Philosophical Notes, High and Low

Economists have always been interested in what philosophers -- especially those writing on political philosophy or distributive ethics -- have to say on what our priorities ought to be. This is not just a concern of those living in -- or those who advise those living in -- the White House, or 10 Downing Street, or the Elysee Palace. Anyone with a little bit of cash left over for charity might wonder if there is a sane and systematic way to think about where one's money would do the most good. Any voter heading to the polling booth may worry about the rationale behind the way our government allocates foreign aid in our name.

When faced with humdingers of this kind, economists instinctively reach for three tried and true formulae: Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, John Rawls's liberalism, and Robert Nozick's libertarianism. Rawls, who is often acclaimed as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, argued that any action, whether by an individual or by a group, should be judged by the extent to which it improves the life of the least well-off person (that the individual or group can reach).

Fans of Rawls will be happy to learn that Google.org, the enormously well-endowed philanthropic arm of Google.com, has taken their side. Writing in Slate, Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org has recently endorsed the Rawlsian approach.

What caught my eye, however, was that instead of mentioning Rawls, Brilliant invokes Gandhi:

Gandhi was once asked, "How can I know that the decisions I am making are the best I can make?" He answered: "I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it?"

The Gandhi quote is dated, in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule by Anthony Parel (Lexington Books, 2000, ISBN 0739101374), to 1947, several years before Rawls completed his dissertation at Princeton, and a decade before his famous paper on "justice as fairness".

So, without knowing it, Rawls was actually a Gandhian!

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In a recent article in The New York Times, the Princeton philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, discusses the recent spate of experimental work in philosophy that presents philosophical quandaries -- e.g., Would you kill someone if it would save the lives of four other people? -- to randomly chosen people, notes their answers, and even peers into their brains using sophisticated scanning technology to see what actually goes on inside when people are pondering ethical imponderables. (Incidentally, this is also the subject of Appiah's just published book, Experiments in Ethics.)

While reading Appiah's article, I was reminded of an idea for a cartoon that had occured to me many years ago when I was thinking idly about precisely this issue: the need to do empirical research on the ethical choices that people actually make in their daily lives. Here's the cartoon idea: Two philosophers are seated at adjoining tables, in the dining area at a philosophers' conference, with waiters standing by to take their orders. One philosopher turns to the other and says: "I'll order the egg and you order the chicken. We'll find out which comes first!"

How the media spins Chavez

The Guardian, a highly respected left-of-center British newspaper, still has on its Web site an uncorrected report about Hugo Chavez's notorious speech at the UN in September 2006, during which he had held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and recommended it to the audience. Towards the end of the report, Rory Carroll writes:

Last week the former paratrooper lamented not meeting Prof Chomsky before he died.

Of course, Chomsky was alive and well and The Guardian's readers would have taken away from the smirk in Carroll's report a portrait of Chavez the ignoramus, of Chavez the buffoon. At that time, many other reports had gleefully amplified the alleged flub. I had read about it in The New York Times and had seen gleefully condescending reports on TV.

Sadly for Chavez haters, the report, it turns out, was false, made up, spun out of whole cloth. Prof. Chomsky explained it all in a recent interview on C-SPAN. Reporters who later went back to the text of Chavez's speech found that Chavez was lamenting the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith and regretting not having had the opportunity to meet the famous liberal economist. Some reporter then substituted Chomsky for Galbraith and wittingly or unwittingly set off a viral lie.

The New York Times later corrected the error but, as is usually the case with such corrections, in a way that guarantees that not two in a hundred readers, if even that, would see it.

So, what does Bill Clinton think of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev?

If you haven't done so yet, please read After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton, By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr., in yesterday's The New York Times. In September 2005, Clinton accompanied a Canadian businessman named Frank Giustra to a meeting with Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president-for-life. Nazarbayev's brutal suppression of dissent notwithstanding, Bill was positively effusive, according to the article, in his praise for his dinner host:

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy [the OSCE].

Within forty-eight hours, Frank Giustra got the lucrative rights to a Kazakh uranium mine. Later, out of the goodness of his heart, Giustra donated $130 million to Clinton's charitable foundation.

As I was working my way through the article, I felt a certain pressure on the back of my neck, as if a few blood vessels back there were about to explode. Luckily, I then came upon the following passage:

After Mr. Nazarbayev won [another elcetion in December 2005] with 91 percent of the vote, Mr. Clinton sent his congratulations. “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,” Mr. Clinton wrote in a letter released by the Kazakh embassy. Last September, just weeks after Kazakhstan held an election that once again failed to meet international standards, Mr. Clinton honored Mr. Nazarbayev by inviting him to his annual philanthropic conference.

Laughter had once again been proved to be the best medicine, in this case, for high blood pressure.