Many progressive arguments that attribute poverty to factors other than out of wedlock childbirths can be refuted with the following two data points: (1) the success of immigrants, who frequently live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools, but find success in America, and (2) the fact that out of wedlock childbirths were much lower during the Great Depression (see this link for a graph), when economic times were much worse than they are today. This makes it unlikely that economics is a major factor in causing out of wedlock childbirths.

A final point that should be emphasized is that out of wedlock childbirths cause more than poverty, but they also cause a wide array of other social problems including substance abuse and problems in school.

Now onto the detailed responses to progressive arguments.
(more…)

Politics

• Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. An ideal first book on economics. Gentle but packed with information that will get you thinking like an economist.
• The Marriage Problem by James Q. Wilson. All the research about the relation between poverty, culture, and the breakdown of marriage. Debunks William Julius Wilson’s job mismatch theory of poverty. See my review here.
• Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality by Thomas Sowell. If you just read one book by Sowell, read this. Makes the case for the importance of culture. Some tidbits: West Indian Blacks earn 94% as much as whites, compared to 62% for blacks as a whole. Jews, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants consistently outperform society as a whole, even when they are discriminated against.
• Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. No statistics or research, this book puts a human face on the self-destructive behaviors of the white underclass in England. Will make you mad.
• Cowboy Capitalism by Olaf Gersemann. A wealth of statistics covering everything from hourly productivity to hidden unemployment which show that the European model is not working.
• Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell. We’ve been spending more money in order to dumb down education for more than forty years.

(more…)

“In philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today” — Quentin Smith (atheist luminary), “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo, no. 2 (2001): 3.

Theistic philosophy - and physics - has undergone an explosion in the past several decades. Set aside your old “Hume, Kant, and Russell proved that there is no God” and make way for the new lines of evidence. If you read just one book on the existence of God, I would recommend God and Design, which is a collection of essays by scientists and philosophers on both sides of the debate, so you’ll get both perspectives. There are plenty of other books by physicists who believe in some sort of a higher power (whether Christian, Jewish, or some other alternative) than you can shake a stick at. A small sampling includes The Faith of a Physicist by J. C. Polkinghorne, The Mind of God by Paul Davies, The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder, and The Language of God by Francis S. Collins.

God? Or an Infinite Number of Unseeable Universes?

The teleological argument is the argument for the existence of God that most people find most intuitively appealing. It also has a lot of force, it was one of the key arguments that led to the atheist poster child, Antony Flew, becoming a deist. If there were just a slight difference in how some of the basic laws of physics were slightly different, then life on earth would be impossible. In this article for Wired Magazine, Greg Easterbrook writes:

In recent years, researchers have calculated that if a value called omega — the ratio between the average density of the universe and the density that would halt cosmic expansion — had not been within about one-quadrillionth of 1 percent of its actual value immediately after the big bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or experienced runaway-relativity effects that would render the fabric of time-space weirdly distorted. Instead, the firmament is geometrically smooth — rather than distorted — in the argot of cosmology. If gravity were only slightly stronger, research shows, stars would flame so fiercely they would burn out in a single year; the universe would be a kingdom of cinders, devoid of life. If gravity were only slightly weaker, stars couldn’t form and the cosmos would be a thin, undifferentiated blur. Had the strong force that binds atomic nuclei been slightly weaker, all atoms would disperse into vapor.

(more…)

Science Versus Ethics

Before even starting to make the case against abortion, it is important to get the scientific facts on the table. Science and ethics are two different things. Science can tell us the facts, but it cannot tell us who has rights and who does not. It is the job of ethics to determine what is morally good and what is morally wrong based upon those facts.

It is an objective scientific fact that a fetus ia member of the species Homo sapiens. An acorn may not be the same as an oak tree, but a pollinated acorn is of the same species as an oak tree. Similarly, we all became a members of the species Homo sapiens after the process of fertilization was complete.

This immediately backs pro-choicers into a corner. If you believe that every human being has an unalienable right to life, then a fetus has an unalienable right to life. This makes it very difficult to defend abortion and stem cell research.

Abortion and an Unalienable Right to Life

The best attempt to defend abortion in a manner consistent with unalienable rights was made by the ethicists Judith Jarvis Thompson. Her main argument is simple and compelling. A famous violinist has a kidney problem and you alone have the correct blood type to help him. So the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and hooks you up to the violinist for nine months. It would certainly be a nice thing if you decide to help the violinist, Thompson argues, but you do not have to. You would be in your rights to walk out of the hospital.

There are two problems with the violinist analogy. The first is that the scenario is more like rape than consensual sex. In the case of consensual sex the parents freely brought the child into the world, so the parents are responsible for the child’s well being. Even if procreation was not the goal, people are responsible for the intentional and unintentional results of their actions. Thompson’s argument by analogy is flawed because the violinist’s kidney problem is not a consequence of a freely chosen actions. The second problem with the argument is that while you are not morally obligated to support the violinist and could freely walk away, you do not have the right to kill him. Abortion is not gently unhooking the fetus unharmed, it typically involves violently dismembering it (even suction abortions result in the dismembering of the fetus).

Abortion cannot be reconciled with an unalienable right to life. This is a steep price to pay to support abortion. As Aristole pointed out, man is a rational animal and with that rationality comes responsibility. We have to choose logically consistent ethical positions. I would hope that people who believe in human rights would reject abortion, even if they may be sympathetic to the pro-choice position.

Read more on the problems with the rights based case here.

Personhood and Infanticide

Unlike being a human, being a person is not a matter of science. It is a matter of taste, and there are may definitions of ‘person.’ Some of these definitions revert back to science: a person is a human. But in the abortion debate the definition of person that you see most often is the philosopher’s definition. John Locke thought that a person is someone who can maintain their identity through time. Other philosophers have homed in on self-consciousness, the capacity for abstract thought, or language use. But regardless of which of these traits you choose, none of them emerge until well after birth. If non-persons can be legally killed, then newborn infants can be legally killed. In fact, infants do not even come close to developing self-consciousness, rational thought, and language use until around a year or more after birth. Most abortion defenders find the legalized infanticide of a one year old baby to be completely unnacceptable.

Of course, you can try to find an alternate basis for personhood that allows abortion while prohibiting infanticide, but this is not an easy task. A newborn infant has the intelligence of a chicken, or perhaps a sea slug. Since personhood means rejecting human rights - the belief that rights are intrinsic to our nature as human beings - we can’t simply declare by fiat that only humans get rights. But there only “tests” that do a good job of separating humans from animals are based upon mental powers that we do not develop until well after birth.

There is another problem that goes much deeper. It is fairly easy to see why someone might argue that all human beings share a basic dignity and worth that makes them equal (at least on paper). And it is fairly easy to see why we might home in on essentially human traits like self-consciousness and language use as the basis for our ethical worth. But it is difficult to see anything special about reaching other, and lesser, landmarks in intellectual development that would vault them to a greater importance than self-consciousness.

Read more about the problem with making the case for personhood while denying infanticide here.

Alternative Ethics

I have found that people who are pro-choice often start debates confident that they are on the side of science and reason. But then when confronted with the basic scientific fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens they rapidly reject science and adopt mystical positions. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen pro-choicers start talking about “quickening” or “ensoulment.” Feminists such as Naomi Wolf have famously argued that we need to adopt a richer spirituality of sin and redemption that embraces the death of the fetus.

The only honest approach for abortion defenders is to either reject abortion, or accept legalized infanticide (infanticide could still be treated as destruction of valuable property if the baby is wanted).

The Hard Cases: Rape and Health of the Mother

Rape and health of the mother are the “hard cases” for pro-lifers. They are complicated issues and many people who are pro-life disagree. The important thing is to reason your way to an ethical position based upon the fact that both the fetus and the mother have an unalienable right to life. These cases create a more direct conflict between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother. The Principle of Double Effect is how natural rights based ethics handle conflicts of rights. It has given us the right to kill in self-defense, the Just War doctrine, and resolved plethora of other difficult ethical issues hundreds of years before abortion was even an issue. Here is where I do this and conclude that abortion is justified if the life of the mother is at risk, but not in the case of rape or when only her health is at risk.

Pro-Choice Challenges

Here are rebuttals to two of the more effective pro-choice challenges.

• Punishment for women who get abortions (vs. fetal homicide laws). The issue of punishing women who get abortions backs pro-lifers into a corner. Either they appear extreme by wanting to punish women who get abortions, or they concede that killing a fetus is not as bad as killing an adult. This is really an issue of logical consistency. If a fetus has a right to life then killing a fetus should be as bad as killing an adult.

  Pro-choicers face the same dilemma. If a fetus does not have a right to life then there is nothing wrong with killing a wanted baby. Most states have fetal homicide laws, but with legalized abortion they should be repealed. A criminal who causes a happily pregnant woman to lose her baby should only be guilty of destruction of valuable property, not murder.

  These are positions that make both sides seem extreme to the moderate general public - but this is a fault that lies with the moderate general public. They have adopted the position that wanted babies have rights, and unwanted fetuses do not.

• The Burning IVF Clinic. This is Ellen Goodman’s famous thought experiment: an IVF clinic is burning and you can save either a Petri dish with embryos in it, or a little girl. Who do you save? This purportedly backs the pro-lifer into a corner. Choose the Petri dish (or choose randomly) and you look extreme. But choose the little girl and you (purportedly) concede that the life of an embryo is worth less than the life of a more developed human being.

  Suppose you have to choose between rescuing a famous cancer researcher or an obviously homeless alcoholic. Most people would choose to rescue the cancer researcher. But this clearly does not mean that we can freely choose to kill the alcoholic. The strongest conclusion you can draw is that the life of a homeless alcoholic is worth less than the life of a cancer researcher - but it is still valuable enough to have a right to life and legal protections. The same reasoning applies to the embryo. But as it turns out, even that limited conclusion is unwarranted.

  All men are created equal, but then the real world starts separating them. This is one of the great challenges to democracy - maintaining the principle of equality in an unequal world. The beauty and power of the ethics of human rights is that every human being has equal dignity, worth, and moral status. It does not matter what the rest of the world says. It does not matter if you are a cancer researcher or a homeless alcoholic, a little girl, or an embryo.

  However, when the chips are down and your back is against the wall, you have to make a stark choice. Since human rights ethics treats everyone with equal dignity and worth, it is impossible to use their intrinsic value as a way to make a separation. It then becomes acceptable to factor in the value that people provide to the very unequal real world. In these cases we can choose the cancer researcher over the alcoholic and the child over the embryo.

  The potential to abuse this is obvious, so the logical machinery of natural rights is designed to keep the situations in which the unequal real world factors into decision down to a bare minimum. In fact, they are only allowed in these black/white situations in which saving one person means letting another die. The tool that human rights ethicists use for this is called the Principle of Double Effect. Read about double effect here and here.

Further Reading

• Moral Theory by David Oderberg. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for abortion defenders. In the course of debating abortion you will be buffetted with thought experiments and hypotheticals. Unless you understand the machinery of natural rights, you will be driven into accepting the position that some human beings are worth more than others (note that few natural rights skeptics take this to its natural conclusions, which would be that the life of a cancer researcher is worth more than that of a bum). See my review which summarizes the ethical machinery here.
• Libertarians for Life. Website with a great collection of articles from rights-based libertarians.
• Applied Ethics. This book applies natural rights philosophy to questions like abortion and euthenasia, and addresses a wide range of various rebuttals from pro-choicers.
• The Golden Rule. I’ve been making the case against abortion based upon human rights, but the Golden Rule is an even more basic ethical principle that underlies all logically consistent ethical systems.

Easy Books on Economics

Start with these two books on economics. If you only read one, then I would recommend that liberals read Sowell and conservatives read Krugman.

• Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. No math, no graphs, but plenty of meat. Sowell is from the conservative school of economics called monetarism.
• Peddling Prosperity by Paul Krugman. There are three good reasons to read this book about the liberal school of keynesian economics. The first is that you need to give them a chance to make their case. The second is that you can use this book to criticize the far left - ‘even liberal economists like Paul Krugman support free trade.’ The third reason is that the book is a short 180 pages.

Learn Economics With Just a Few Short Articles

Here are a few articles written in plain English that will give a fairly comprehensive sweep through all of economics. If you don’t want to bother with a book, stick to these.

• Price Gougers Should be Shot? Price is one of the most elegant and beautiful methods through which the “invisible hand” regulates free markets.
• Speculators. The “invisble hand” uses speculators to correct an incorrect price, or to encourage conserving a scare resource. This happens automatically without consumers even being aware of the fact that they resource is even becoming scarce - what could be easier?
• The Law of Unintended Consequences. When the government creates policies that interfere with the invisible hand, bad things happen. Tragically, the bad effects are often concentrated on the people that the policy was supposed to help.
• The Division of Labor. We all know that technology makes our lives better. What is less well appreciated is that technology often does its work by making it so that it takes fewer workers to make the same amount of goods. This results in economic trauma to the workers who lose their jobs, but it lowers the cost of living. The fact that we are wealthier today is powerful evidence that this process is a net gain to society.
• When the Invisible Hand Fails. There are a few areas when free markets do not work. This includes environmental issues (external costs) and national defense (public goods).
• Licenses Restrict Competition. Here is agreat article by Mary Ruwart, a former Vice-Presidential candidate from the libertarian party making the standard (and frequently valid) libertarian talking point about how licensing schemes restrict competition and hurt small businesses. New York taxis are her major example. Get the other side of the story here Sometimes the real world is too complicated for simplified economic models.
• Three Economic Myths. If there are just three lesson that I would like to see people take from economics, these are it.

Challenges to Economics

Before even getting onto the articles, economics can only tell us what is good for the economy. It can tell us that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for the middle class, because taxing the wealth will result in fewer jobs. But it can’t tell us whether or not we should go ahead and do this because we need to help the poor. That is a separate decision that falls in the realm of morality.

• Economics and Ideology. This is an excellent post on a liberal blog about the (conservative) ideological biases of economics professors. It is a good post, but what makes it valuable is the high quality of the comments. I strongly recommend reading them all.
• Economics and the Irrational Man. A frequent criticism by the left is that free market supports are mistaken in their assumption that people are rational decision makers who can be trusted to make good decision. There is a grain of truth to this criticism, but voters are even more irrational than consumers, and government power corrupts more absolutely than corporate power. In other words, we can’t simply assume that the government will do a better job, it may be even worse.
• Weaknesses of Keynesian Economics. The more liberal school of keynesian economics has had some powerful challenges to free markets. Over time keynesian economics has moderated into a monetary (i.e. Federal Reserve) policy of managed inflation and abandoned most of its interventions into markets.
• Imperfect Competition and Classical Economics. This argument claims that economic analysis is invalid because it assume perfect competition, which does not occur in the real world.
• Consensus Among Economists Polling data of economists to see what they do and do not agree on.

Europe Versus the United States

Comparing Europe to the United States puts the theory into practice. European countries generally have extensive social welfare safety nets, nationalized health care, and more heavily regulated industries than the United States - all of which is financed through higher taxes. If free markets are best, the United States will “win.” If they are not, then Europe will “win.”

• Not The Hidden Unemployment Defense!. Europe has a higher unemployment rate than the United States, leading the left to claim that hidden unemployment explains the difference. But Europe has even more hidden unemployment than the United States (as would be expected because its safety nets make it easier to be a discouraged worker).
• The Myth of the Productive Europe. The left holds up the high hourly productivity of some European countries. But a closer look reveals problems with this. Even in hourly productivity, the United States is outpacing Europe.
• Is Social Democracy a Viable Model for Europe’s Future? The opening salva in a long running debate about Europe’s productivity. Read all the comments, they are some extremely good ones. See Quiggon’s response here and Cowen’s follow up here. This should keep you busy for a while.

Economics Blogs
Here are some good economics blogs:

• Greg Mankiw Who would have thought that a Keynesian would have my favorite economics blog? Greg Mankiw is a wonderful writer with a lot of common sense. He is a staunch supporter of free markets despite being from within the Keynesian school.
• Marginal Revolution Probably the most popular Austrian economics blog. Austrian economics is the most strongly free market oriented school of economics.
• Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal. The leading liberal economist on the blogosphere. From the Keynesian school. You need to keep up with what he has to say.

Further Reading

• Amazon List on Economics. Here is list of books about economics on amazon. If you find it helpful, please vote to give it positive feedback so more people will see it.

Polygamy and incest are the ultimate wedge issues for supporters of gay marriage. Some oppose polygamy (here) while others support it (here and here).

The standard argument for gay marriage is that marriage is a basic civil right that should be available to all people. One problem with the standard argument is that it also applies to polygamy and incest. This backs gay marriage supporters into a corner. If they support polygamy and incest then they make the slippery slope argument of conservatives a reality. But if they oppose polygamy and incest they must drop the standard argument or become hypocrites.

Supporters of gay marriage have tried to create replacement arguments that draw a line between polygamy and gay marriage, but they are all much weaker than the standard argument. Here is a summary of polygamy-proof arguments for gay marriage:

Jealousy

In this argument (made here) gay marriage is advocated because “You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you. Second, the number isn’t arbitrary. It’s based on human nature. Specifically, on jealousy.”

This is a strange argument. The only reason we human nature leads to jealousy is because it takes two people to reproduce. A third person can only break that reproductive unit. Either the husband will raise another man’s child, or the mother will be abandoned by the father to another woman. Jealously only reinforces the biological basis of marriage. This is an argument for heterosexual marriage against both gay marriage and polygamy. Finally, the jealousy argument would support incestuous marriage, so it is only effective against polygamy.

Not a choice

Andrew Sullivan makes that point here. Polygamy really is a choice, whereas homosexuality is not. This does a nice job of creating a distinction that puts homosexual and heterosexual marriage on one side and polygamy on the other. However there are two problems with the “not a choice” argument.

But first some clarification. It may be the case that homosexuality is not a choice, but it is also the case that it is not genetic. The science behind the “gay gene” has withered (here) and only about 30% to 50% of identical twins of homosexuals are themselves homosexual (here).

The first problem with the “not a choice” argument is that while it prohibits polygamy, it allows other forms of marriage such as incest. No one would choose to fall in love with their sibling. Pedophiles and some rapists could make the claim that their sexual attraction is not a choice. Of course, pedophilia and rape can be disqualified because they do not involve sex between consenting adults - but this illustrates the fact that consenting adults is the important factor, not the lack of a choice.

A second problem with the “not a choice” argument is that lack of a choice is a poor basis for making the law. If X is objectively bad, then it should not matter whether people do X freely or compulsively. And if X is objectively good, then it also shouldn’t matter. This leads to what is perhaps the most important of the non-standard arguments for gay marriage: whether or not gay marriages are objectively good.

Good of Society

This argument states that relationships that are good for society should be recognized as marriages, those that are negative should not (Dahlia Lithwick makes that point here, although it is hard to tease the substance of her argument from among the fireworks). Polygamy has three big problems. The first is that it leads to powerful men coercing young women and girls into marriage. The second is that it leads to powerful men viewing young men as a threat. It was only one generation after the founding of Mormon colonies that Blood Atonement against adolescent males began. The final problem is that high-status favored wives can gain more of the father’s time and money for her children against the children of the lesser wives.

You can make just as strong - if not stronger - of an argument against homosexuality. Gays have much higher rates of domestic violence, STDs, substance abuse problems, and infidelity (some references here). Gay marriage supporters claim that this bad behavior is caused by intolerance and lack of legalized marriages. This is a difficult position to maintain because other discriminated and oppressed groups have had strong marriages, such as Asian immigrants and blacks in the first half of the 20th century. It was only after the civil rights movement that the black family disintegrated. Finally, consider the last time in history when homosexuality was legitimate, and when Christians were the subject of discrimination and oppression: the Roman Empire. Christians had strong monogamous marriages in stark contrast to Roman society around them (many people had literally dozens of wives). Even the famous Enlightenment critic of Christianity, Edward Gibbon, conceded in his book The ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, that Christianity restored the dignity of marriage.

We have decades of quality research showing what happens when you introduce non-biological parents into heterosexual families: higher rates of social maladies such as depression, substance abuse, promiscuity, low self-esteem, bad grades, and dropping out of school (see here). Although there are exceptions, this is the statistical pattern. It defies common sense to claim that gays are an exception to this rule, but that is precisely the argument they make.

Gay parenting is a fairly new phenomenon, and the research is very preliminary, much like the research on single motherhood back in the 1970’s. Back then liberal sociologists believed that alternatives to traditional marriage were good for children (see here and here for articles that describe the change of mindset).

One of the main flaws of the early research on gay parents is that it suffers from a selection bias - researchers recruit volunteers rather than find random samples (here is an article in which it is argued that appeals case trials are more random than recruiting volunteers). Nevertheless, there is already plenty of research confirming that children raised by gay parents do worse (see here, here ). Supporters of gay marriage have been forced to massage the data (see here and here).