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.