy Files, encouraging the reader to work through philosophy problems themselves. It's longer and a lot less fun. But it's good to look at the topics you're interested in and work through them Hospers' way. If you're doing a degree in philosophy then a lot of people teaching you will also probably have read some of it early on in their philosophical educations, so it's an important part of the culture.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich

Don't read this one from cover to cover, and don't carry it around with you. It's a big heavy reference book. It's basically like any other Oxford Companion, but it's good to be able to look up philosophical ideas and people and read something quick and sensible about them. Most of the entries seem reasonably sensible. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a wonderful online resource, but its articles are in too much depth to recommend to beginners. If you look something up in the Oxford Companion and it isn't there or you want to know more about it, look it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia. It's much better than Wikipedia. I wouldn't recommend Wikipedia for explaining philosophical ideas but it's probably fine for a quick biography if you come across someone and want to know who they are.

Logic, by Wilfrid Hodges

This is an introductory logic textbook, including formal logic. It was the one I used as a first year undergraduate and it's better for beginners than the few others I've read. There are loads out there and others may be better. But this one was fine for me and I wouldn't mind recommending it to someone who wants introducing to logic. Some people will tell you that you should learn logic before you learn any other philosophy. I don't think that's true. It's important to understand the style that philosophy's done in but beginners are better off getting that from immersion than from learning to formalize everything. Even learning the names of fallacies, fun as it is, can only get you so far. You can probably already spot them, and learning their names doesn't fully immunize you against them anyway. Logic is a branch of philosophy though and if you want an introduction to that branch then Hodges' book is fine.

You'll also need to learn some formal logic at some point even if you're not studying logic, for two reasons. First, there's a lot of more or less unnecessary use of logical notation in philosophy papers that aren't about logic. Second, if you don't know any formal logic you won't know whether it's relevant to what you're doing or not, which leaves you vulnerable to evil wizards blinding you with arguments you don't understand. You'll also have to read some Wittgenstein at some point for the same reason, even if you don't like him.

That's about it for properly introductory books. But you can, and probably should, also introduce yourself to philosophy partly by reading some philosophy. That's what people are trying to do when they tell you to start with An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. When you're a beginner, reading philosophy is hard. But you can only fully get a sense of the style by reading the stuff, so here are some suggestions beginners might be able to handle.

Meditations, by René Descartes

This is the exception in the lists of classics people tell beginners to read, in that it really is accessible to beginners. It was written for a fairly lay audience, and it shows. It covers a lot of interesting ideas that are central to a lot of philosophy, in a quick and engaging way. (How can we know anything? What is the mind? Does God exist?) The arguments are simple enough, and on some readings bad enough, that a beginner can have a lot of fun engaging with them. It also contains his most famous presentation of the "I think therefore I am" argument without using the expression "I think therefore I am", which is probably some kind of lesson in itself.

Meno, by Plato.

Maybe read some other dialogues by Plato too, but hold off on the Republic for the moment. The Republic is too long and it's better to get used to the style first by reading some of the shorter ones. (If you read Plato's Parmenides, stop once it gets weird. You'll wait pages and pages for it to go back to being normal, but it never will, and you'll just wonder what the hell you just read.) It was a long time before I could really get much out of Plato, but Meno was an exception. I found it really funny. Like laugh-out-loud-in-the-library-multiple-times funny. But maybe that's just me. Some people will probably say that reading Plato's dialogues gives you a good sense of how philosophy should be done, but I'm not sure that's really true. Socrates is a bit of a bully. But it gives you a good sense of what the deal is with this Plato guy everyone keeps talking about, and humanizes him a bit. Plus, like I say, it's hilarious.

Existentialism and Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre

This is a much better bet than trying to take on Being and Nothingness. It's short, it's informal, and it's for a lay audience. Sartre is giving a talk where he clears up some misconceptions about what his brand of existentialism is and responds to some objections to it. He takes questions at the end. If you like it, go and see a production of Dirty Hands, and The Flies too if you can find one.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick

OK, this is a pretty long book. And beginners probably won't get much out of the bits on Rawls. But some people are into long books, and this one is full of cool stuff. It gives a good sense of the style of analytic philosophy because it's self-consciously written in that style by a super smart philosopher who's really good at it. It's about politics and ethics too, which lots of people like. Obviously handle it with care - you don't want to end up accidentally becoming an actual libertarian or anything. John Hospers, incidentally, once ran for President of the USA as the Libertarian party's nominee. This doesn't really come over in his book, though.

On Suicide, by David Hume.

This is a nifty essay making the case that suicide isn't wrong, done in good philosophical style by one of the all-time greats. Maybe read some other essays by Hume, too. Not the Treatise on Human Nature, though. It's too long, and I once saw someone argue fairly persuasively that in Hume's own estimation the Treatise doesn't represent his best work anyway. If you must read a book by Hume, read the one of the Enquiries you're more interested in. If you get on well with that, you can read the other one.

There's no shame in reading essays, generally. Usually these introductory lists will mostly have books on them. Big books. But everyone likes short books, especially beginners. And essays are even shorter than short books. If you're going to do a degree in philosophy, it's going to be essays you're writing, and mostly essay-length papers you're reading. So read some essays and papers. Here are two to start you off.

A Defense of Abortion, by Judith Jarvis Thomson

This is an incredible piece of writing. Even today, people often think of the ethics of abortion as turning on whether the foetus is a person or not, or whether it has the rights of a person or not. Thomson argues that even if the foetus is a person and has the rights that go along with that, abortion is still morally defensible. The arguments aren't hard to follow and they're another example of good philosophical style by a top philosopher, but they're also important arguments that bear on a debate a lot of people care about. Everyone in the world should read this paper.

The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance, by David Lewis

Lewis argues that punishing attempted murder more lightly than murder might be fair, in spite of how it seems pretty unfair. It isn't Lewis's greatest contribution to philosophy. It probably doesn't crack the top fifty. But it's accessible and fun, and you don't need much background to understand the arguments. Once you're not a beginner anymore, you can read everything else he's written.

All these books are Western philosophy, but that's kind of by design - I'm in no position to recommend introductory books on philosophy from non-Western traditions. They're also almost all by men though, and that bothers me, because there's a lot of great philosophy by women and giving the impression that philosophy is a men's thing is bad for the subject and for at least most of the people doing it. I couldn't really think of many books by women that I've read and would recommend to a beginner though, and I know this is largely my own fault. So if you're starting out, you should probably also look at some other lists written by better read people than me. They might have a better logic textbook on there too.

Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, by Julia Annas was good, and it's for a lay audience. But it was a long time ago and I don't remember much about it. The Enfranchisement of Women, by Harriet Taylor Mill is probably something a beginner could get on with too. If you enjoy that and want to read something else by her, she also definitely influenced and probably co-wrote some of John Stuart Mill's work, some of which is pretty accessible too. His System of Logic is not recommended reading for beginners, however.

Anyway, once you've got a sense of what philosophy is, which will hopefully be before you've got through the whole list, read some books by women. There are loads of great ones out there. My favourite philosophy book by anyone that I read last year was The Minority Body, by Elizabeth Barnes, which makes the case that being physically disabled isn't necessarily bad for you overall, and that disability identities have a lot in common with identities based on race, gender and the like. It's not an obviously correct position, but that's why she had to write the book. Read it. Unless you're a beginner, in which case you should read The Philosophy Files.

Parliament's Role In Brexit

Governments plan for some pretty unlikely things. They plan for pandemics, nuclear wars, conventional wars, natural disasters, the sudden deaths of leaders, and all sorts of other things. For some of these, nuclear war for example, planning for them plausibly makes them less likely. But whether or not planning for something makes it less likely, it’s good to plan. It’s become fairly clear that the British government didn’t have much of a plan for what to do if we voted to leave the EU in the referendum last June. The polls were pretty close beforehand and there was a significant chance we’d vote to leave, so I think not having a plan was pretty irresponsible. But here we are.

I voted to stay in the EU, and it wasn’t a difficult decision for me. I’ve been strongly in favour of the UK remaining in the EU for a long time. Regular readers of this blog may have picked up on that already. It also seems that most MPs wanted to stay in the EU too, or at least they used to say they did. It’s unclear whether Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn were sincere in the their support of remaining in the EU before the referendum, but the received wisdom is that, like capital punishment, leaving the EU is one of those things that’s more popular with the general public than with MPs. I don’t really want to make the case that leaving the EU was a bad idea here, though, or even to debate the wisdom of holding the referendum in the first place. I want to talk about how MPs should have responded to the Leave vote.

Essentially, I think they should have treated it like any other unexpected event that they didn’t have a plan for and which most of them didn’t want. Like an asteroid heading for the Earth, or a pandemic, or the Royal family all dying in a plane crash, assuming they didn’t have a plan for those things.

One thing to decide is who’s in charge. It turns out we didn’t know who was in charge, but the courts decided that Parliament was at least partly in charge, because leaving the EU would involve changing laws and the executive isn’t allowed to do that by itself. The courts ruled that we couldn’t leave the EU without Parliament voting for it.

Another thing to decide is what kind of deadline we’re working to. When a country triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, they’ve got two years to negotiate an arrangement with the rest of the EU and after those two years they’re out. The original referendum bill could have authorized or even required the executive to activate Article 50 immediately or within a specific timeframe after a Leave vote, but it didn’t. David Cameron might have tried activating it anyway just after the vote, but he didn’t. He resigned and left the problem to other people. Basically the answer is that there’s no firm deadline until Parliament votes to start the clock. Presumably waiting for too long would be a bit cheeky, but there’s no fixed deadline for them. That’s lucky, because it gives them time to come up with a plan, which, as we’ve said, they didn’t already have.

The Government does seem to have some kind of plan now. It’s basically what people call “hard Brexit”: we leave the EU and the single market, and where this leaves gaps in our relationships with other countries we renegotiate them more or less from scratch. That’s not what all the Leave campaigners wanted: a lot wanted to stay in the single market. But hard Brexit seems to be the Government’s preferred option. They haven’t said whether they plan to forcibly relocate the three million EU nationals living in the UK, possibly because they want to use this as a bargaining chip in the negotiations. Maybe some MPs (and peers) would prefer to be like Norway or Switzerland, or would at least like to commit to not doing the forced relocations. If they do, they’re in luck! The executive can’t leave the EU without a vote, and Parliament can withhold the vote until the executive agrees to a plan Parliament is happy with. They can put the conditions into the law they vote for too, if they like. They could even refuse to leave the EU at all, overruling the will of the people for what they believe to be the good of the people. That would presumably undermine the public’s faith in our democratic processes somewhat, but democracies have survived worse. Parliament is sovereign and if they really think any kind of Brexit would be worse than letting democracy take the hit, then they’ve got that option.

So here’s what I think Parliament should do. They should take their time and debate the issue properly until they’ve come up with a plan they’re happy with. That plan will probably involve leaving the EU, because of the referendum result. If they’d had a plan before the referendum, the process would have been quicker. (And if they’d told us what it was, we might have voted differently. See the earlier comment about planning for nuclear war making nuclear war less likely.) They didn’t have a plan, and that’s on them, but we are where we are and they have plenty of time to debate it and come up with something not totally awful.

But it seems that’s not how it’ll go. MPs are voting on Wednesday to let the Government do its hard Brexit, and the House of Lords is expected to acquiesce as well. MPs aren’t happy with the plan, and they’ll debate some amendments, but when the amendments are defeated they’ll vote for the unamended bill that they don’t support, because they’re cowards and they don’t understand the situation they’re in and the responsibility they have. The public has no say in what kind of Brexit we do, and Parliament is giving up its say. Taking Back Control is not getting off to a good start.

Doing the Honours

What’s an honour? People will sometimes say things like “this is a great honour” when giving an acceptance speech, or an inauguration speech, or something like that. What do they mean? Do they always mean the same thing? I’m going to work on the assumption that they do usually mean basically the same thing, and make a suggestion as to what that might be. Then I’m going to use that analysis to try to explain something else that people say in acceptance speeches which might otherwise seem a little puzzling.

Honours come in a few varieties.

• Practical honours: sometimes people say it’s an honour when they’re chosen to do something. Winning an election, getting a prestigious job, being someone’s maid of honour, and so on.
• Accolades: a recognition for having done something well. These sometimes have a monetary prize attached, as with Nobel Prizes, and sometimes they don’t, as with knighthoods.
• Unearned honours: as well as achieving honour and having honour thrust upon them, some people are born honourable. In the UK, the children of barons and viscounts (and the younger sons of earls) are styled as the Honourable. And there are other hereditary titles and positions too.

What unifies all of these, while excluding things that aren’t honours? My suggestion is that an honour is an instance of people saying you’re good which gives you an additional reason to be good.

With practical honours, the conditions are usually fulfilled in a pretty positivistic way. In being elected or hired, the electorate or the hiring committee are saying you’re good. And your new responsibilities give you an additional reason to be good, because it matters more now if you mess up. Now, suppose the hiring committee said you were one of two equally good candidates and they hired the other one. They’re saying both of you are good, but since the other person gets the responsibility it’s an honour for them and not for you. Or at least it’s less of an honour for you, even though the level of praise is the same. So honours aren’t just about praise.

And yet accolades can be honours. Why’s that? Well, I think that insofar as accolades are honours, they do give you additional reasons to be good. If a Nobel Prizewinner isn’t much good at the thing they won the Nobel Prize for, they’re more open to criticism for it than one of their colleagues who didn’t win one. This is a strange situation, but I think there’s a real phenomenon here. When Obama does something unpeaceful this reflects worse on him than it would if he hadn’t won the Nobel Peace Prize. Robert De Niro is more open to criticism for his bad movies than he would be if he hadn’t been praised for his good ones. Now, perhaps this isn’t true. Perhaps Obama’s unpeaceful actions would reflect just as badly on him if he didn’t have his prize, and the prize only makes them reflect badly on the Nobel committee. And perhaps it’s De Niro’s talents and not his Oscars which make critics so angry about Dirty Grandpa. But I’m suggesting it’s more complicated than that. If you accept an Oscar or a Nobel, you owe it to us to deserve it, or to have deserved it.

Unearned honours are a difficult case. Being the Queen is an unearned honour. It gives you reasons to be better, because being the Queen is a job and it matters if she messes it up. (Yes, it does.) But she was selected on birthright, not merit, so the praise component seems to be missing. And with the Honourable Toby Young, his status doesn’t give him any responsibility and also doesn’t say anything about him beyond that his father was a Lord.

But let’s think about this. Suppose at her coronation the Queen made a speech saying that it was a great honour, she hoped she could live up to it, and so on. None of that would be out of place, just as it wouldn’t be coming from an elected president. But if you’re a dictator who seizes power in a military coup, it would seem out of place. It’d seem like a sham, trying to give the new regime a veneer of legitimacy, as if the people or God or some kind of authoritative person or process had selected them. And it’d be similarly ridiculous if I styled myself the Honourable Michael Bench-Capon. (“Why 'the Honourable'?” “Because I am so honourable.” Ridiculous.) The difference, insofar as there is a difference, is that we (well not me, but lots of people) really do think the royal family are better than us and should be treated accordingly. Acquiescing in the continued existence of the monarchy expresses this, and that’s why being the Queen is an honour. Kim Jong-un is arguably a king, but his role is still in no sense an honour because there’s no sense in which he rules by the consent of the North Korean people.

The puzzle this solves is that it explains why people say they are humbled by honours, when you might expect them to be quite the opposite. If honours were just about praise, they wouldn’t be humbling. But they’re not just about praise: they also raise the standard you ought to be meeting. If the standard for you is raised, without you getting correspondingly better, then it makes sense for you to be humbled. It is no longer clear that you’re as good as you should be. And while it’s clear that my analysis is pretty tendentious, the fact it solves this puzzle makes me think I might on to something.

With most unearned honours, it seems they cause problems for the praise component because the recipient of the honour so clearly doesn’t deserve any praise. My response was to say that while this is indeed clear, it’s not at all clear that we’re not praising them anyway. But a different case of unearned honours causes trouble. Suppose an honour is assigned by a genuine lottery. Not a birth lottery, or even one where you pick someone at random to allow to God make the decision. Just names from a hat with no theological trappings. A job assigned in this way could be something we’d pre-theoretically call an honour, I’d say. But it’s basically impossible to say that assigning the job in this way counts as praise. I don’t think we can just ditch the praise component though, because of the dictator case. So I don’t know. I think as an analysis it’s not a bad first pass, and we could always just accept that we’d be wrong to call the lottery job an honour, but if you’ve got any suggested refinements, please put them in the comments.

The Electoral College Is A Good Idea

As I write this, the American electoral college is voting for the President. They are probably going to elect Donald Trump. America is unusual among democracies, in that its President is not elected directly. The simplest system, and the one most countries with presidents use, would be to award the Presidency to the person who gets the most votes. Then they could say that the President had a democratic mandate, the choice reflected the will of the majority, and that sort of thing. But they don't do that.

Each state (and DC) appoints some electors to the electoral college, and the electoral college elects the President and the Vice President. A state gets a number of electors equal to the number of representatives it has in Congress, and DC gets three, which is the number a state with DC's population would have. States have a number of House members proportional to their population, and two senators. This means, for the most part, that the smaller a state (or DC, although there are additional complications with DC) is, the more electors it has per person. If no candidate gets a majority of the votes then the House of Representives votes from among the top three.

Forty-eight states, and DC, tell all their electors to vote for whichever President/Vice President ticket got the most votes in the general election. Maine and Nebraska tell one elector to vote the way each electoral district voted, and tell the other two electors to vote for whichever ticket got the most votes statewide.

Some people - perhaps most people - don't think this system is very fair. These people are wrong.

There are four main objections to this system:

1) Small states have an influence in the electoral college out of proportion to their populations.

2) The system allows for the candidate who gets most votes not to become President. This happened to Al Gore in 2000, and to some other people a long time ago, and it will probably happen again to Hillary Clinton this year. It happened with the Vice Presidency too, to Joe Lieberman in 2000 and probably to Tim Kaine this year, but nobody cares about that.

3) When a state heavily favours one candidate, neither candidate has to do anything to get that state's votes, since one is guaranteed to get no electoral votes anyway and the other is guaranteed to get all of them.

4) If the electors don't vote the way they are told, then the wrong person will become President (or Vice President). This has never happened before, unless it's happened this year while I'm writing, but it bothers people that it could happen.

The first three can be taken together, because the correct response to them is the same. There's a big difference between a state of America and an administrative division of a lot of other countries.

In Britain, where I live, the national government is in charge. We have some devolution in Scotland, Northern Ireland, to a lesser extent Wales, and to a still lesser extent London, and they're a bit more like states. But in England the national government is in charge. It divides the country up into electoral regions, counties, metropolitan boroughs, postal regions and so on, at its convenience. Some of these regions have elections and local governments. But the national government divides it up however it wants. If the government wants to move most of Wirral, where I grew up, from Cheshire to Merseyside, then it does. (People write to local papers saying that Wirral is all still in Cheshire, but they are wrong.)

States are different. The original states of America were independent entities that decided to form a union, with a federal government controlling some things, and the states retaining control over some other things. It's a bit like the European Union. The central governing entities of the EU can't just decide that Wirral is a part of Ireland now, or that Alsace and Lorraine are parts of Germany. They can't tell countries how to appoint their commissioners. And there are some things they can't regulate within the countries, without an amendment to the European Union's rules that could be vetoed by any of the member countries.

To summarize: most countries divide themselves into administrative regions, but the states organize themselves into a country.

States aren't as independent as member countries of the European Union, but that's because they've chosen not to be. There are some rights they haven't chosen to give up, and one of those rights is the right to tell their electors who to vote for when it comes to the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Now, maybe you think the states should give up this right, or that the states should decide how to tell the electors to vote in a different way. But that's up to them, and all the states have democratically elected governments that can change it if they want.

OK, now we can take the objections in turn.

1) Small states have an influence in the electoral college out of proportion to their populations.

Without loss of generality, California (big population) has made a deal with Montana (small population). The deal says that California has more influence over the Presidency than Montana, but not in proportion to the population. It's the same deal they've made when it comes to representation in Congress. If California doesn't like the deal, they can try to renegotiate the deal. They can't unilaterally secede, but nor can Montana: that's part of the deal too. But if they're renegotiating the deal, secession could be on the table. It's understandable that Montana doesn't want to be a drop in someone else's bucket, any more than Malta wants to be a drop in Italy or Tunisia's bucket, and it's understandable that other states are willing to compromise on this to get the benefits of having them in the Union. And whether or not you agree that it's understandable, that's the deal they made.

2) The system allows for the candidate who gets most votes not to become President.

Accepting (1) means accepting (2).

3) When a state heavily favours one candidate, neither candidate has to do anything to get that state's votes.

Most of the states, in the infinite wisdom of their state governments, have decided to tell their electors to vote for whoever gets the majority of votes in that state. This means that the presidential candidates can more or less ignore the interests of people in, for example, California (which always votes Democratic) and Texas (which always votes Republican). They can't afford to ignore them in the primaries, but once they've got the party's nomination, it's all about Florida and Ohio.

It's understandable that swing states would go for winner-takes-all. The presidential candidates can be expected to promise extra goodies to voters in swing states, which benefits everyone there. And while there's a chance the whole state won't vote the way an individual voter or legislator likes, this is kind of balanced out by the possibility that the whole state will vote the way they do like. The expected number of electoral voters isn't necessarily the same, because the expected vote split isn't the same as the chances of each side winning. (Suppose the state was guaranteed to vote 48-52.) Swing states aren't necessarily close states; they're states where either side might win (which in practice tend to be close states). But in genuine swing states, it's a gamble to be winner-take-all but not obviously a bad gamble, and there is the added bonus of candidates paying more attention to the voters when setting out their platforms.

It's less obvious that voters in safe states should prefer winner-take-all. They confine their influence over candidate platforms to the primaries, and in return they get a bigger influence in the electoral college. (Or for the minority voters, no influence. A California Republican or a Texas Democrat shouldn't prefer winner-take-all.) Most states have gone for winner-take-all. This is the outcome of a standard democratic process within the states themselves. Call it tyranny of the majority, but the states are representative democracies and not direct democracies, so if the voters care enough about it, there will be votes in it. I guess they care about something else more, and let the majority have their way on this one. In a democracy, the minority has to pick its battles.

4) If the electors don't vote the way they are told, then the wrong person will become President.

For some people, this is the one thing about the Electoral College they like. If someone wins the general election but they would be such a disastrous President that it's worth violating a strong democratic norm to keep them out of the White House, there's a final line of defence. But most people probably think that this norm is important enough that it should be enforced by a law. Some states do enforce it with a law, but the penalties probably aren't a sufficient deterrent given the stakes.

I'm not going to say whether this feature of the Electoral College is a bad thing or a good thing. Unlike the other three objections, it's less clear cut. But it's worth pointing out three things. First, the norm has proven pretty strong. Its being a norm rather than a law hasn't changed the result of any elections. Second, it's not weird to have the top dog chosen by representatives chosen by the people. Britain does the same thing. (Unless you think the Queen is top dog rather than the Prime Minister, but the Queen isn't directly elected either.) Third, if a few electors did violate the norm and cause a crisis, the (democratically elected) House of Representatives would usually be able to step in and avert that crisis. They would only be unable to avert it if someone who got a majority of pledged electors didn't get in the top three of actual electors, or if no-one got a majority of pledged electors and one of the top three pledged didn't get in the top three actual. [BUT SEE UPDATE BELOW.] Given the two party system and the strong norm, neither situation is likely. It's a bit more likely that a close electoral college would go to the House and the House would pick the wrong person. But it's OK if your constitution would lead to a minor constitutional crisis in an unlikely situation and a major constitutional crisis in a very unlikely situation. It's normal. Everyone's constitution is like that. You can't blame the electoral college.

Obviously I don't actually think the electoral college is a good system; nobody does. But it’s fun to defend the indefensible, and debate's healthy.

UPDATE 15/02/18: I've realized that the House would also be unable to avert the crisis if someone got a majority of actual electors without having had a majority of pledged electors. I guess this is more likely than the other two situations I thought of: you'd get it when the pledged elector count was very close and a small number of electors defected. I'm not sure how much this possibility should affect the strength of the overall argument.

Mathematical and moral deference

Regular readers will remember that once I posted a fallacious proof of the continuum hypothesis. I’m not a mathematician, but I am a philosopher, and the continuum hypothesis is philosophically interesting as well as mathematically interesting, so occasionally I think about it and read about it and generally try to understand it better. The last time I did this I tried to learn about forcing. It didn’t go well.

Forcing is a mathematical technique for producing models of set theory. Paul Cohen used it to produce models of ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice) in which the continuum hypothesis is false, which showed that it didn’t follow from the ZFC axioms. Kurt Godel had already produced a model of ZFC in which the continuum hypothesis was true, and so this completed a proof that ZFC doesn’t rule the continuum hypothesis in or out. Godel and Cohen’s methods for constructing models of set theory have proved very useful elsewhere in set theory too, and we’re all very grateful.

Anyway, when I was trying to learn about forcing I read a couple of papers with titles like “A beginner’s guide to forcing” and “A cheerful introduction to forcing and the continuum hypothesis”. They sounded like they were about my level. The first of those contained a passage which made me feel a bit better about not having understood forcing before:

All mathematicians are familiar with the concept of an open research problem. I propose the less familiar concept of an open exposition problem. Solving an open exposition problem means explaining a mathematical subject in a way that renders it totally perspicuous. Every step should be motivated and clear; ideally, students should feel that they could have arrived at the results themselves. The proofs should be “natural” in Donald Newman’s sense [Donald J. Newman, Analytic Number Theory, Springer-Verlag, 1998]:

This term . . . is introduced to mean not having any ad hoc constructions or brilliancies. A “natural” proof, then, is one which proves itself, one available to the “common mathematician in the streets.”

I believe that it is an open exposition problem to explain forcing. [Timothy Y. Chow, 'A Beginners Guide to Forcing', p.1]

After reading these papers, however, I still didn’t get it. One stumbling block was that when they sketched how it works, they would invoke a countable standard transtitive model of set theory. A standard model is one where all the elements are well-founded sets and “∈” is interpreted as set-membership. A transtive model is one where every member of an object in the domain (in reality, not just according to the model) is also in the domain. A countable model is one with countably many objects in its domain. And while they don’t construct one of these models, they assure us that the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem shows that there will be such models.

Now, for me, reading this feels the way that spotting an error feels. Because when I learned about the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem as an undergraduate, they told us it said that every theory in a countable first-order language that has a model has a countable model. It doesn’t say that it has a countable standard transitive model. Standardness and transitivity are meta-language things, and you can’t just stick an axiom into the theory so it’ll only have standard and transitive models. So the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem doesn’t guarantee anything of the kind, forcing doesn’t work and Paul Cohen should posthumously give back his Fields medal.

Of course, this isn’t the correct response to my feeling and the accompanying line of reasoning. I’ve just made a mistake somewhere. I think the most likely thing is that there’s a suppressed step in the argument which is obvious to the authors and to their imagined readers but which isn’t obvious to me. It’s normal for mathematicians to leave out steps they think are obvious, which is why maths papers aren’t all ridiculously long. It’s also normal for these steps not to be obvious to everyone, which is why maths papers are often difficult to understand. But in this case I can’t really even imagine what this obvious step might be. It just looks to me the way a silly mistake would look.

The fact I’ve made this error is sad and embarrassing for me, but I’ve no serious doubt that it is a fact. This just isn’t the sort of thing the mathematical community gets wrong. Well, there was that thing with John von Neumann and hidden variable interepretations of quantum mechanics, but the people who spotted the problems with that were mathematicians and physicists, not clowns like me. There’s no serious doubt that forcing works. I’d be a fool not to defer to the experts on this, and I do. (I feel like you won’t believe me about this, but I don’t know how to make it any more explicit.)

Normally when we trust mathematicians, we haven’t inspected the case ourselves. I’ve no significant doubt that Fermat’s last theorem is true, even though I haven’t looked at the proof. I do have significant doubt that the ABC conjecture is true, because not enough people have gone through the proof. Andrew Wiles’s original proof of Fermat’s last theorem didn’t work but could be fixed, but maybe Shinichi Mochizuki’s proof of the ABC conjecture doesn’t work and can’t be fixed. But when there’s a consensus in the mathematical community that they have found a rigorous proof of something, we can all believe it and we don’t have to look at the proof ourselves.

In the case with me trusting mathematicians on forcing and the continuum hypothesis, however, I have inspected the proof and the experience was subjectively indistiguishable from discovering that it didn’t work. That puts me in an odd position. It’s complicated, but the situation is a bit like if I believed that P and that if P then Q but rejected Q. The premises are compelling, the inference is compelling, but the conclusion is impossible to accept.

This is a bit like the situation you get in the presence of a paradox, like the liar paradox or Zeno’s paradoxes about motion. I think a lot of the time we just accept that some paradoxes are weird and there’s no particularly satisfying response to them. But with forcing and the continuum hypothesis, I also don’t think there’s any significant chance that there is any paradox here. It feels to me the way paradoxes feel, but it isn’t really a paradox. It’s a subjective paradox, if you like. An objective paradox arises where the premises are indubitable, the conclusion is unacceptable and the inference from one to the other is compelling. A subjective paradox arises for someone when it just seems that way to them.

I used to think that there weren’t any objective paradoxes and they were all ultimately subjective paradoxes, and I still think that might be right. But there’s a big difference between a subjective paradox where you’re just confused and something like Curry’s paradox where nobody knows how to sort it out. The thing with me and forcing is definitely in the subjective category.

So I’m in a weird situation, but you’re probably not in it yourself. I was reminded of this weird situation when I was reading a paper by David Enoch on moral deference recently. He discusses a couple of cases, one from Bernard Williams and one he came up with himself. Here’s the Williams one:

There are, notoriously, no ethical experts. […] Anyone who is tempted to take up the idea of there being a theoretical science of ethics should be discouraged by reflecting on what would be involved in taking seriously the idea that there were experts in it. It would imply, for instance, that a student who had not followed the professor’s reasoning but had understood his moral conclusion might have some reason, on the strength of his professorial authority, to accept it. […] These Platonic implications are presumably not accepted by anyone. [Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 205.]

Enoch’s own example is about his friend Alon who tends to think wars in the Middle East are wrong, whereas Enoch usually starts off thinking they’re right and then later comes round to agree with Alon. When a new war arises, Alon opposes it and Enoch doesn’t, but Enoch knows he’ll probably end up agreeing with Alon. Alon is likely to be right. So why not defer to Alon?

Enoch wants to explain what’s fishy about moral deference, while disagreeing with Williams about whether moral deference is OK. Enoch says sometimes you should defer. He should defer to Alon and the student should under some circumstances defer to the professor. The fishiness, according to Enoch, results from the fact that moral deference indicates a deficiency of moral understanding or something like it. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and it’s better to endorse the right conclusion without understanding the situation properly, than to endorse the wrong conclusion because you don’t understand the situation properly. I don’t think that misrepresents Enoch’s position too badly, although you can read the paper if you want to know what he actually says.

One interesting thing Enoch does in the paper is to compare moral deference with deference in other areas: prudential rationality, aesthetic assessment, metaphysics, epistemology, and maths. I think that considering the mathematical case can bring to light a source of fishiness Enoch overlooks. I would say there is nothing fishy about me deferring to the mathematical community about Fermat’s last theorem. I’ve good evidence it’s true, I’ve no idea why it’s true, and there’s nothing particularly odd about this situation. But my deference in the forcing case is fishy. People believe ZFC doesn’t imply the continuum hypothesis on the basis of the proof, I’ve inspected the proof, and from where I’m sitting it transparently sucks. To repeat: I don’t think the proof is wrong. But I am in a strange situation.

Now consider two cases of moral deference, adapted from the ones Enoch talks about. First, consider an 18 year old taking Ethics 101. They read a bit of Mill and decide utilitarianism sounds pretty good. They can’t really see yet how the morality of an action could be affected by anything besides its consequences, although they haven’t thought about it much. Professor Williams assures them there’s more to it and things like integrity and people’s personal projects matter. I think the student should probably trust Williams on this, at least to an extent, even before they’ve heard his arguments. (Perhaps especially before hearing his arguments.) Williams knows more about this than the student does, and the student doesn’t have enough information to come to their own conclusion. They’ve just read a bit of Mill.

Now consider Enoch and Alon. Enoch looks at the available non-moral information about the war and comes to the conclusion that this one is right. This time is different, he thinks, and he points to non-moral differences grounding the moral difference. Alon looks at the same information and comes to the conclusion that the war’s wrong. Should Enoch defer to Alon? Well, yes. I think so. And so does Enoch. But how does he go about deferring to Alon? He basically has to reject his inference from the indisputable non-moral premises to the conclusion, even though that inference seemed to be compelling. He’s in the grip of a subjective paradox, just like me.

Williams’s student lacks moral understanding, the way children frequently do. But there’s nothing especially epistemically dodgy about what Williams’s student is doing. He doesn’t have all the information to understand why integrity and projects matter but he has it on good authority that they do. Enoch lacks moral understanding too, but he’s in a worse position. He has what seems to him to be a compelling argument that Alon is wrong this time, and another compelling argument that Alon is probably right. Worse, we might as well stipulate that he has examined Alon’s argument and it doesn’t seem to be much good.

I stipulated that Enoch’s inference from the non-moral facts to his conclusion that the war was right seemed to him compelling. That was deliberate. Maybe you don’t think it’s a plausible stipulation, and if you don’t, then I’m on your side. I think that’s the source of the problem. It’s tempting to think that armchair reasoning has to seem compelling if it seems to be any good at all. What would an intermediate case look like? Either an argument follows or it doesn’t, right? Well sure, but we’ve got no special access to whether arguments follow or not. No belief-formation method is completely reliable. We can go wrong at any step and our confidence levels should factor this in. Nothing should seem completely compelling. Of course, you’d expect me to say that, because I’m a sceptic. But it makes it a lot easier to deal with situations like the forcing thing. By the way, if you think you can explain to me why the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem guarantees that ZFC has countable standard transitive models, feel free to have a go in the comments.