The NRA's (bad) armed-guard argument

The NRA's argument for a policy of armed policeman/guards/teachers in schools:

P1) The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for there to be a good guy with a gun. (T)

C) Therefore, we need police-officers, armed-security-guards, or armed-teachers at schools. (F)

Even though many people are reacting against P1 as "insane", it's true. Your best chance of survival in an armed confrontation with a bad person is to be armed yourself (or to have another person armed with your interest at heart). There's no getting around that.

Where the argument fails is the leap to C. C is false because armed-guards are not the only way to solve the problem of armed bad-guys in schools. The other way is having fewer armed bad-people. Thus, the problem with the argument lies in a false hidden premise, P2: no regulation of private-firearms ownership is ever justified.

The problem with P2 is that it places gun-rights above the principle-of-peace. And the principle-of-peace is the core of the social-contract. The reason we leave the state-of-nature and form society is first and foremost to end the war-of-all-against-all and have peaceful social-interactions. And in leaving the state-of-nature, we give up those liberties that threaten peace. Once society is established, if a liberty threatens the general-peace, we can justifiably restrict it. If things are getting to the point where the NRA, America's main gun-lobby group, is advocating armed guards in public-spaces to maintain order -- which assumes the threat of violence is ever-present -- then greater regulation of private-firearm-ownership is justified.

Though I don't believe the threat to public-order posed by mass-shootings is enough to justify either armed-guards in schools or gun-controls -- I think most people are over-reacting -- I do think that among the options currently available, regulation of private-firearm-ownership is preferable to having armed police-officers in schools. Many North-American high-schools already have armed police-officers, but this is something we should be moving way from, not extending to elementary- and middle-schools. Armed police in schools, like the heavy-security at our airports, is an unecessary police-state aspect of society that we should avoid.

Given that gun-control is preferable to armed police-offers in schools, I offer the following analysis of various types of gun-control.

1) Good gun-controls:

i) acquisition controls (acquisition permits, background checks, etc.)
-- these work to control who can get their hands on guns
-- they are probably the single most important gun-control

ii) controls on bearing-arms (bans on open-carrying of loaded weapons when weapon is not in use)
-- openly carrying a loaded-weapon communicates to others that one is prepared for violence
-- peaceful intent in public is important to a peaceful-society
-- gun-allowed zones aren't better than gun-free zones in preventing mass-shootings -- Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood all had armed-guards or police on duty, while Tucson is one giant guns-allowed zone (minus university buildings and some private-property)

iii) storage-controls
-- makes it harder for non-owners to gain control of weapons
-- promotes a culture of safe weapon use


2) Bad gun-controls:

i) keeping-arms controls (locking all weapons in central-storage)
-- leaves civilians defenceless at home and creates easy-to-steal-from weapons caches

ii) assault-weapons bans
-- prevents rebellion, the most important reason for civilians to have guns

iii) licensing ownership and registration of firearms
-- makes possible cultural-genocide of gun-culture through disarmament
-- makes gun-owners distrust government (especially in North-America)
-- makes public cooperation on matters pertaining to civilian-weapons more difficult


Gun-controls of unclear effect:

i) magazine restrictions
-- I have no idea whether this would work, or if it does, whether it's not worth the cost placed on rebellion

The intolerance behind arguments for gun-control

If you substitute the arguments typically made against gun-ownership for Islam, their intolerance becomes clear.

1) Practicing x is a choice and thus not subject to discrimination protection. It's not something you can't change like being black or handicapped.

2) Restrictions and prohibitions on x are justified because x is associated with increased violence.

3) The interests of those who find x offensive should be weighed against those like x.

4) You don't need to practice x. x isn't essential to your life like eating or transportation.

5) x gives you a false sense of security. Evidence shows x is more likely to harm you than help you.

The first and last arguments don't seem as intolerant as the middle three because, in the context of religion, they're generally made by atheists and atheists tend to be progressive. The middle arguments are made by conservatives and so sound more intolerant. Yet, they're all intolerant. This only goes to show -- in addition to our main point that arguments for gun-control reflect intolerance -- that progressive thought avoids charges of intolerance faced by other ideologies simply by virtue of being dominant.

Remembering a very good man

Professor Richard Nutbrown, who was the second reader on my master's thesis, has passed away at 64 from a brain tumour.

My memories of him are fond. Though we came from very different ideological perspectives, and though this created a slight discomfort in our meetings, he offered me his full professional efforts and in doing so revealed a kind heart.

After I presented my initial thesis ideas to a less than receptive faculty and graduate student body, he came to me later and started me on the early-modern contractarians. It turned out to be some of the most important guidance I have received to date. Hobbes remains the strongest influence on my political thought.

On other occasions, he would email me, or bring by my desk, papers which he thought I would find useful. This might seem standard for a supervisor to do, but he did it without prompting. These gestures didn't stem from prior meetings, email requests, or having just read something I wrote. Rather, if he came across something in his own research that he thought would be of value to me, he made sure I got it.

Finally, when I was having difficulty with Faculty of Arts administrators, he took up my cause. And he did so in spite of the fact that he would be working with these people long after I was gone.

Impartial, intelligent, and considerate. The world is down a good man.

Prepare for drug shortages

The Globe and Mail reports that,

Provinces will begin bulk-buying several different generic drugs as part of the first steps Canada’s premiers are taking to make health care less costly and more efficient for Canadians.

This means that the monopsony model used for provincial health insurance plans will now be used for generic drug purchases. It's unclear whether provinces will be providing the drugs through provincial insurance plans or simply re-selling them to pharmacies.

Once this policy goes into effect, there will be more shortages of certain types of generic drugs. Worse, you'll end up paying more on average for those drugs that suffer shortages. If provinces let generic drug prices fluctuate, the price of drugs that suffer shortages will rise consistent with increased demand. If provinces fix the prices of generics, then you will have to pay for the more expensive brand names when generics experience shortages. This, however, is better than our provincial health insurance plans for doctor and hospital services. Because provinces ban private delivery, when shortages occur (i.e. waiting-lists), your only option is to wait.

The reason there will be shortages of certain types of generics is that monopsonies are a form of central-planning and therefore suffer from the knowledge-problem. When there is one purchaser in a market, they need to know what everyone will need in the future. This is impossible because they cannot gather knowledge of 'time-and-place' -- i.e. the circumstantial knowledge of particular people in the economy. In healthcare, this would be a patient's knowledge of his or her particular ailments and the doctor's knowledge of how different kinds of people react to different treatments. This type of information can only be transmitted through prices that arise from a market with multiple buyers and sellers. One buyer can drive down the price, but they do so at the expense of the efficient aggregation of information.

There are market-failures in health-care, which I have addressed elsewhere, but ceteris paribus, the allocation of prescription drugs in Canada is about to get worse.

Guns and violence

The disorder that this Globe and Mail editorial decries is part of a society that guarantees the final protection against tyranny: civilian arms.

The idea that allowing civilians to possess arms is insane and indifferent to killings is, in truth, a value judgement that better protected liberty is not worth additional disorder.

This is a value judgement that is not applied in other areas. Legal rights and due process similarly increase disorder by seeing criminals go free on rights violations. Yet, we tolerate this disorder knowing that legal rights and due process protect the liberty of the innocent. And we value the liberty of the innocent more than increased order.

So why permit disorder for legal rights and due process but not guns? The assumption is that Western liberal-democratic states can be entrused to protect liberty but that they could never turn tyrannical and deny it. The idea that liberal democratic states will never stop being liberal reflects an obedience to authority that is far scarier than the American willingness to let the people, not just the rulers, be armed.

Natural-rights help the nanny state

Natural-rights thinking contributes to nanny-state restrictions for the simple reason that weighing of rights is not possible. Many petty restrictions are seen as justified because they prevent a small number of people from harm or death. Smoking bans, seat-belt laws, gun-control, etc.

I suspect natural-rights libertarians will object that this is because the rights in question aren't rights. None of these violate property-rights, which are the only natural-rights. Even if it's true that these restrictions don't violate property-rights, it means that that natural-rights thinking is only valuable in arguments against petty restrictions in an ideal society where everyone recognises that our natural-rights consist only of property-rights. That makes natural-rights libertarians' thinking pretty limited in our modern context of value-pluralism.

The alternative doesn't have to be a utilitarian framework where odd rights violations follow, e.g. society is justified in executing curmudgeons because no one likes them around. (That said, I think that overall, utilitarianism would lead to more a liberal society under value-pluralism than natural-rights.) Rather, a contractarian society can allow for weighing of rights without utilitarianism's bizarre rights-violations. The reason is that it permits probability calculations in its thought. In a contractarian framework, you can say, for example, that gun-rights will be permitted even though more people will be injured or die because the deaths will only affect a few people and chances are it won't be you. Alternatively, many will receive additional utility from the option of owning and enjoying firearms and chances are that will include you.

A quick thought on Mill and liberty

Is John Stuart Mill responsible for most nanny statism even though he wanted to create a new sphere of individual liberty against the civil societal majority above and beyond that enjoyed against the state?

I don't have in mind the usual conservative objection that a civil societal sphere of liberty requires a welfare state, the idea that people free from customs will necessarily suffer consequences that only societal alms can remedy.

I mean many petty restrictions on liberty are defended by recourse to harm to others. If by contrast we justify all restrictions by recourse to Hobbes' concept of peace -- lack of a known disposition to contend by force -- I think the remaining liberty is closer to what most liberals have in mind.

Is there a right to arms in Canada?

As Canadian courts like to tell gun owners petitioning for their rights, there is no right to arms in Canada. They're right. Legally, there isn't. You may have that right morally, but legal bodies -- Parliaments, courts, etc. -- aren't bound to acknowledge it.

Canada does have a right to arms from the English Bill of Rights 1689, but this bill only guaranteed rights against the monarchy. It doesn't apply to Parliament or other democratically elected bodies. As such, Parliament, or your provincial legislature, is free to regulate, even prohibit, firearms. Just so long as the Queen doesn't initiate the legislation, there is no violation of our Constitutional framework.

To argue that there is a right to arms in Canada, one would have to make a case under §7 of the Charter. One would have to argue that firearms are essential to liberty. That when democratic and speech rights are obstructed, one can only guarantee one's liberty with arms and, as such, your right to liberty must include a right to arms.

There would rightly be suspicion of this idea as American because only the Americans have applied the right to arms against legislative bodies. Nations in the British tradition -- UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc. -- only apply it to the Crown. You can correctly argue that when the right to arms passed in the British system only the monarch was a threat to liberty, but that won't establish a right against legislative bodies. We've had plenty of opportunity to apply the right to arms to legislative bodies since the Americans first did so in 1789 and we haven't.

That said, one would have a strong case for contending that the right to liberty includes a right to arms based on Canadian history alone. There are many cases where rebellion has been used to secure or defend liberal democratic rights: Upper Canada Rebellion (democratic, language, and minority rights), Lower Canada Rebellion (democratic rights), Red River Rebellion (democratic, minority, and native rights), and Oka (native land claims).

So no, there is no legal right to arms in Canada but a case could be made that it's part of our right to liberty. Given that §1 limits §7 and that legislative bodies can use §33 to override §7, even if one successfully made the case, gun controls would still be permissible -- the only difference being they couldn't be as severe.

A brief thought on morality

The more moral and political philosophy I read, the more I think that morality, more often that not, is detrimental to well-being. It tries to restructure some relationship of concern, finding displeasure in the fact that it, like nearly all human relationships, is a game, or series of games, of partial-conflict. The restructuring seems to always be an attempt to reduce whatever harm one one party causes to another by securing a benefit from interaction. The restructuring usually takes the form of changing the game of partial-conflict to one of positive-sum. The reason this is detrimental to well-being is that games of partial-conflict tend to have much higher net payoffs than positive-sum games. To put it in plain language, society is better off when one party, in part, exploits another.

ONE MORE THOUGHT: Put differently, moral value undermines well-being by undermining economic value.

The economics of Canadian healthcare

This is a column I wrote for my local paper, the Morinville Monday Morning News:

A persistent difficulty with Canadian healthcare is waiting-lists. In Alberta, the waits from the time a doctor recommends the patient see a specialist to actual treatment range from 6 months to 3 years. In this column, I will address the cause of waiting-lists and propose a possible solution.

The cause of waiting-lists is that our public, single-payer model of healthcare is a form of central-planning and all central-planning suffers from a knowledge-problem that makes efficient deployment of resources, in this case tax-dollars, impossible.

The reason our healthcare system is a form of central-planning is that decisions about which procedures, equipment, and other healthcare goods will be bought or provided are made by a central body, viz. provincial health ministries.

That central-planning suffers from a knowledge-problem that prevents efficient resource allocation was first indentified by Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek. He argues that central planners cannot allocate resources efficiently because they cannot accommodate the quickly changing ‘circumstantial’-knowledge individuals possess in their allocation decisions. Basically what this means for healthcare is that provincial funding decisions cannot take account of fast changing, individually-based information like the patient’s awareness of their condition or the doctor knowledge’s of how general treatments apply to particular patients. As such, provincial funding never aligns with patient needs and waiting-lists form.

The main solution to overcoming the knowledge problem is a market. In a market, individuals choose what treatments to consume or provide to others or based on their circumstantial knowledge. The knowledge they require in addition to their own to make such decisions is conveyed to them by prices, which reflect the information other patients and practitioners hold.

The main objection to creating a market for healthcare is the well-known problems of the United States healthcare system. These are two. The first is the producer-demand failure. Doctors know more about patients’ health than patients do and therefore have an incentive to sell them more services than they need. The second is insurance-agent problem. Since an insurance company is paying rather than the patient, the patient tends to choose more expensive treatments which insurance companies pass on as higher premiums.

If our single-payer healthcare suffers from an irreconcilable knowledge problem and the common solution – a market – produces the failures of the United States, what can we do? In short, we allow a market in healthcare, but, unlike the United States, we encourage government to correct the two failures. Many European countries have pursued this strategy successfully. My preferred example is Switzerland. They mandate that insurances companies offer everyone basic coverage at no profit. This corrects the failure of producer-led demand by precluding over-charging. It also removes the increasing costs that insurance companies pass on to consumers. To ensure that insurance companies are still viable, though, the Swiss allow insurance companies to allow for-profit services over and above the basic plans.

Next time someone mentions private healthcare, don’t get up in arms. It can produce better outcomes than what we enjoy now as long as we correct the problems the Americans won’t.

Is New Atheism bigoted?

When I started this post, the question of New Atheism being bigoted was timely. Christopher Hitchens had just died and public discussion focused in large part on his on role as a fountainhead of New Atheism. Then the Christmas break happened. And I completed forgot about it. Matters changed three weeks ago when my id threw a temper tantrum of sufficient force that my ego took notice. All of a sudden: "Oh, I have that blog post to finish." Thanks to my temperamental id, I take it up. Well, that and my superego confirmed believe that the question remains important is spite of it no longer being timely.

The first step in taking up the question is defining both New Atheism and bigoted. Analytic philosophers take this necessary, if tedious, step to establish a clear understanding that prevents later evasive arguments. Annoyingly, it leads to seemingly endless definitional debates, especially when one philosopher doesn't like the arguments that follow and can't refute them. But, even these debates are fruitful long-term. They lead to a multi-dimensional understanding of concepts. See, for example, the literature debating what liberty is.

New Atheism, as I understand it, is an intellectual movement wishing to delegitimise religious belief in public debate. This is a new variation on atheism because previous variations only advocated for a secular state. Whereas previous versions wished for the state and its numerous functions to be without religious or spiritual basis, this version also wants public debate to be similarly secular. The professed motivation for this stronger version of atheism is the the 9/11 attacks bringing into sharp focus the problem of religious violence. Addressing this threat, it is argued, requires not only a secular state, but also a move away from religion in politics, if not societal culture.

As for bigoted, I take the American Oxford Dictionary definition to be definitive. (If you see me walking in the street, feel free to shoot me for that pun.) It states, bigoted is "having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others".

So, is New Atheism bigoted? I think so. It follows a thought pattern typical of bigotry: fear causes loathing. 9/11 animated a unique fear for those with atheist convictions: that people with genuine supernatural beliefs don't place as much value on this life and are therefore more willing to become violent. This belief is what is motivating them to argue that religious reasons should be excluded from the space of public reasons. This pattern is consistent with other contemporary instances of what I consider bigotry.  Parents fear that drugs will turn their children into zombies so they condemn drug culture. Progressives fear gun-violence so they accuse gun-owners of being selfish in choosing to own guns. Blue-collar conservatives fear competition for employment and depleted social serves so they resent illegal immigration. Feminists fear prostitution leads to violence against women so they detest johns.

Many people may not accept, or, at least, not immediately see, how these examples constitute bigotry, so we need to answer a second question: how do we know that fear-and-loathing is an instance of bigotry? How does fearing a value-community and showing contempt for it reveal obstinate belief in the superiority of one's opinion and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others? In short, fear of a value-community with conflicting values leads to an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's values and the resultant loathing of that value-community is an instance of prejudiced intolerance their beliefs. The way in which fear of a value-community with conflicting values leads to obstinate belief in the superiority of one's value is that it shelters our beliefs from challenges. It does this by mentally preventing us from undertaking a full rational consideration of the values that challenge own our. Instead of calmly considering the values that spook us, we mentally close up and hold tight to our pre-existing values. Of course, fear doesn't always preclude full rational consideration. In fact, it can enhance it. But where this is the case, it moves us to rational consideration of something other than the object of fear. For example, think of the student who, for fear of poor performance, excels during an exam. As for loathing resulting from fear of a value-community being an instance of prejudiced intolerance of others' values, it is so because it's a belief that does not stem from a rational consideration of others' beliefs.

The most obvious objection to this line of thought is that New Atheism falls into the fear-and-loathing model but this does not preclude its advocates from undertaking a rational consideration of religion. New Atheist's have well-reasoned arguments in defence of their positions. You might not be convinced by them, but they're certainly not based on emotive conjecture.

I think that New Atheists' arguments amount to rationalisations, not well-reasoned arguments. This is because they beg an important question. In political debates, it is not only public values that are in dispute, but also the method for finding truth regarding them. It's not just a matter of choosing between policies and principles favoured by secular or religious reasons, it's also, and first, a matter of choosing between pure reason and a mix of reason and faith in the pursuit of public moral truth. Moreover, this initial choice of method is necessarily subjective. You can't appeal to which method is better except by recourse to it. As such, in public debates, the most reason can be used for is finding policies agreeable to both the secular and religious. You can't assume away the other person's method for truth based on subjective preference and then tell them their reasons for principles and policies are illegitimate. Importantly, I don't think this tendency to assume away the other person's method for truth is intentional. I think it's a product of bigotry. New Atheist analysis does not penetrate past the stage of reasons and policies and into the realm of methodology because fear of religious violence and intolerance of religious beliefs precludes them from undertaking a full rational analysis.