I Scott Alexander has a new blog post up in which he complains about a phenomenon he calls justice creep. A move in language away from talking about how it would be nice to help certain groups or causes, to talking about securing justice for those causes:
I think this is a great post. I have quibble on the Iraq war example - I think it's highly relevant that Saddam had invaded both Kuwait and Iran unprovoked previously and had had and had used chemical weapons. I don't think this changes anything substantively in your argument, but I think it underplays the degree to which Saddam was a danger to international community.
After reading both posts, I think I agree more with you - we probably should consider more things as issues of justice, not fewer. I do still think it's pretty arbitrary how we chose to frame things - in a society with slightly different values (or even with the same values?) we could well be talking about social issues in terms of "Duty" or "Virtue" with much the same results, so I think it's just a matter of what we find most compelling. It may actually be worth considering whether different frames work better in different contexts or cultures? (e.g. Liberal vs Conservative, Eastern vs Western)
I do feel like there are issues with framing things in terms of justice though - it may constrain the scope of the problem too much, and encourage disengagement if you're just a regular person - after all, we leave justice to the justice system! As Scott observes, many people have a purely punitive conception of justice, so maybe environmental justice just looks like doing nothing until it's too late and then punishing a small number of people for our collective guilt, which is probably not going to help much. This is probably an issue with how we conceptualise justice more than anything else, but it is still worth considering.
Regarding the person with the gun denying you shelter, I believe the case falls under the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue . I am actually surprised (okay, maybe "disappointed but not surprised") to find that common law jurisdictions generally do not contain this kind of provision. However, in large swaths of the world, including where I live, the man's actions would indeed be considered a crime.
As for the widow's mite, do you think what the widow did was sustainable? Do you think it should be socially encouraged? As impressive as it is, the widow should probably keep her money and build up to a situation where she can contribute from her surplus.
The veil of the law, as you call it, has an important role you ignore. The alternative is escalating blood feuds until you get a full-scale civil war, someone wins, then establishes the law and its veil again and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Or you can speedrun the whole process via a revolution with extra genocide on top. Don't poke the veil, there's a Chesterton's bull behind it.
The macaroon consumed is fuel for the engine of progress. The person in the room who could figure out how to fix the poisonous gas thing needs lots and lots of macaroon, and the other people are helping that person in many ways - some direct, some indirect. The people below and those who claim to speak for them only have "stop eating macaroon then let's all slowly starve ourselves to death" as their policy proposal. And the biggest joke is, at this point the gas is slowly being released anyway...
The widow's mite is not sustainable, no, but I am not holding it up as an example of how we should act exactly when I mention it in passing in the essay. The point is more that genuine acts of kindness are *hard*. Ideally sustainable, but always hard. This is to counter Scott's view about the paucity of saints in a world of justice and severe moral requirments.
I specifically acknowledge that we need the veil of law for pragmatic purposes in the essay and other places, precisely because I have in mind the escalating sequence of blood feuds it prevents. I think we should accept it to some degree, in some contexts, but be very uncomfortable about it. and never forget that, morally, it is fiction that better creatures than us could do away with. We should keep it, but keep it in contempt.
I'm not trying to litigate the specifics of global warming and the optimal policy response, just making the point that there's perfectly sensible reasons to think it's not so very different to violence after all.
That's fair. Still, in a justice paradigm, you can be a saint if you're downtrodden and punching up. This has the uncomfortable consequence that if you're already at the top (and globally, most of your readers are) you're fair game for "saints" to take your stuff, in fact, drastic moral action is not supererogatory for you as it is for them, it is mandatory. And whatever you do, will never be enough.
This is not a healthy worldview. It just leads to a spiral of self-loathing and virtue signalling that is both unproductive and cringeworthy, ie. the observed outcome of the whole social justice / privilege checking enterprise. And suspiciously, after years of this whoever started at the top is still at the top.
I’m surprised to see this kind of take from Scott; I vividly recall an analogy involving fisheries that he made a while ago illustrating the tendency toward defection/breakdown in coordination problems where the penalties are longer-term and more abstract than the payouts. Did he forget?
I think this was more a comment on the framing of issues as "justice", not so much the object level issue of "should we coordinate to prevent environmental degradation". There are lots of ways to frame this - virtue, responsibility, benevolence, self-interest - so it is an interesting observation that justice is an increasingly popular way of framing things.
I don’t mean this as a character attack on Scott — I kind of owe him my life actually — but it’s an odd feeling reading this latest blog post and contrasting against his “non-libertarian FAQ” from like 2014, where he already made what I thought was a pretty airtight case for perceiving environmentalism as a contract no individual would willingly enter in good faith yet which harms everyone if not entered. Since our existing system already treats breach of contract as a matter of “justice”, the only real difference I can see is that there’s no actual written contract for environmentalism that the relevant parties have signed — at least, not one that anyone sincerely expects will be followed.
Maybe the divide is because I’m willing to be a bit prescriptive here and say that a contract which “should” exist (even if it literally doesn’t) is actually stronger than one that does. As beings with the power of imagination at our disposal, I think we have a duty to imagine something better than what we have, and pursue it.
I think this is a great post. I have quibble on the Iraq war example - I think it's highly relevant that Saddam had invaded both Kuwait and Iran unprovoked previously and had had and had used chemical weapons. I don't think this changes anything substantively in your argument, but I think it underplays the degree to which Saddam was a danger to international community.
After reading both posts, I think I agree more with you - we probably should consider more things as issues of justice, not fewer. I do still think it's pretty arbitrary how we chose to frame things - in a society with slightly different values (or even with the same values?) we could well be talking about social issues in terms of "Duty" or "Virtue" with much the same results, so I think it's just a matter of what we find most compelling. It may actually be worth considering whether different frames work better in different contexts or cultures? (e.g. Liberal vs Conservative, Eastern vs Western)
I do feel like there are issues with framing things in terms of justice though - it may constrain the scope of the problem too much, and encourage disengagement if you're just a regular person - after all, we leave justice to the justice system! As Scott observes, many people have a purely punitive conception of justice, so maybe environmental justice just looks like doing nothing until it's too late and then punishing a small number of people for our collective guilt, which is probably not going to help much. This is probably an issue with how we conceptualise justice more than anything else, but it is still worth considering.
Regarding the person with the gun denying you shelter, I believe the case falls under the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue . I am actually surprised (okay, maybe "disappointed but not surprised") to find that common law jurisdictions generally do not contain this kind of provision. However, in large swaths of the world, including where I live, the man's actions would indeed be considered a crime.
As for the widow's mite, do you think what the widow did was sustainable? Do you think it should be socially encouraged? As impressive as it is, the widow should probably keep her money and build up to a situation where she can contribute from her surplus.
The veil of the law, as you call it, has an important role you ignore. The alternative is escalating blood feuds until you get a full-scale civil war, someone wins, then establishes the law and its veil again and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Or you can speedrun the whole process via a revolution with extra genocide on top. Don't poke the veil, there's a Chesterton's bull behind it.
The macaroon consumed is fuel for the engine of progress. The person in the room who could figure out how to fix the poisonous gas thing needs lots and lots of macaroon, and the other people are helping that person in many ways - some direct, some indirect. The people below and those who claim to speak for them only have "stop eating macaroon then let's all slowly starve ourselves to death" as their policy proposal. And the biggest joke is, at this point the gas is slowly being released anyway...
The widow's mite is not sustainable, no, but I am not holding it up as an example of how we should act exactly when I mention it in passing in the essay. The point is more that genuine acts of kindness are *hard*. Ideally sustainable, but always hard. This is to counter Scott's view about the paucity of saints in a world of justice and severe moral requirments.
I specifically acknowledge that we need the veil of law for pragmatic purposes in the essay and other places, precisely because I have in mind the escalating sequence of blood feuds it prevents. I think we should accept it to some degree, in some contexts, but be very uncomfortable about it. and never forget that, morally, it is fiction that better creatures than us could do away with. We should keep it, but keep it in contempt.
I'm not trying to litigate the specifics of global warming and the optimal policy response, just making the point that there's perfectly sensible reasons to think it's not so very different to violence after all.
That's fair. Still, in a justice paradigm, you can be a saint if you're downtrodden and punching up. This has the uncomfortable consequence that if you're already at the top (and globally, most of your readers are) you're fair game for "saints" to take your stuff, in fact, drastic moral action is not supererogatory for you as it is for them, it is mandatory. And whatever you do, will never be enough.
This is not a healthy worldview. It just leads to a spiral of self-loathing and virtue signalling that is both unproductive and cringeworthy, ie. the observed outcome of the whole social justice / privilege checking enterprise. And suspiciously, after years of this whoever started at the top is still at the top.
I’m surprised to see this kind of take from Scott; I vividly recall an analogy involving fisheries that he made a while ago illustrating the tendency toward defection/breakdown in coordination problems where the penalties are longer-term and more abstract than the payouts. Did he forget?
I think this was more a comment on the framing of issues as "justice", not so much the object level issue of "should we coordinate to prevent environmental degradation". There are lots of ways to frame this - virtue, responsibility, benevolence, self-interest - so it is an interesting observation that justice is an increasingly popular way of framing things.
I don’t mean this as a character attack on Scott — I kind of owe him my life actually — but it’s an odd feeling reading this latest blog post and contrasting against his “non-libertarian FAQ” from like 2014, where he already made what I thought was a pretty airtight case for perceiving environmentalism as a contract no individual would willingly enter in good faith yet which harms everyone if not entered. Since our existing system already treats breach of contract as a matter of “justice”, the only real difference I can see is that there’s no actual written contract for environmentalism that the relevant parties have signed — at least, not one that anyone sincerely expects will be followed.
Maybe the divide is because I’m willing to be a bit prescriptive here and say that a contract which “should” exist (even if it literally doesn’t) is actually stronger than one that does. As beings with the power of imagination at our disposal, I think we have a duty to imagine something better than what we have, and pursue it.