To Solve The Global Food Crisis We Must First Stop Fixating On Putin

There appears to be a moral panic going around that Putin is engineering a global famine to extort a more favourable outcome to his failed Ukraine invasion. 

This is a delusion with 2 pernicious consequences. First, it grants too much power to a warlord, and thus too much weight to his interests. Second, it distracts us from our own shared global responsibility to prevent food supply disruptions from causing a global tragedy.

We Should Fix Climate Change, But We Should Not Regret It

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

I disagree. Climate change is the unfortunate outcome of the economic growth that has transformed human civilisation for the better. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered technological revolutions of the last 250 years have achieved. Nor should we draw the anti-technology lesson that solutions are always worse than the original problems, that humans should retreat to living within the bounds of nature rather than attempting to escape them.

Abortion Bans as Conscription

Recent developments in the US have brought renewed interest to the ethics of abortion. I will skip over most of that rather parochial and politically tribalised debate and instead consider the ethical implications of prioritising the right to life of a foetus over its mother's right to autonomy. I will suggest that banning abortion for this reason could be justified in a liberal state, but this 'conscription' model would look quite different from the straightforward bans on abortion as wrongful killing that we are familiar with.

Putting Women In Charge Is Not The Way To Make The World Better

It is common to see claims that if only women were in charge things would be much better and nicer, for example that people would be much happier at work, inequality would fall, climate change would be solved. 

There is no good evidence for these claims. They seem to rely on the question begging assumption that the best explanation for why people in charge of things seem so often seem incompetent, mean, self-serving, unresponsive to their constituents' needs, and so on is that they are men. This framing is then used to cherry pick anecdotes about female prime ministers/CEOs that support the possibility, but not the probability that women would do things better. 

As a general rule, we should reject claims supported by inadequate evidence. We should also be careful to distinguish moral claims about fairness in the competition for power from claims about how that power would be exercised. The first moral problem of power is whether it is used rightly and for the good. The moral problem of fair opportunity to gain power is a secondary and far less significant moral problem. To put it another way, we should care less about the gender of the super competitive alphas who get the top jobs in our society, and more about the poor saps who will be ruled by them.

Assuming that power is misused because it is held by men leaves us unprepared for the very probable discovery that things will be just as bad when most things are run by women (which in some countries is only a couple of decades away). This is because it is institutions rather than gender that select, train, and constrain those who wield power, and it is highly questionable whether and how far those institutions would be changed merely by changing the gender of those in charge. Instead of trying to control how power is exercised by changing the gender of those in charge, we should focus directly on restructuring the institutions of power, for example by making political leaders more legally accountable and empowering employees with workplace democracy. The aim should be to ensure that whether the people in charge are men or women, they are no longer able to behave like bullies or tyrants. 

No, Poor Countries Shouldn't Try To Make Their Own Covid Vaccines

Source: UNDP

One of the impressive features of humanity's response to Covid was the development of successful vaccines within only 10 months, and the production and distribution of 12 billion doses around the world. One of the worst features was the inequality in the distribution of those vaccine doses.

As of June 2022, only 18% of people in low income countries have received at least one dose compared to a global average of 66% and an average of 72% in high income countries (Our World in Data/UNDP). 

Obviously this contrast looks very unjust. Many people in rich countries have now received a full course of vaccination and multiple booster shots, even if they aren't particularly vulnerable. They also benefit from access to large well-resourced medical systems and thus high survival rates even if they are unlucky enough to be infected. Covid vaccines are clearly not being distributed to where they would do the most good.

One response to this injustice has been to argue that Low Income countries should be enabled to manufacture their own vaccines. Unfortunately, this is one of those ideas that sound nice but don't stand up well to systematic scrutiny (see previously: ideas vs arguments).

Philosophy Belongs in the Sciences, Not the Humanities: A Rant

Philosophy has traditionally been considered and considered itself a part of the humanities, with a continuity in skills and attitudes, such as an emphasis on scholarship. In many universities philosophy departments are part of larger humanities faculties and thus fall under governance institutions designed for traditional humanities disciplines like literature, history, law, and religion. This association is bad for philosophy. Philosophy is a science of intellectual inquiry and it needs institutions, methods and attitudes suited to that task.

Four Reasons Not To 'Trust The Experts'

A standard reaction to the disastrous democratic discourse and political mismanagement of public interest issues from the economy to public health to gun control has been to demand more respect for experts. I am sympathetic to the idea that when it comes to facts it is better to look them up than to try to work them out for ourselves, and that the way to do that is ask the experts: people in good standing in the relevant epistemic community (previously: Democracy is Not a Truth Machine). 

Nevertheless, there are problems with the 'trust the experts' mantra that should be acknowledged if we are not to fall into an epistemic trap of misplaced faith. Here are four that I try to keep in mind.

Just End Poverty Now: The Case for a Global Basic Income

According to the World Bank’s latest figures, around 700 million people live in utter destitution, on less than $1.90 per day, poorer than the average pet cat in the rich world. It is easy to agree that this is a terrible thing. It has so far been much harder – even for philosophers – to agree on what should be done about it. Peter Singer, for example, argues that rich people should donate more to effective charities. Thomas Pogge argues that rich world citizens should stop their governments from supporting less than ideally just global institutions. Yet this intellectual debate is an unnecessary distraction. We already have all the moral agreement we need to act. Ending extreme poverty is not an intellectual problem but a practical one, and not even a particularly difficult one. We just need to find the people who are poor and give them enough money so that they aren’t poor anymore.

Why Governments Failed the Challenge of Covid and Capitalism Succeeded

Capitalism has had a good Covid. While governments of every political hue seem to stumble from one crisis to the next, for profit corporations stepped up to deliver our food and consumer goods to our doors, reroute disrupted supply chains, manufacture huge amounts of PPE, and develop multiple safe and effective vaccines in record time. I put this triumph of capitalism over statecraft down to two factors in particular. 

1. Corporations are better at globalisation than national governments 
2. Political incentives are less well aligned with the public interest than those for corporations

A Dead Man's Switch Method for Insuring Against Dementia

Dementia is a terrible condition that afflicts up to 1 in 3 of the elderly (and some younger people too). People with dementia suffer a gradual loss of their cognitive functions, including memories, emotional self-management, and such essential everyday abilities as chewing and swallowing food. Many people consider this gradual decay of personhood and independence a fate worse than death, your still living body turning into an empty husk, a drooling incontinent mindless - but still conscious - burden on your family and carers. 

What can be done to mitigate this risk? I propose a dead man's switch method for ensuring that your body cannot continue living without you in it. 

There Is No Such Thing As Countries

As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places.

But countries are not any more than that.

Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money, or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.

Secondly and more significantly, countries are places not agents. Places on a map cannot have interests or goals or take actions to achieve them. To think otherwise is to confuse the properties of one kind of thing with another. This category error infects not only general talk, but also much otherwise careful journalism and even academic analysis. For example, the influential Realist school of international relations is founded on the axiom that countries do (or ought to) act only in their national interest. This trades on two category errors: that countries (rather than governments) can act and that they have interests. The result is confusing and unfalsifiable nonsense about buffer zones, access to resources and so forth that is about as helpful for understanding, predicting, and managing conflicts as an astrological map.

Invading Ukraine Can Only Be Bad For Russia

If Russia invades Ukraine this will be very bad for Ukraine. This has led many commentators to assume that invading Ukraine would be a great victory for Russia and a great defeat for the US and its allies. Actually the opposite is true. Ukraine doesn't matter geopolitically, and therefore the suffering of Ukraine also doesn't matter. What Ukraine does represent is a huge military distraction for Russia (as Iraq and Afghanistan were for the US) and a huge advertisement for NATO membership.

Replace Waiters With QR Codes

A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have - customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and so on. They do not solve a real problem but a fake problem created by inefficient institutions. They therefore do not make our society better off but rather they represent a great cost to society - of many people's (life)time being expended on something fundamentally pointless instead of something worthwhile. 

One way of spotting such anti-jobs is to compare staffing in the same industry across different countries. US supermarkets employ people just to greet customers and bag groceries, for example, which would seem a ridiculous waste of time in most of the world (hence US supermarkets are more expensive). In Japan one can find people standing in front of road construction waving a flag (they are replaced with mechanical manikins on nights and weekends).

Another way to spot anti-jobs is to to observe the effects of Covid restrictions and look for areas where removing workers or tasks made no impact on performance, or even improved it. Take waiters. In America there are around 2 million people doing this job (1.4% of all employment). The experience of Covid lockdowns shows that much of what waiters do can be done better by pasting a QR code to tables for customers to scan to visit the menu webpage and order and pay directly. Having learned this, it would be ridiculous to go back to employing people to waste their time and their customers' by doing such fundamentally needless work. We still need some servers to bring the food and drink we ordered (for now), and to bus tables, but we don't need nearly as many because we don't need to employ people to ask us what we want and then tell someone else to make it.

Moral Status Should Not Depend On Social Status

“The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he” (Thomas Rainsborough, spokesman for the Levellers at the Putnam Debates)

What does it mean to say that everyone is equal? It does not mean that everyone has (or should have) the same amount of nice things, money, or happiness. Nor does it mean that everyone’s abilities or opinions are equally valuable. Rather, it means that everyone has the same – equal – moral status as everyone else. It means, for example, that the happiness of any one of us is just as important as the happiness of anyone else; that a promise made to one person is as important as that made to anyone else; that a rule should count the same for all. No one deserves more than others – more chances, more trust, more empathy, more rewards – merely because of who or what they are.

If We Could All Be Good For Just One Day….It Wouldn’t Make Much Difference

Suppose that we could all be good for just one day. No one would be tempted away from doing the right thing and towards their own selfish interests or illicit urges. No one would be afraid of retribution. We would be free of all internal and external obstacles to being good. What would happen?