What will Trump play while America burns?

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No doubt many of us would consider an election and its attendant politics to be the paragon of an adversarial institution or process. Naturally, we expect a certain degree of hardball from candidates and parties when it comes to a competition for power. However, it’s one thing to raise hell about partisan gerrymandering – the nefarious scheme politicians employ in order to ensure electoral domination by their party and its other candidates – but isn’t it a whole other ball game to claim that an entire election will be rigged and stolen? (Not even that it was fraudulently won, but that it will be. Fear > Facts.)

Donald Trump’s latest, and arguably most concerning, comments regarding the upcoming presidential election have thrown many reasonable citizens into whirlwinds of confusion, anxiety, and outright fear. (If somehow you haven’t yet heard about any of this, this should bring you up to speed.) Those same flippant, yet consequential, remarks have primed his supporters for what may prove to be the least peaceful transfer of power that this nation has ever seen.

When it comes down to it, especially given the salience and perceived importance of the presidency in the minds of many Americans, the United States really only survives due to the gracious and peaceful quadrennial transfer of power from one chief steward to the next after a free and fair election.

While Donald Trump’s warning that such an American rite may be subverted may suggest negative prospects for his ascension to the presidency, giving at least some of us superficial comfort, the fact remains that he seems to have convinced a not insignificant number of ignorant, confused, obtuse, disillusioned, angry, and armed people to prepare for what we can only imagine would be a literal uprising.

Many Americans consider “the election” to be the fundamental institution of democracy, and to spoil our common trust in its practical efficacy and salutary potency disrespects the rules of the game from a procedural perspective – this is a process which he willingly joined and the rules of which he agreed to follow – and threatens the actual security and stability of the United States as a sovereign state. He has stepped beyond his hateful and ignorant remarks to take aim at the very mechanism through which American democracy is able to exist at all.

Sometimes sports fans burn cars or businesses in their own cities when their teams lose, but should a politician burn a whole country when he loses an election?

-SB

Unwritten rules in baseball and business

Here’s another on the unwritten rules in competitive institutions, by sometime contributor to this blog, Chris MacDonald.

Capitalism, like baseball, has both written and unwritten rules

no rule against slobber balls

Ted Cruz and Zinedine Zidane on partisanship, team solidarity, and family honor

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Ted Cruz gave a press conference the day after his keynote speech at the RNC, which had ended with a ringing non-endorsement of the party’s nominee, Donald Trump. Some in the audience were upset that he wasn’t being a good “team player,” and was acting like a “sore loser.” Others noted that he had signed a pledge, earlier in his Primary campaign against Trump, to support the party’s nominee in the general election. (See the reporting in Politico.) His response:

“This isn’t just a team sport, we don’t just put on red jerseys, blue jerseys, and yay! This is about principles, ideas, standing for what we believe in.”

And what are the “principles” that justify nullification of his earlier commitment? It is possible that they are the political principles that he takes to be sacred for the Republican party:

“the standard I intend to apply [when he casts his ballot] is which candidate I trust to defend our freedom, be faithful to the Constitution.”

But he seems clearly more emphatic when he cites not political principles but a chivalrous code from everyday morality: you defend your family’s honor!

“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father. And that pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you slander and attack Heidi I’m going to nonetheless go like a servile puppy dog” and stick to the pledge anyway.

“You gotta get over it!” one man in the audience yelled.

“This is not a game … right and wrong matter,” Cruz shot back, as he also argued, “I would note, sir, you might have a similar view if someone was attacking your wife. I hope you would.”

The question of whether defending his family’s honor was reason enough to stay on the sidelines for now was a matter of heated debate in the hallways of the over-air conditioned Marriott outside the ballroom where Cruz spoke.

If “defending family honor” is indeed Cruz’s justification for a bold move that undermines his “team’s” chances of winning an important contest, it is not obvious that this helps distinguish politics from team sports. Who can forget Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head-butt, 10 years ago this month?

This is the biggest Football World Cup controversy ever. It was 19 minutes into the extra time of the final match of the 2006 world cup when Zinedine Zidane, one of the best soccer players of all time, left the whole world in awe. In one sudden move, the French head-butted Marco Materazzi of Italy for allegedly hurling spiteful words at him.

Materazzi admitted to have said, “I prefer the whore that is your sister”. He goes further to note there are more harsh words exchanged between players in the field and Zidane had heard worse of them before. Well, the fatigue felt way into the second half of the extra time was the ultimate trigger for him.

Zidane said the words were too hurting and Materazzi kept repeating them causing him to lose his cool. In that split moment of anger, Zidane turned back, leaned forward and rammed his head into the chest of the player.

Zidane was shown the red card. Without their best player on the pitch when the match ended in a draw, France lost to Italy in the ensuing penalty shoot-out. At the time of posting, the implications of Cruz’s head-butt on the general election result for his party are unknown.

 

Shredding the unwritten rulebook on the Tour de France

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“Sticky bottle”

Here’s a great case study on the phenomenon of “gentlemanly” unwritten rules in a sport. Several different examples; justified or criticized on different grounds; enforced in different ways; threatened for different reasons. H/t Chris MacDonald

 

 

Who makes the rules for selecting the rulers?

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Our major adversarial institutions are not free-for-all, war-of-all-against-all, slugfests. They are highly regulated competitions, with specific rules in place to encourage desirable outcomes: convicting the guilty but not the innocent (law), creating prices and promoting efficiency (markets), electing competent governments (politics), entertaining fans (spectator sports). The “players” are invited to play to win; but the competitions are not in place primarily for their benefit, but mostly for the benefit of those outside the competition.

This, in a nutshell, is why it always matters who gets to write or amend the rules of these competitions. And why we worry when the “players” get to write their own rules. Especially when a subset of the players — the ones who happened to win the last round — get to write the rules for the next round.

As Arash Abizadeh writes in Toronto’s Globe and Mail,

Here’s the problem: letting politicians who won the last election decide future election rules is like letting the team who won the last playoff game decide rules for the next game. There’s an obvious conflict of interest. Electoral rules determine who forms government, and different rules favour different parties.

After surveying the options for a better process of electoral reform, Abizadeh recommends something novel:

how could electoral reform be legitimized? We need a manifestly fair procedure – a neutral body, unbeholden to politicians, that will reasonably evaluate the alternatives.

Fortunately, political scientists have a solution that fits the bill – a randomly selected citizen assembly. The idea is this: randomly select a few thousand Canadians, ask if they are willing to serve, and, from those saying yes, randomly select 100 to 200 to serve on an assembly empowered to determine federal election rules.

Putting regular citizens in charge may initially seem crazy. Wouldn’t citizens with no special experience or expertise make incompetent decisions? But that’s who decides referenda, too. In fact, Canada is a pioneer in using citizen assemblies to make decisions about voting systems.

We’ve done it twice before, in B.C. and Ontario. Political scientists havestudied both cases, and both were in many respects a great success. Once our fellow citizens received expert advice (about voting systems) and consulted the public, they became well informed, and their deliberations and decision-making were extremely competent and reasonable.

No surprise here: it’s well known to social scientists that under the right conditions, there is intelligence in numbers. The decisions of an assembly of regular but diverse individuals are often more intelligent than decisions by a lone genius or expert.

As they used to say in 1960s sitcoms, that is so crazy it just.. might.. work! It is also not beyond the realm of conceivability that the current Trudeau government in Canada, which promised electoral reform in its last campaign, would consider such a thing.

The probability that anything like this will happen south of 49th parallel, where two parties have successfully colluded to secure a political duopoly for generations, is approximately 0.0. Why think outside the box when the box is just fine the way it is? Why not just hire a consultant…

new yorker escher construction

 

Worth more than 1000 words

I discovered this cartoon a few weeks ago, posted it on Facebook, and within days my post had garnered more than a thousand “likes” and more than 2500 shares. Why all the love? Because it is a Perfect Cartoon. Caption unnecessary.

screwdriver pol

For more wordy reflections on a wider range of ethical issues in political campaigning, see numerous posts on this blog in recent weeks by Isak, below.

Rules of engagement for academic adversaries

Academics argue. That’s what they do. They argue against each other’s theories and results; they propose alternatives they believe are superior; and those theories, in turn, become the subject of critique by their colleagues. Yada, yada, yada, we all get closer to the truth.

Read between the lines and academic argument often sounds pretty passive-aggressive. As if we’re often not sure which kind of argument we are trying to have. The distinction between the two sense of the English word “argument” is, of course, most perfectly explained by those Cambridge philosophers, Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

 

So how ought we to argue in academia? Politely. Why? Because it works.

I recently came across some advice from the great American philosopher Daniel Dennett on how to write a scholarly critique. (I haven’t yet tracked down the citation, or the larger context in which it was written, but the advice given here is perfect all on its own.)

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1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

If I may, I would add a fifth point:

5. Once you have presented a rebuttal or criticism, search the text in question to see if the author has already considered and responded to your criticism; and if he or she hasn’t then it is up to you to formulate the best possible responses to this criticism, given the author’s other commitments. Either way, voice this actual or potential replies to your critique explicitly, and respond to them. Repeat….

So what kind of friendly advice is this? Is it academic etiquette? Academic ethics? Or the key to academic effectiveness?

If the academic community you are in has a sufficient degree of intellectual integrity, then its widely recognized leaders will have convinced a good many of their colleagues that they have discovered flaws with previous theories and findings in the field, and they will have demonstrated this critique, its implications, and possibly a new-improved theory in its place, with a reasoned argument involving clear concepts, evidence, and inferences. (In an academic community without a sufficient degree of integrity, institutional and political power will be the main tools for achieving local, if fleeting, fame.)

In any case, if your chosen field has integrity, then Dennett’s advice unites those three E’s: etiquette, ethics, and effectiveness. If you want to have an impact on the debates in your field (and if not, why are you doing this?), you need to get your critique published. Editors will invite the authors you are engaging with, or others known to be sympathetic with their views, to “referee” your critique. If they think you have simply not understood the ideas you are criticizing; or worse, if they think you have deliberately misrepresented them, then they are highly unlikely to be persuaded by your arguments — assuming they even read all the way to the end of your MS.

On the other hand, if you play nice and follow Dennett’s rules, the Journal editor may well read in the referee’s report not only “I wish I’d put it that way myself,” but also “OMG, I never noticed that gap in my argument/ that ambiguous concept/ that invalid inference/ that inconsistency….! I hope I can fix that, but this critic may be onto something original and important!” As a former editor, I can assure you, we do get those kinds of referees’ reports on papers that are criticizing their own theories. And when when we do, those submissions are usually fast-tracked for publication.

I should underscore that Dennett’s advice runs deeper than mere professional decorum or publishing tactics. If you are not successfully mastering Dennett’s first step, then you are probably not grasping why the theory you are criticizing has been taken seriously. Why it might be smarter than you realize. Similarly, if you don’t consider how an intelligent interlocutor would reply to your critique, then are likely to be ignoring the most obvious objections to your critique — the one’s the referees will not fail to point out.

But if you really are onto something, then bending over backwards to demonstrate the inescapability of your critique in a spirit of intellectual fairplay will only make the critique itself that much harder for your academic community to ignore. You “win” in the nicest possible way.

Boaty McBoatface, Primaries, and the Illusion of Democratic Legitimacy

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The internet seems to bring out the extreme tendencies of human groups. It can connect us over the greatest of distances and provide for the rapid spread of information — whether in the form of revolutionary tweets or cat pictures. At the same time, the anonymity provided by certain social media platforms coupled with mass social movements can end up having some wonky effects.

One such recent sensation was the saga of Boaty McBoatface. As detailed in a recent article in The Atlantic, the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) recently ran a contest to determine the name of a new $300-million research vessel. The new ship would explore the remotest waters, its side emblazoned with a name chosen by “the people” of the internet. Or such was the idea.

As Atlantic writer Uri Friedman put it:

The NERC had expressed a preference for an “inspirational,” environmental science-y choice. Your “Shackleton.” Your “Endeavour.” And so on.

Of course, internet users jumped on such an opportunity to “participate” in such scientific endeavors. Before long, the leading entry for the name of the new ship was “RRS Boaty McBoatface,” a name which soon became an internet sensation. As links to the contest were shared, the name continued to gain steam, ending with 124,000 votes — over three times the votes of the runner-up entry.

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The boat that will NOT be named Boaty McBoatface

Yet the captain (er, Science Minister) Jo Johnson leaned hard on the tiller and, along with the hardy crew (the NERC), decided to bring her about, ignoring the prevailing winds of internet opinion. Such a name just wouldn’t be proper!

This raises the obvious question: if the NERC wanted to maintain creative control over the naming of the ship, why hold the contest at all? Had they never asked the amorphous mob of “the internet” to participate, they could have just named it whatever boring name they wanted. But had the done so, they never would have got people interested. After all, wasn’t the purpose of the marketing ploy precisely to raise awareness for science and give people the feeling that they were somehow participating in the process?

Here we see something pertinent to the study of adversarial institutions: sometimes a contest can be used to give validation or legitimacy to an idea. The logic is generally this: the majority will have little reason to complain about the outcome, since they themselves chose it. Such a notion may appear extremely obvious — after all, we are used to it in its political form: majoritarianism.

Yet the story of “Boaty McBoatface” shows that while a body might set up a such a structured contest to give their actions legitimacy, that same body of organizers might find themselves still wanting control over the outcome. In an alternate scenario, the  NERC could have the people choose between several tried-and-true-and-boring options. But is a choice among options you didn’t pick really a valid choice for the purposes of legitimacy?

The example of Boaty McBoatface seems especially relevant in a U.S. primary season where both major parties have seen strong challenges from candidates considered to be outsiders. On the right, there has been talk of Donald Trump being blocked at the Republican convention by the party establishment; on the left, superdelegates have proved to be a hot-button issue in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Like the NERC, both parties seem to want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to let the people (generally, or of their party) appear to have some input, but they also want to maintain some control over the process.

If there’s one thing that both the saga of Boaty McBoatface and this U.S. primary season will achieve, it will be the raised awareness among citizens and internet-basement-dwellers that sometimes the way that contests are structured matters immensely. Is it enough to have a choice, or is directly choosing the options also required for democratic legitimacy? Needless to say, deciding the scope and limits of democratic legitimacy is and will continue to be a slippery business.

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Does Society Favor Healthy Competitions?

Pollice Verso, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Pollice Verso *oil on canvas *97,4 x 146,6 cm *1872

Joseph Heath’s effort to develop an adversarial ethic for business begins by noting some reasons why competitions―be they in business, in sports, or some other sphere of modern society―are ethically so puzzling. Basically, they are deliberately imposed collective action problems that are specifically designed to disincentivize cooperation and which often permit behavior that would, “. . . in other contexts, typically be regarded as anti-social.” (Heath 359) This sounds like a toxic brew, and it’s easy to see why competitions are often something we want to avoid. What’s puzzling is that, despite these features, many competitions are considered morally permissible and even desirable. But, “. . . why would society want to inflict this peculiar sort of collective action problem upon people?” (362)

Heath suggests an answer. He claims that “. . . the reason that ‘society’ favors competition in certain areas of life has everything to do with the externalities that are generated. The difference between healthy and unhealthy forms of competition is that, in the former case, the external benefits outweigh the losses incurred by the competitors, while in the latter case they do not.” (362)

Curiously, Heath illustrates this distinction by contrasting athletic training with the use of performance enhancing drugs, where the former characterizes healthy competitions and the latter unhealthy ones. He claims that training “. . . usually improves the athlete’s overall health, whereas performance enhancing drugs have serious adverse health effects in the long run.” (362) The reason this is puzzling is that Heath’s distinction between healthy and unhealthy competitions turns on all the externalities these competitions produce, not just their effects on participants. In fact, he explicitly defines positive externalities as “benefits to people other than those directly involved.” And while it’s true that the use of performance enhancing drugs constitutes a net harm for the competitors, whether or not it constitutes a net harm for society at large is anybody’s guess.

The example aside, what about Heath’s claim that society favors competitions on the basis of their externalities? Is this plausible? In my view, no. In fact, I think it’s so implausible that I doubt Heath actually wants to commit himself to it (his project certainly doesn’t require him to do so). But whether or not Heath holds it, this externality-based view is an interesting idea in it’s own right, so it’s worth discussing what’s wrong with it. Here are three problems.

First, there appear to be counterexamples: Gladiatorial combats, jousting, and flower wars were all objects of positive social attitudes in their time, but the huge costs they imposed on their participants and their debasing effect on spectators makes it hard to believe that they constituted healthy competitions in Heath’s sense. Contemporary counterexamples might include hunting, fishing, eating contests, and environmentally destructive economic competitions.

Admittedly, it’s hard to know that these really are counterexamples. That would require identifying all of the relevant externalities and accurately quantifying their value―hardly feasible tasks! But this gets to a more fundamental problem with the externality-based view: Given how difficult it is to determine the aggregate value of competitions’ externalities with any degree of precision, it’s just not plausible that society’s approval could accurately track whether or not they are healthy in Heath’s sense. How could social attitudes reliably gauge the outcome of such a complex calculation?

The third problem arises when the proposal is applied to competitions involving fans and spectators. Probably a substantial share (the bulk?) of the positive externalities generated by these competitions consists of their entertainment value. But to that extent, the claim that society favors competitions with positive externalities seems to get things backwards. It’s not that society favors competitions because they have positive externalities; rather, competitions have positive externalities because society favors them.  In that case, why society favors them remains an open question. I have no idea what the answer is, but I suspect that it’s much more variegated and messy than the externality-based view suggests.

All citations are from Heath’s “An Adversarial Ethic for Business: Or When Sun-Tzu Met the Stakeholder,” Journal of Business Ethics, 72.4 (Jun., 2007).

The Clock Doesn’t Lie:  Gaming, Cheating, and the case of Julie Miller

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Corked Bats. Blood doping. Deflated footballs —after a while, we almost cease to be surprised when another story surfaces of a professional athlete engaging in shady (or outright banned) practices to gain an upper hand in competition. Without excusing such behavior, we might recognize that professional players and programs perhaps face greater temptation to cheat than an average person: after all, millions of dollars are on the line in these professional contests, right? Plus, after finding out that competitors are cheating, players may feel that they too need to cheat in order to stay competitive, resulting in a race to the bottom as a culture of cheating takes hold.

If we were to accept such assumptions about the reasons for cheating in sports, the case of Canadian triathlete Julie Miller would appear all the more bizarre. A recent article in the New York Times details how Miller’s competitors and fellow triathletes used timing data, race photos, and spectator testimony to accuse Miller, who competes in the female 40-44 division of Ironman races, of skipping portions of the 2015 Ironman Canada. Miller apparently has a knack for “losing” her timing chip.

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When competitors and spectators couldn’t recall seeing her during parts of the 2015 race, suspicions were raised, and forum posters at Slowtwitch.com began to conduct an impromptu forensic investigation, CSI-style. Times were compared, stories swapped, photos enhanced. See presentation of evidence here, and the NYT infographic of the course here.

Despite Miller’s claims of innocence, the evidence presented to Ironman officials caused her to be stripped of several past titles and barred indefinitely from competing in future Ironman events. One could say that in the triathlon world, it looks like it is no longer … (puts on sunglasses) … Miller time. (Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaah)

Two things in particular stand out in the case of Miller. First, she was competing in a sport that does not draw huge crowds and offers few (if any) monetary rewards. Many Ironman competitors probably embody the spirit of amateurism in the etymological sense of the word: they compete for the love of the sport. As triathlete Claire Young put it in the NYT article:

“Most of us are essentially racing against ourselves. There’s no money and no glory. It’s just a hobby, and if you cheat, who are you cheating? You’re only cheating yourself.”

Yet the NYT article suggests that Miller still had an important standard to live up to: her image. Miller, a mental health counselor specializing in body-image disorders, had become a hometown hero in her hometown of Squamish, British Columbia:

“Miller had established herself as a minor celebrity in town, an inspirational, warm, sympathetic woman who could apparently handle it all: work, motherhood, training and high-level sports competition.”

The second thing to note is how cutting the course in a triathlon differs in kind from the sports scandals mentioned at the beginning of this post. The use of illicit equipment or banned substances may give an athlete an unfair advantage, but they still require that the athlete actually compete. Miller’s violation was not gaming or rule-bending for unfair advantage, it was downright failure to complete the designated activity. One might call such conduct beyond the pale, or so reprehensible that it seems difficult to defend in any capacity. Unlike other race to the bottom scenarios that cheating might foster, cutting the course seems less likely to inspire other athletes to act similarly: after all, it was Miller’s competitors who called her out.

With Miller out of future contests, the triathlon world can hopefully return to business as usual, i.e., not on the front of the sports section of the New York Times. But Miller’s case might cause us to stop and ponder why it is that people cheat, and what cheating does to the culture of a sport. Her (bad) example might help us to recognize how the desire to maintain our image (or self-image) may tempt us to bend —or flagrantly flout — the rules of the competitions that we supposedly love.

Are European Soccer Matches Won in Stadiums or in Boardrooms?

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Was it a goal or not? This question will forever cause a stir between English and German soccer fans. (Probably less of a stir for English fans since England were awarded the disputed goal in extra time of the 1966 World Cup final in Wembley Stadium: watch the disputed goal here, read about it here.) But this is not the only thing matter of debate between English and German soccer. Germans often complain that English football is just about money, finding a big sponsor, and less about sports and a fair competition.

Whenever we are talking about professional spectator sports there are always two overlapping competitions in play, so to speak. The one we are watching take place on the fields (court, ice, etc.) between the teams, and the one that goes on in the marketplace between rival businesses. The German complaint, in a nutshell, is that English football is driven too much by the pressures of the marketplace, and not enough by what the English fan’s themselves love to call “England’s game.”

In order to promote the sport over the marketplace, the German Bundesliga invented the “50+1 rule”. It says that clubs are allowed to compete in the Bundesliga only if they hold a majority of their own voting rights (50% + at least 1 additional vote; read more about the rule here.) By this rule the “on-field” sporting interests of a club should be protected from the “marketplace” economic interests of its investors. This way, financiers and businesses will be able to gain control over clubs and professional football teams. The Germans believe that this is exactly what has gone wrong with English football. For example, Manchester United is owned by the US-American business-family, Glazer. (You can read about the differences between English and German football policies in this BBC article from 2013.)

What does that mean for the sport? Is the competition in England and elsewhere unfairly manipulated by investors? Is it unfair that some clubs have wealthier or more generous investors than others? Does the German rule make it impossible for smaller teams to compete with the historic giants of the Bundesliga like Bayern Munich? Perhaps finding an investor is just part of the game if you really want to be able to compete on the field. Such are the dilemmas and paradoxes when two fundamentally different kinds of competitions – sports and markets – overlap so completely.

Is life just a competitive game?

In adversarial ethics, we need to be able to differentiate institutions that are adversarial from those that are not. But isn’t competition all around? In any social situation we can imagine there are mutual interests but also competing interests. In some areas like sports, markets, and electoral systems competition is clearly expressed. In others it is not. But that doesn’t mean that it is absent.

There are children competing against each other for the last piece of cake. You may fight against yourself on your daily running track. Even love is a competitive game as ABBA sing in their famous song “The Winner Takes It All”. (Watch the video of the song here.)

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The song tells the story of a jilted woman sadly looking back on a love affair and thinking about the new relationship of her ex. The songwriters used the game-metaphor to illustrate the competition in love. The woman in the song is the loser who is “standing small” and “has to fall”. She is the loser in the game against the woman she lost her boyfriend or husband to but also in the game with or against her boyfriend. There is “no more ace to play” – the game is over. Destiny plays a role in that game, too. It is personified by Gods throwing their dice and thereby deciding about the end of that relationship.

ABBA’s song was about the game of love. We don’t know whether they think all human activities are competitive because, well, they really only ever wrote songs about love. But still, doesn’t it seem plausible to believe that competition somehow plays a role in every situation we can imagine? Aren’t we naturally competitive? Isn’t that the reason why we have ethics and moral standards at all? Joseph Heath quotes Kurt Baier who says that being moral means “following rules designed to overrule self-interest whenever it is in the interest of everyone alike that everyone should set aside his interest”. This means, most ethics are there because we cannot all have what we want. They are used to solve collective action problems.

Sure, in some institutions like markets we try to encourage competitive behavior because people or costumers benefit from that competition. In others like a family we want to suppress it – but it is still around. This difference might be the most important distinction between adversarial and non-adversarial institutions. This means, in non-adversarial contexts (family, love etc.) we try to live by the principles of cooperation and even altruism. In adversarial institutions (markets, elections, sports etc.), however, moral ideals that are relevant in non-adversarial settings are forbidden. For example, cooperation between competitors might lead to price fixing. We justify the abandonment of these ideals in competitions by the benefits for the people who are not competing (the customers). The difference is thus different ethical and moral ideals.

 

On gaming the game

A fan-made video highlighting flagrant fouls on Charlotte Hornets guard Jeremy Lin has been going viral in the U.S., Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From a New York Times article on the video, which you can watch for yourself below:

Piecing together clips of Lin being whacked in the face, clotheslined, bleeding, tumbling to the floor — all without ever drawing a flagrant foul — Kuei tried to convey that Lin, an American-born son of immigrants from Taiwan, was the victim of excessive physicality from opponents and insufficient protection from the league and its referees.

[…]

With its bruising simplicity, it revived questions about the fairness and consistency of officiating in the N.B.A. and led to conversations about latent racial biases. 

Fans of Lin, especially among the Asian community, have interpreted the video as evidence that Lin is being treated unfairly because of his race. I haven’t watched enough of the NBA to know whether this is true, though there does seem to be a pattern of referees not calling fouls on Lin in cases that are pretty clear-cut. Moreover, in the Times article, ESPN reporter Tom Haberstroh notes that “the 813 fouls that Lin had drawn over the past three seasons represented the highest total for a guard — and the third highest number for any position — without a flagrant foul, a particularly hard foul that can lead to an ejection.”

The video raises some interesting questions about buck-passing in unfair games. Suppose his race is a factor, due to referees’ explicit or implicit racial bias. Then, suppose opponents know referees won’t call fouls on them if they overstep their boundaries with Lin, so they take advantage of this fact to play more aggressively with him. This form of gaming the system would seem unsportsmanlike in most contexts, but part of professional sports (if not other leagues) is that playing to win is the dominant, and often overriding, motive for players. Playing to win often requires playing the refs. This is as much a part of the game as any official rule-bound move. For example, the practice of diving in professional soccer is the new normal.

In this context, I’m not sure if players would be wrong to shrug their shoulders and say “Blame the system” while clocking Lin in the face. But compare this to the question of individual responsibility for collectively caused racial problems in everyday life. Surely there’d be something seriously wrong there about passing the buck to “the system” when one could just refuse to play by the rules of an unfair game.

NCAA Bans Satellite Football Camps–Stops a Race to the Bottom

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A few weeks back I wrote a post titled: Michigan’s Harbaugh Rankles SEC Feathers With Spring Practices at Florida High School Recruit Factory. There I discussed how Michigan’s plan to hold spring practices (which have since taken place) at a high school in Florida upset many coaches and fans in the South Eastern Conference (SEC).

Today, the NCAA made a ruling on the use of camps. Mitch Sherman at ESPN writes:

The NCAA has shut down satellite camps, effective immediately, with a ruling Friday by the Division I Council that requires FBS programs to conduct all clinics at school facilities or facilities regularly used for practice or competition.

Satellite camps rose to prominence over the past year as several programs, notably Michigan and others from the Big Ten, conducted camps in the South and regions rich in recruiting prospects.

The ruling Friday is effectively a win for the the SEC and ACC, which had banned their coaches from working camps at destinations outside a 50-mile radius from their schools.

It seems that the NCAA has effectively stopped what may have become a race to the bottom (see my previous post). Perhaps it is also time the governing body addresses the geographic advantage in recruiting enjoyed by the SEC.

 

Congressional Military Oversight: A Trial Without A Judge

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The US Congress holds the constitutional responsibilities of declaring war and raising, equipping, and maintaining the military (clauses: Declare War, Army, Navy, Regulate, Installations). The framers of the constitution intentionally gave the legislature these powers to divide control of the military between it and the executive. They sought to prevent either branch of government from using the fighting force to oppress the people or to engage in wanton war making. In short, they wanted an adversarial structure to the mechanism that controlled the military; an institutional check on military and executive decisions that relate to war and national defense.

To fulfill this constitutional duty, congressional committees frequently hold hearings to investigate ongoing military issues, to learn about strategies being employed, and to hold military leaders accountable for the decisions they make. When done right, congressional oversight can be extremely effective (Truman Committee: here). The Senate Armed Services Committee handles these duties for the Senate.

Unfortunately, committee members frequently use hearings for personal or political advantage. Consider testimony on the Syrian Civil War and the Iraq War:

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On 10/27/2015, Senator Lindsey Graham (above) engaged in an emotional questioning of Secretary of Defense Ash Carter (below) and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford about the ongoing Syrian Civil War. He asked both individuals questions on the US strategy to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Asad from office and in all cases he proceeded to interrupt and answer for the witnesses (video: here). His line of questioning was less about learning and more about criticizing the Obama administration. Despite hearing such as the one shown here, Congress is still yet to authorize the ongoing military operations in Syria and Iraq, consciously choosing not to vote on an Authorization for Use of Military Force.

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On 9/11/07, then Senator Hillary Clinton (Dem) spent 6 minutes giving a speech criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War before ever asking a question. In this speech she essentially accused the witnesses General David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker of lying (video: here; article: here), stating: “Despite what I view is your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today, I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief.” It was later revealed by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that Clinton admitted that she only voted against the surge for political reasons (article: here).

In contrast to Senator Clinton, in the same set of Iraq War hearings Senator John McCain (Rep) asked several softball questions that supported the ongoing Bush-Petraeus surge strategy. McCain was a noted supporter of the surge and his leading questions did very little to probe the war effort or provide any real oversight (video: here; support: here).

Although congressional hearings have a question and answer format reminiscent of a lawyer’s examination of a witness in a courtroom and they are similarly intended to seek some approximation of the truth, there is no equivalent to the judge to keep the questions on track and professional. It’s unfortunate that committee hearings frequently turn political instead of being informative. It’s also easy to understand why witnesses so uniformly hate testifying before Congress.

Alexander Hamilton and the Supreme Court nomination crisis

By now there is (probably) not a single person in the country who remains unaware of the impending, but also already incredibly intense, showdown over President Obama’s nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice to replace Antonin Scalia, who died last month. (Facts: here. Conspiracy theories: here.)

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In justifying their refusal to consider any nominee, many Republicans cited the authority of both precedent and even some vague Senate “rule,” arguments which have since been unmasked as straight up not true. The number and intensity of opinions seems to be growing wilder and fiercer by the day, so I thought I’d one-up Republicans by appealing to an authority even higher than mere precedent or tradition: Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU does a great job explaining in this article (which can be read alternatively as a cross-posting at The Huffington Post if, for some reason, you prefer Arial to Helvetica) how the framers of the Constitution, particularly Hamilton (and Madison), expected situations like this would be handled by future generations.

As its authors note: “Our constitutional system only works if the institutional players adhere in good faith to the Constitution’s basic rules.”

Politics is an appropriately adversarial system; however, it is inappropriate, and even dangerous, to play political games with the basic, constitutive rules of a government. Politicizing the mere maintenance of the fundamental institutions of a system of government risks gutting the framework and crippling the stability of that system.

Confessions of Olympian saboteurs

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I have blogged elsewhere about why I think a contest that does not involve defensive tactics barely qualifies as a sport. Or at any rate, in the aesthetics or connoisseurship of sport, the highest ranking sports are those for which good defensive play and strategy is as satisfying for the spectator as good offense. That’s why most events in the Winter Olympics — ice hockey and curling aside — will never rank highly in my pantheon of great sports. But I digress before I have even started.

When using sports in the service of understanding the ethics of competition in other adversarial realms (law, business, politics, war, etc) it is worth paying attention to the extent to which “defense” is a permissible, or even admirable, feature of the competition. Is it acceptable to try to win by thwarting an opponent’s offensive tactics (the way one does in hockey, American football, or chess)? Or is the competition the kind in which the only permissible winning strategies involve making yourself perform as well as possible (as a sprinter runs as fast as she can, or a pianist competing for a prize plays his heart out, or a law-school applicant presents a dossier with her highest possible grades and test scores, etc)?

Competitions that do not involve “defense” tend to present fewer challenges for adversarial ethics. Competitors can still cheat — by puffing or fabricating their alleged achievements, plagiarizing, bribing judges, using banned performance-enhancing substances (say, cocaine for LSATs). And if such cheating is widespread, or believed by the competitors to be widespread, it is especially problematic in an adversarial realm, because it strongly incentivizes all competitors to cheat. But when there are no opportunities for defensive tactics (a law school applicant has no way to make her rivals look worse — the way a politician, lawyer, or salesperson can), there is less directly adversarial behavior to have to regulate or monitor.

Of course, when competitors find a way to undermine their rivals in a competition that does not permit defensive tactics, that can lead to grave, and often super sleazy, ethical violations. In his seminal paper on this topic, Joe Heath reminds us of the time one figure skater, Tonya Harding, tried to improve her chances for an Olympic medal by having her ex-husband and a hired goon kneecap her main American rival, Nancy Kerrigan, at the US Figure Skating Championships in 1994. There is no playing defense in figure skating. And certainly not that kind. (Harding plead guilty to a felony. The USFSA — figure it out — booted her out for life, citing her “clear disregard for fairness, good sportsmanship and ethical behavior.”)

Teachers who grade on a curve hear similar blood-curdling tales of classmates who hide books in the library, mess up their classmates’ lab experiments, and refuse to cooperate in study groups, so that they can climb over their fellow students and claw their way higher in the curve.

Anyway, all of this is a rather pretentious set-up for a totally low-brow, and misleadingly advertised bit of clickbait from the Onion’s Clickhole entitled

8 Olympic Athletes Tell Us About Their Most Successful Time Sabotaging A Competitor

Put it this way: nobody’s going to jail for any of these revelations. Nobody is going to have to make a living in their post-athletic careers through professional wrestling, celebrity boxing, or selling sex tapes (Harding’s fate). But the concept of “sabotaging a competitor” — especially in adversarial realms that don’t allow any defensive tactics — remains a critical and controversial one in adversarial ethics.

Tonya Harding Defeated By Samantha Browning

MEMPHIS, TN – FEBRUARY 22: Tonya Harding is hit by a right jab from Samantha Browning during their women’s bantamweight bout at The Pyramid on February 22, 2003 in Memphis, Tennessee. Browning won the fight by way of decision after 4 rounds. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

Is the Academy an Adversarial Institution?

The recent wave of student protests against racism have inspired significant opposition by some academics. The protests have prompted the formation of the Heterodox Academy, a “politically diverse” group of social scientists and other academics who are concerned about “the loss of lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’” on campuses.

One reason for this concern is that the liberal views and “PC culture” that are mainstream in universities may lower the quality of research and silence dissenting views, especially in notoriously/proudly leftist fields such as anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Members of the Heterodox Academy, who include prominent members such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, quote Mill’s On Liberty to illustrate their position:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

Philosopher Jason Stanley thinks this position is disingenuous: conservative academics have cried “free speech!” in response to social justice concerns, but have not shown the same zeal for free speech when it comes to pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israeli, or anti-Semitic, depending on your ideology) positions. Moreover, Stanley argues that the opposition between free speech and social justice issues is a false dichotomy. Continue reading

The Most Expensive Honey I’ll Ever Have

I’m a skilled dog whisperer. Given that, I was talking with my dog, Honey, the other day about current events. After she complained to me that she was being cruelly starved (really, is it too much to ask for some lasagna and apple pie in her food bowl, too?), she brought up Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals and his actions concerning a prescription called Daraprim. Honey, the intellectual she is, informed me that Daraprim is the only treatment for humans with a parasite infection but not an immune system strong enough to fight it (an example of such a person would be a cancer patient). The medicine costs mere cents to make and was originally sold for about $13 per pill. So, Honey thought, Turing made excellent profits to begin with. But then hedge fund manager Shkreli increased that price to over $700 per pill, making him and the company exorbitant profits (imagine how many chew toys you could buy with that money!).

So, if a human were in the position that he needed Daraprim, he either needs to empty his pockets or die. So what are the people in this situation going to do? They’re going to pay it, if they can, and otherwise they have to wait on a looming death sentence as they die off slowly. Unfortunately, Honey, commented, humans aren’t as lucky as animals because they can’t be euthanized when death is imminent (an ethical discussion for another day).

So, is there a valid reason for this price inflation of Daraprim? Some people might label it greedy. Heartless, even. It’s one thing to pick on people, but to pick on the feeble and dying? That just seems so much more wrong.

Then Honey brought up a good point – people are enraged by this manipulation, but actually it’s more common than you’d think. Such price gouging already exists in the medicinal market; it’s just that many don’t think twice about it because, legally, it involves property. She was referencing herself, her animal friends and veterinary medicine. Honey and my family know the price of veterinary medicine too well. Honey was diagnosed with cancer about 18 months ago. At the time, my family was given two options: (1) let her die within the next few months or (2) treat the cancer, which could keep her alive for years. That treatment, though, would cost hundreds of dollars per month. It wasn’t a hard decision – Honey made a list of all of the good she brought into my family’s life (how else would we get exercise except for chasing her when she stole undergarments and shoes? who was going to perform the important task of shredding wrapping paper on holidays? how would we fill the silence in the morning without her whining…hem…singing?). My family didn’t need much convincing; we created a budget and started Honey’s treatment immediately.

Honey is an integral part of my family, just as many other pets are to their families. It’s not just us that are willing to go to great lengths for our four-legged friend; thousands go to veterinarians with their pets, diagnosed with life threatening conditions, and are willing to do anything in order to same them, even if it costs them a small fortune. How is this so different from when someone’s grandma is diagnosed with cancer and unable to fight off a parasite except for a prescription that costs an arm and a leg, but pay it anyways because they love her? Why are the market ethics of human medical treatment and animal medical treatment so polarized? They both have to do with living beings. Honey thinks that pet pharmaceutical companies, like Shkreli, bank on that emotional attachment to the lives that the law has so cruelly reduced to property. Why are they allowed to profit off of expensive but necessary medication for pets, but it’s taboo if the profit is a byproduct of expensive human medication? I brought up to Honey they differences between human and animal care, especially research funding and healthcare, but she still thinks that both should be approached, at least morally, from similar positions.

Honey’s story has a happy ending (maybe a better word would be continuance) – my family was able to get her the necessary treatment and she, the champion that she is, managed to beat the cancer into remission. The vet thinks that Honey has a lot of years left in her. We think that more animals should have such chances.

Upon Further Review: Ethical Controversies in Campaigning

Post 3: Bernie Sanders’ “Endorsements”

When and why do pundits, candidates, and campaign staffers cry foul during election season? As I mentioned in my introductory post, this section of the blog will serve as a sort of data collection depository for disagreements about what constitutes fair and unfair play in campaign competitions.

The issue:

Bernie Sanders’ campaign was criticized for running misleading ads in the days before the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries. One ad in particular, titled “Endorsed” (see below), contains excerpts from editorials in Nashua Telegraph and The Valley News praising Sanders. While neither newspaper actually endorsed Sanders, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking otherwise (I highly recommend watching the ad—it’s only thirty seconds long and quite cunning).

The accusation:Trump tweetCarroll, the editor of the Nashua Telegraph, called Sanders’ ad “deceptive.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a “briefing” outlining Sanders’ alleged habit of using misinformation. Without explicitly accusing him of unethical behavior, one of her ads on Sanders closes with the question, “Why is Bernie Sanders misleading voters?” A Newsweek piece titled “Advocacy Groups Call Foul on Sanders Campaign in Iowa, Nevada,” reports that some have accused the Sanders campaign of “playing dirty.”

The accused’s response:

During a recent debate, Sanders addressed the accusations (sort of). He said, “As I understand it we did not suggest that we had the endorsement of the newspaper. Newspapers who make endorsements also say positive things about other candidates and to the best of knowledge that is what we did. So we never said, that somebody a newspaper endorsed us that did not. What we did say is, blah, blah, blah, blah was said by the newspaper.”

Categorization:

Nobody claimed the ads were illegal. Like the Cruz mailers (a controversy I examined in an earlier post), the ads also don’t appear to be a violation of everyday moral norms. And though technically not false, the ads (especially the “Endorsed” ad) are clearly misleading—something Sanders never explicitly denied. That leaves us with unfair play. While not illegal or an egregious display of personal immorality, critics appear to believe that the Sanders campaign was ‘playing dirty.’

Other relevant information:

Interestingly, few, if any, pundits (that I know of) have questioned Sanders’ personal integrity in the wake of these controversies. In contrast, many attacked Cruz’s personal integrity after his campaign engaged in similar ‘dirty’ tactics.

No Longer a Bench Player: A Decade Later, Justice Thomas Gets in the Game

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As was widely reported, yesterday marked the first time in just over a decade that Justice Thomas asked a question during oral arguments. Thomas’s questions came about during oral arguments in the case of Voisine v. United States, in which the legal questions are, first, whether a misdemeanor crime with the mens rea of recklessness qualifies as a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” as defined by 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(33)(A) and 922(g)(9); and second, whether 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(33)(A) and 922(g)(9) are unconstitutional under the Second, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments and the Ex Post Facto Clause of the United States Constitution. Thomas directed questions to the Justice Department’s lawyer, Illana Eisenstein, about whether there were other areas “where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right.”

From an adversarial ethics perspective, the questions from Justice Thomas during oral argument signal a significant shift in his view of the proper role of the justices—or, at least his own role—in Supreme Court cases. For one, Thomas has previously said he frequently relies on the written briefs and therefore does not see a need to ask questions of the lawyers appearing before the Court. At other times, he has cited respectfulness to the lawyers and the propriety of not interrupting them. Thomas once mused that, “Maybe it’s the Southerner in me. Maybe it’s the introvert in me, I don’t know. I think that when somebody’s talking, somebody ought to listen.”

In general, however, it seemed he believed that the adversarial process should involve the parties to the case making arguments to the Court—not the Court engaging in arguments with the parties. Thomas has long held that, basically, Supreme Court litigation is adversarial enough without the justices adding to the hostility. At the very least, Thomas has believed that they ought not to “badger people.”

Perhaps Justice Thomas, following Justice Scalia’s death earlier this month, feels that the new makeup of the Court gives the more liberal justices an unfair advantage to pick the winners and losers in cases if he remains silent. Though he might think the justices should be rather more like impartial referees than active participants in litigation, his role as a just another warm body at the end of the bench might be over for good.

On Monday, Justice Thomas was a player.

Things fall apart: Williams v. Pennsylvania and judicial conflicts of interest

It seems self-evident that no person should be permitted to judge a case in which they have an interest, but our laws do not yet reflect this principle clearly, if at all. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU recently published this article about a capital case—Williams v. Pennsylvania—in which conflict of interest has had a leading role.

This is a particularly timely article because the U.S. Supreme Court—narrowly divided on this issue several times in the past, though now more evenly so with the recent passing of Justice Scalia—heard oral arguments in this case yesterday, February 29th. (Transcripts and recordings of the oral arguments will be available here by March 5th.)

What is important for us to note is that, at issue are not disputes over guilt or innocence, but rather whether the fundamental concept of procedural justice has been tainted by a judge’s conflict of interest; and what kind of threat that would pose to both the perception and reality of justice and fairness in our legal system.

As the article notes, we all have the right to a fair trail before an impartial judge; yet

Mr. Williams was denied that right, by any reasonable reckoning, when Pennsylvania’s Chief Justice, Ronald Castille, who is now retired, declined to recuse himself in a 2014 ruling by his court upholding Mr. Williams’ death sentence, notwithstanding an astonishing conflict: He personally approved and oversaw Mr. Williams’ prosecution and post-trial defense of the death verdict in his earlier role as Philadelphia’s district attorney.

 

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“You look familiar. Have I prosecuted you somewhere before?”

Our legal system is necessarily, and fortunately, adversarial; and removing that adversarial component from this case puts the integrity of the entire system at risk.

Lawyers are to argue their client’s case competently, perhaps even very aggressively, and an impartial magistrate is to judge the proper course of action after listening to and considering both sides. But what might we expect to happen if one of those lawyers were to become the “impartial” judge of the case at a later stage of the trial and then refuse to recuse himself? (Spoiler alert: objectively bad things, many of which are certainly immediately apparent to the reader even as pure hypotheticals.)

Upon Further Review: Ethical Controversies in Campaigning

Post 2: 199 and Counting: Donald Trump’s Insults

When and why do pundits, candidates, and campaign staffers cry foul during election season? As I mentioned in my introductory post, this section of the blog will serve as a sort of data-collection depository for disagreements about what constitutes fair and unfair play in campaign competitions.

The issue:

At this point, most are likely familiar with Donald Trump’s propensity to personally insult his opponents. The New York Times even keeps a running tally of his insulting tweets (he currently sits at 199). Trump tweet

The accusation:

Some argue Trump’s incessant personal attacks are undignified and dishonorable; “Trump has no sense of personal honor. None.” Others claim that his “raunchy language” lack of “basic decency” and “is ill suited to the nation’s highest office.” David Brooks suggests that “Trump’s bashing style of rhetoric makes communication impossible.” Trump’s style of speech doesn’t bode well for democratic governance, Brooks continues, because it forecloses the possibility of compromise and cooperation. Still others contend that his insults are troubling because they inspire Trump’s online followers to harass and intimidate his ‘enemies.’

The accused’s response:

Last fall in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Trump said: “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either” (see here for the full quote). More recently, Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski asked (rhetorically), “When someone attacks [Trump], should he just not respond? That’s not fair.”

Categorization:

Because of the sheer amount of commentary on all things Trump, it is difficult to definitively categorize critics’ objections to Trump’s actions. That said, some common themes emerge in many of the reactions to his repeated resorts to personal insults. As noted above, pundits (and rival candidates) have accused Trump of being an undignified or dishonorable person. Brooks’ claim is slightly different; he seems to be more concerned that Trump’s habit of personally insulting his opponents makes governing (after elections) impossible. Either way, few have criticized Trump of playing the game unfairly (e.g. bending the rules or cheating). And nobody has accused him of acting illegally by insulting his opponents. Thus, most objecting to Trump’s action accuse him of personal (im)morality in general, and dishonorable behavior in particular.

Other relevant information:

I have specifically avoided discussing some of Trump’s (and his rivals’) more inflammatory ‘policy proposals,’ here. I intend to address the ethics of those controversial comments (e.g. carpet bombing, the use of torture, name-calling of particular groups, etc.) in another post.

Michigan’s Harbaugh Rankles SEC Feathers With Spring Practices at Florida High School Recruit Factory

It’s an understatement to say that college football is a competitive game-both on and off the field. For big football schools like Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia, a successful school year includes a conference championship (or better) and plenty of revenue.

Coaches spend inordinate amounts of time and money recruiting top-tier high school players to ensure they can compete at the highest levels year after year. And typically, schools do their best recruiting relatively close to home. This tends to help the programs of the South Eastern Conference that are located in some of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the nation.

The NCAA attempts to regulate college football recruiting to ensure schools do not become disruptive to high school students and to maintain the illusion of a level playing field between big and small schools (guideline & calendar). The period in which Michigan plans to have practices in Florida is considered a “quiet period” for recruiting, meaning coaches can only have face-to-face contact with college-bound recruits on their own college campuses. The NCAA also only regulates the length and frequency of spring practices, not their locations.

Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh recently sought and received approval from the NCAA and the Big Ten to conduct spring practices at an elite Florida football high school, IMG Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. This is not the first time the school has conducted “satellite” camps, either. Last year Michigan conducted 11 satellite camps in 7 different states.

SEC coaches strongly dislike this trend:

Nick Saban of Alabama:

Jim McElwain of Florida:

Hugh Freeze of Ole Miss:

Brett Bielema of Arkansas:

And Kirby Smart of Georgia:

“(The Wolverines are) obviously trying to gain a competitive advantage, and that’s their right,” said Smart, who took over the UGA program in December and served as Nick Saban’s defensive coordinator at Alabama the previous eight seasons (2008-15). “But I think the NCAA, in due time, will have to step in.”

Jim Harbaugh responded quickly to Kirby Smart’s comments, stating:

The NCAA recruiting rules exist for a reason. Without them, large universities with lots of money would seek even more elaborate ways to woo the talented high school students they wish to sign. The more money and effort pumped into recruiting, the less effective it would become as all other schools sought to do the same. Eventually, all of the major schools would be spending (even more) massive amounts of time and money for arguably little improvement in recruiting (not to mention the growing distraction to the high school students). Professor Joseph Heath labels this type of behavior a race to the bottom: “in which each individual, responding to the actions of the others, generates an outcome that is successively worse, but where each iteration of the interaction only intensifies their incentive to act in the same way.”

The NCAA rules help the big schools overcome a collective action problem. These schools have come to a collective agreement about the rules of recruiting to prevent the very race to the bottom that Harbaugh may reignite.

The SEC commissioner is currently seeking to block Harbaugh’s plans through appeals to the NCAA about college players’ “off-time”; if that effort fails, discussions about changing the SEC prohibitions on these so-called “satellite” camps may soon follow. If Harbaugh wants a recruiting war, I’m sure the SEC football programs would be more than willing and able to outspend him in prime southeastern recruiting territory.

So who is right? The SEC coaches who own a distinct geographic advantage on fertile recruiting ground? Or is it Coach Harbaugh who is most likely realizing improved exposure to key recruits by practicing in “warmer weather?”

Harbaugh may not be breaking the letter of the law, but he is pushing the spirit of it. Being a Georgia football fan who has long supported Georgia’s recently started indoor practice facility construction, I’ll remind the readers that Michigan has one of these:

Athletics, Dave Ablauf

“Reasonable disagreement” v. “beyond the pale”

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Isak has begun a series of posts on this blog under the rubric “Upon Further Review.” He explains this project of gathering and analyzing the allegations of “fouls” on the campaign trail this winter and spring on the Presidential campaign trail here, and he continues here (and elsewhere “above” this post in the near future, no doubt). His rubric borrows the language of video-replay officials in American football, and other sports, who take a slow-motion second look at calls they used to be able to make only on the fly.

Canada went through its own federal election in the fall of 2015, and in later stages of that election the then-governing Conservative Party was accused of “playing the race card” — albeit in coded language that might appear almost quaint when compared to the game played by the current frontrunner in the Republican primaries. (I say almost, because it would not have appeared quaint to those whom these Conservative tactics were attempting to stigmatize.) And when they did play the card, Canada’s leading political philosopher, Joe Heath (University of Toronto), called them on it in this post on his blog In Due Course.

Those tracking the US campaign these days should find plenty of useful analysis in Heath’s post: from an excellent summary on why democracies thrive on “reasonable disagreements,” to how we decide when certain tactics that exploit unreasonable disagreements must be considered “beyond the pale.” The cartoon below captures some of Heath’s argument for why certain ways of playing the game of politics fall short of our minimal standards of “political sportsmanship.” (For those unfamiliar, a “niqab” is what the hockey player in the cartoon at the head of this post is wearing.)

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Heath begins like this:

One of the most important concepts in modern democratic politics is that of “reasonable disagreement.” There are a number of different principles or values that most of us subscribe to, at some level, but in cases where they conflict, it is not entirely obvious how they should be ordered. When should public welfare be assigned priority over personal freedom? How much loss of welfare should be accepted in order to promote greater equality? These are the sorts of questions that define the zone of reasonable disagreement in modern politics. The central distinguishing feature of the right-to-left spectrum of political parties is that they propose different answers to these questions, with the right putting more emphasis on personal freedom, the left more emphasis on equality, and the centre focusing on maximizing welfare. This naturally translates into different views about the role of government in society.

The disagreement is “reasonable” because the underlying principles are ones that are very broadly accepted – they are in fact foundational for a liberal democratic society – the disagreement is more one of emphasis.

And ends like this:

…after Friday’s press conference, I can no longer regard it as morally acceptable for anyone to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada. A week ago, I could still persuade myself that reasonable people could disagree over how to vote in this election, but no longer.

As they say on the sites that troll followers with clickbait: you won’t believe what those mild-mannered Canadian Conservative politicians said during that press conference last fall. But seriously: if you’re looking for guidance on how a committed Republican should vote if Donald Trump is the GOP’s nominee, click into Heath’s post.

Upon Further Review: Ethical Controversies in Campaigning

Post 1: VOTING VIOLATION and the Cruz Campaign Mailers

When and why do pundits, candidates, and campaign staffers cry foul during election season? As I mentioned in my introductory post, this section of the blog will serve as a sort of data collection depository for disagreements about what counts as fair play in campaign competitions.

The issue:

In recent days, many have accused the Cruz campaign of using “dirty tricks” during his presidential campaign (you can watch Seth Meyers’ Late Night segment on Cruz for a more entertaining rundown of some of his ‘tricks’). While Cruz has provided those of us interested in campaign ethics with an abundance of material to examine, I want to focus on one particular (and lesser known but perhaps more interesting) controversy that Cruz was forced to address in the past month.

Iowans (and a handful of pundit) were upset about the mailers distributed by Cruz staffers insinuating that potential caucus goers’ participation rates would be publicized. In hopes of increasing turnout, Cruz (presumably) sent these notices—which can be seen in the image below—to those his campaign thought would be likely to support him in the caucuses (a strategy that seems to have backfired in the case Tom Hinkelday).

 

Cruz Mailer

The accusation:

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate condemned Cruz’s tactic because “it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.” Iowa Governor Terry Brandstad called the mailers “unethical and unfair.”

The accused’s response:

After criticism about the misleading mailers, Cruz said: “I will apologize to no one for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote.”

Categorization:

After the mailers made headlines, the Cruz campaign was accused of dishonesty by some and outright fraud (but not illegality) by others. As noted above, Pate and Brandstad argued that Cruz was violating the spirit of the competition. Almost all agreed that the mailers were legal (in fact, Donald Trump deleted a tweet where he stated that they were illegal). And though some accused Cruz of personal immorality following the mailer controversy, his campaign was usually criticized on the grounds that it circumvented the rules of the political game by sending the mailers. Moreover, Cruz himself did not deny that the mailers were deceptive and manipulative (perhaps implicitly acknowledging that, in his view, deception and manipulation have a place in campaigning). All things considered, both Cruz and his critics appear to believe that one’s ethical judgment about the mailers were depends on how one understands the rules of the game. In short, this ethical controversy is about fair play more than personal morality or legality.

Other possibly relevant information:

These mailers have been distributed in previous campaigns with little or no fanfare. Why did this controversy make headlines? Some have argued that this particular mailer was worse than others because assigned letter grades (which usually happened to be an “F”) next to the names of individuals. Others have stated that it looks much more like an official state document than previous mailers. While it seems as though the mailers are now generally taken to be more evidence that Cruz is personally untrustworthy (which, as many have pointed out, is ironic considering he usually speaks in front of ‘TrusTED’ banner), that didn’t seem to be the case, initially.

“Kasich — are you still here?”

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Presidential Primaries are a game. So here’s some more elementary game theory — on the game known technically as “chicken” — to predict the Rubio-v.-Kasich endgame. This is brought to you by the brilliant graphics editor at The New York Times, Kevin Quealy. Here’s the conclusion:

The chance to be your party’s nominee for president comes along only every four or eight years, even for the very luckiest candidates. If the candidates lived in a universe in which they could run for president hundreds of times, they might agree that, on average, their shared interests were better served by cooperating. Once in a while, Mr. Kasich might try to win the contest outright against long odds, but, on average, he would probably agree that cooperating, including alternating victories, was the best way to serve his and Mr. Rubio’s shared interests. Game theory shows that initerated dilemmas, played many hundreds or thousands of times, cooperation is a very stable strategy — one reason it is so common in nature.

But this is not an iterated dilemma. It’s a one-time-only dilemma with a tremendous payoff for the winner. As much as Mr. Kasich might think about his legacy, the good of the party or even his own chances in 2020 or 2024, the future is very far away.

Ultimately, they risk an outcome neither he nor Mr. Rubio wants. As Daniel Diermeier, the dean of the public policy school at the University of Chicago, notes, “A very important lesson of game theory is that sometimes the world is a grim place.”

Then again, the Presidential Primaries aren’t just a game….

Mr Corbyn and parliamentary bloodsports

corbyn kinder

We count democratic politics on this blog as one of the Big Archetypical deliberately adversarial institutions. Power in the state is not given to a person or group who is carefully determined to be able to use it to run the most just government. It is given to the winners of a highly regulated — and also ritualized — contest; otherwise known as an election.

It is easy for us to see and feel the “game” of politics during elections. In America right now we are consumed by it, and it is covered by the news media in almost exactly the same way the sports media covers professional and college sports leagues. But elections are only part of the game of democratic politics. The next most visible political competition happens openly in legislative assemblies, and then in the maneuverings — partly public, but often in “back rooms” — that precede the debates and votes that take place in the legislatures.

One of the principal complaints about the legislative game, from the point of view of adversarial ethics, is that it has become in the US a so-called “permanent campaign” — legislators between elections are primarily concerned about what they can do (or avoid doing) in the legislature in order to win the next election. If they ever care the slightest about the design and justice of policies, bills, and laws, it is only insofar as public perceptions about these things will influence the next election. (See the criticisms of Mitch McConnell discussed here a few days ago.) This is the heart of the satire in the greatest just-slightly-fictional political comedy ever, the BBC’s Yes Minister (and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister), not to mention the now-sharked House of Cards.

This post, however, is less about the “permanent campaign” than about a much more visible manifestation of politics-as-sport (even bloodsport, on occasion). Every legislature has its own written and unwritten rule, conventions, and rituals of debate. And no legislature has had more time to develop these than the British House of Commons, where the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition debate face-t0-face on an almost weekly basis. It you were designing from scratch the rules by which a deliberative body would be most likely to develop and enact sensible legislation (what political philosophers do when they theorize about “deliberative democracy“) you would not end up with something like the House of Commons. To say nothing of the House of Lords or the Monarchy.

That said, in the UK, it is what it is. All MPs know the rules, written and unwritten. For example, they never address each other directly, but carry on the debate as if everyone were trying to convince the Speaker. Although outsiders may be aghast at the seemingly buffoonish behavior of British MPs in the House, the MPs themselves are expected to know how to deal with it if they are to have any chance of “winning” the day during Question Period.

Which brings us to the clip-of-the-day in my Facebook newsfeed. Comments on Facebook and Twitter from many of my American friends and friends-of-friends suggests they don’t really know how British politicians, especially the PM and the Leader of the Opposition, are expected to play this game. What is obvious, however, is that virtually every MP on both sides of the isle knows who won and who lost this round.

I see that many British commentators (well, some of my British Facebook friends, at any rate) have all sorts of sinister explanations for the irrepressible smiles of Jeremy Corbyn‘s colleague Andy Burnham, the Shadow Home Secretary, seated behind Corbyn, on his left. I am too ignorant of Labour Party intrigue to psychoanalyze him from this clip alone. It seems to me that Burnham knows the rules of the game, knows that his leader has just been blown up by his own pompously lobbed petard, and done so because of the kind of quick wit one usually sees only on scripted shows like Jon Stewart’s old Daily Show. Burnham seems to be tipping his hat for a move well played by his opponents. Normally, that is one of the hallmarks of good sportsmanship. Corbyn’s inability to do the same, and to immediately change course and attempt to seize rhetorical advantage in a way he had not planned, is also a sign that he either does not understand the game he is playing during Prime Minister’s Questions or, more likely, that his game as a parliamentarian is just not that good.

 

Constructive Game-Over and What Makes Brannen Greene’s Dunk a “Dick Move”

 

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A few weeks ago, Kansas University men’s basketball player Brannen Greene dunked the basketball just before time expired in a contest against rival Kansas State.

Before the dunk, the KU Jayhawks were winning by 16.

(You can watch it here.)

KU head coach Bill Self called it “totally classless” and “probably the biggest dick move I’ve ever had a player do during a game.

Other commentators note that “anyone who plays this game understands that you don’t do that when you’re up 16.”

Clearly, Greene violated a norm of basketball etiquette. There is no rule that says you cannot dunk at the end of games, so Greene was technically within the rules. But why does that norm—don’t dunk at the end of a blowout if you’re winning—exist?

The most likely explanation is probably that offered by Myron Medcalf—that when your team is up by 16 with a few seconds left, “the game is over.” Though not technically true, since the game is not officially over until the time is completely expired, underlying what Medcalf points out is that there are situations (like when your team is up 16 with a few seconds to play) where an adversarial athletic contest is constructively over because the final outcome of the contest cannot reasonably be doubted.

Greene knew, or should have known, that the game was constructively over before he dunked the ball.

When the game is over, we expect the competitors to realize that what constitutes proper (or perhaps “ethical”) behavior is no longer subject to the norms of competition. Before and after the contest, socially appropriate behavior is governed by ordinary conceptions of virtue. Ordinarily, we expect the persons who play basketball to have respect for others in a non-adversarial way, which may include being sensitive to the feelings of the players on the other team—or at least not purposely inflicting emotional distress upon a former adversary.

Simply put, we have different expectations for the actions of basketball players playing basketball compared to persons who play basketball. As Joseph Heath has (in my view, persuasively) argued, “the competitive environment licenses a greater range of ‘self-interested’ behavior.” However, choosing to remain in an adversarial role—remaining a basketball player rather than resuming life as a person who plays basketball—when the contest is constructively over is to abuse that limited license. At bottom, we regard as at least unsportsmanlike the choice to act as an adversary even when you are no longer engaged in competition.

And that choice is a dick move.

Upon Further Review: Ethical Controversies in Campaigning

Post One: Introduction

Like the NFL’s attempts to determine what counts as a catch, this year’s primary contests have been marked by disagreement about what constitutes ethical behavior in campaign competitions. To cite a few prominent recent examples:

At first glance, the negative reactions to these developments are not particularly surprising; all this behavior seems intuitively wrong, at least in the context of everyday morality. Yet there have been other instances of candidates engaging in actions that one would usually frown if witnessed in daily life that that were not met with outrage and controversy. For example:

So what’s the difference? Why do we censure some actions while accepting others as part of the rough and tumble nature of the political game? In other words, what ethical criterion or moral framework does one use to determine the moral ‘wrongness’ of any candidate’s actions? Is it (il)legality of the act? Is the behavior judged in light conventional norms of interpersonal interactions (e.g. lies and insults are generally frowned upon)? Or, are actions judged by something else entirely—like the ‘spirit’ of the competition?

While I eventually intend to develop an empirically informed answer to these questions, this blog will serve as a sort of data collection depository for disagreements about what constitutes fair play in the campaign game. More concretely, I will use it to list and categorize (e.g. take note of the justifications provided by both the accused and accuser) some of the ethical controversies that arise during this election season. I suspect some patterns will emerge and I hope that they will help us make begin to make sense of the ‘inner morality’ of elections and campaigns.

Finally, I should note that I am not interested in making judgments about the morality of any particular action, here. One can find a wide variety of opinions both defending and criticizing a candidate’s behavior, regardless of how outrageous or offensive it might be, elsewhere. Thus, I’ll usually refrain from weighing in on any controversy in the interest of uncovering what others think it means to compete fairly during campaign season.

Democracy for a race of Mitch McConnells

Immanuel_Kant_(painted_portrait)Immanuel Kant famously believed that “the problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.” These rational devils will realize that they need well designed and enforced laws for their own self-preservation, even though each “is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them.” So they need “to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such evil intentions.”

In short, in this essay Perpetual Peace, published about 30 years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Kant was optimistic that with a well designed constitution, something like an Invisible Hand (and sometimes, surely, a visible foot) could turn opportunistic political behavior into responsible, statesmanlike, governance.

Of course, this is all probably irrelevant for those following the current election cycle in the US. Kant thought that cleverly designed rules for the game could handle greed. But all bets are off if either the devils running for office, or those whose votes they are courting, lack intelligence, understanding, or rationality. So, well, all bets are off then.

A time-traveling Kant would nonetheless be intrigued by the political biography of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. At least, if the account developed by Alec MacGillis, author of The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, tracks the truth. In his recent attempt in The New York Times to explain McConnell’s tactics for the game of selecting and approving the appointment of a new justice to the Supreme Court, MacGillis portrays the Senate majority leader as exactly the kind of intelligent devil Kant had in mind.

The best way to understand Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. has been to recognize that he is not a conservative ideologue, but rather the epitome of the permanent campaign of Washington: What matters most isn’t so much what you do in office, but if you can win again.

As an aspiring young Republican — first, a Senate and Ford administration staff member and then county executive in Louisville — Mr. McConnell leaned to the moderate wing of his party on abortion rights, civil rights and many other issues. It was only when he ran for statewide office, for the Senate in 1984, that he began to really tack right. Mr. McConnell won by a razor-thin margin in a year when Ronald Reagan handily won Kentucky. The lesson was clear: He needed to move closer to Reagan, which he promptly did upon arriving in Washington.

From that point on, the priority was winning every six years and, once he’d made his way up the ranks of leadership, holding a Republican majority. In 1996, that meant voting for a minimum-wage increase to defuse a potential Democratic talking point in his re-election campaign. In 2006, as George W. Bush wrote in his memoir, it meant asking the president if he could start withdrawing troops from Iraq to improve the Republicans’ chance of keeping the Senate that fall, when Mr. McConnell was set to become its leader.

A year later, it meant ducking out of the intense debate on the Senate floor about immigration reform to avoid making himself vulnerable on the issue. It is no accident that the legislative issue Mr. McConnell has become most identified with, weakening campaign finance regulations, is one that pertains directly to elections.

This is also the best way to understand Mr. McConnell’s staunch opposition to the president: It is less about blocking liberal policy goals than about boosting Republican chances.

MacGillis concedes that McConnell’s tactical obstructionism has been successful on its own terms:

The resistance from Mr. McConnell has had an enormous influence on the shape of Obama’s presidency. It has limited the president’s accomplishments and denied him the mantle of the postpartisan unifier he sought back in 2008.

But the game isn’t over yet, and McGillis wonders whether McConnell has overplayed his hand in the aftermath of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

This blog does not really have a dog in that fight. We’re interested more in the concepts and categories we use to think through issues than we are (at least within this blog) in the political conclusions they lead to. My interest in McGillis’s portrait of McConnell is about the viability of Kant’s constitutional optimism. Some deliberately adversarial institutions — like Wimbledon tennis matches, courtroom law, markets without dangerously exploitable market failures — can licence the players to pursue their own interests in a contest with well designed rules and close monitoring for compliance. In these cases those outside “the game” will benefit even if the “players” care only about their own interests.

But can we possibly expect a modern democracy to work well, and justly, if the players vying for, and holding, office are all rational devils? Do the US Constitution and other defining features of the political infrastructure (such as the Federal Election Commission and the 50 different states’ laws for drawing up federal constituencies and voter-eligibility rules) constitute the kinds of rules that will, as Kant put it, convert selfish or evil private intentions into virtuous public conduct?

Even Mitch McConnell (thought not perhaps Francis Underwood) would surely agree that the answer to these questions is No. When this blog ponders politics, it will generally be to explore  “why not?” or “where, then, from here?”

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Are student athletes more successful in life?

gallup coverAccording to a huge recent survey conducted by Gallup, student athletes beat their non-athletic former classmates at the game of life-after-college.

Former student-athletes who received a bachelor’s degree between 1970 and 2014 are leading other college graduates in four out of five elements of well-being that Gallup studied. These former student athletes are more likely than non-student-athletes to be thriving in purpose, social, community and physical well-being. In the element of financial well-being, former student-athletes are just as likely to be thriving as their non-student-athlete peers

For those interested in methodology — and who isn’t? — the survey and the correlations it finds, are pretty credible, as far as these things go:

Results for the Gallup-Purdue Index, which the study used for comparison purposes, are based on Web surveys conducted Feb. 4-March 7, 2014, with a random sample of 29,560 respondents with a bachelor’s degree, aged 18 and older, with Internet access, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. These respondents included 1,670 former NCAA student-athletes. The Gallup-Purdue Index sample was compiled from two sources: the Gallup Panel and the Gallup Daily tracking survey.

Of course, these results are merely correlations. We cannot infer from correlations alone the direction of causation: did participation in athletics improve students’ life skills and well-being, or do the kinds of students who go in for athletics already have those skills to a greater degree than other students? Or is it, as NCAA researcher Tom Paskus argues, a little bit of both?

This kind of data may be relevant nonetheless for deeper philosophical debates about the nature of the good life. Some find competitiveness, and the need or desire to express oneself in zero-sum competitions where your winning means someone else loses, as an inherently less desirable character trait, disposition, or way of living. At the very least, this survey suggests that a very intense period of competition in sports during a person’s formative years (a college athlete will have had sports as their major non-scholastic activity from their pre-teen years until their early 20s) does not make them a worse, less happy, or less successful person afterward.

Check out the more detailed results by asking for the report in pdf form from Gallup at the link above. Or check out the summary in this article Money magazine.

 

 

Gaming the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice

This blog is about to wake up big-time: there’s a new seminar on Adversarial Ethics at Duke full of eager bloggers — and it’s election season in the US. The neverending Presidential-election season provides us not only with a hyperactive example of one of the classic “deliberately adversarial institutions,” namely electoral politics. But it has a tendency to suck almost every other institution, including many that are not supposed to be adversarial or partisan, into its flames.

Exhibit A: the selection of a new justice to sit on the putative non-partisan Supreme Court.

There is not a single political commentator or politician who has not already weighed in on what the President and the members of the Senate ought to do now that Antonin Scalia’s sudden death has opened up a new seat on the bench. Richard Lempert‘s post over at The Brooking Institution’s Fixgov blog does a nice job of mapping out the likely scenarios in the language of game theory.

Assuming — kind of big assumption, no doubt — that the President (who is constitutionally required to nominate a new justice when there is a vacancy) and all of the Senators (who must confirm the nomination) are all rational, well informed, and intelligent, game theory should help us to predict what they are likely to do, given their divergent interests and options. I won’t rehearse them here. Lempert’s post is here.

The Supreme Court is a striking example of a kind of paradox or contradiction we see in many quintessentially non-adversarial institutions. The Court itself, and the role the justices have, is supposed to be strictly non-partisan. When they vote on a decision or opinion, the justices are supposed to interpret the law. They are not supposed to be supporting a cause or political movement they sympathize with, nor are they to base their votes and arguments on their own principles. And yet swirling around the Court are tornadoes of partisanship:

  • we know — because psychology — that each justice’s attempts to provide “strictly legal” interpretations of law and the Constitution are influenced in conscious and unconscious ways by values that are hotly contested in the political sphere;
  • for this reason, the nomination process we are seeing now involves high political stakes for the elected politicians who get a say;
  • many of the Court’s decisions have huge implications for the actors in other deliberately adversarial institutions — from those involved in electoral politics to corporations and their stakeholders in the marketplace, and even for sports leagues and athletes;
  • and last but not least, as a Court atop the adversarial legal system, the justices preside over a contest played out between lawyers who are committed to making any argument that will help their client’s interests in the cases at hand.

new yorker scotus ping pong

 

But the Court and the justices themselves are supposed to have the role of a neutral umpire, with no personal interests in any given case, calling strikes and balls as she sees them.

In principle.

Lempert finishes his post with the following reflections of this intriguing “game” we are now watching:

It is interesting to treat the contest between Obama and the Republicans as a game, and to think about the best strategies for each, and how the moves of one might affect the choices of the other. Yet we are not talking about a game. We are talking about consequential political choices that could change the direction of the law in this country for a generation. Voting rights, money in politics, access to abortion providers, environmental regulation, and much more could turn in the short run on the choice of Scalia’s replacement, although in the longer run there are enough aging Justices that the next presidential election is likely to be more consequential. Now it appears the long and short term outcomes may turn out to be intertwined, for the fate of Obama’s nominee may influence what happens in the election. The “game” being played by Obama and the Republican Senate is, however, one that we, the people, can only watch, though we are permitted to root for our favorite team.

It doesn’t hurt that Justice Scalia’s death set the contest in motion during that lull in the American sporting calendar between the Super Bowl and March Madness….

Some of my favourite people are hacks

Hello, readers. I’m Alex DeForge, a philosophy PhD student at Duke University. I’ve spent a number of years working with non-profits, legal advocacy groups, labour unions, and political parties, so I feel somewhat justified in subjecting you to my commentary on these matters. I’ll be posting here from time to time.

A disclaimer on the following post: I have never worked for a politician that I thought was a hack. Needless to say, I haven’t worked for many politicians.


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       “Who are all these fuckin’… who are these hacks man?”

                   —  Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson,

                         City Council Meeting, July 8th, 2010

Yes, it was inappropriate for a Mayor to say this at a city council meeting, even if he didn’t realize his mike was still onRobertson apologizedHowever, for those of us that are not elected officials, this is often the right question to be asking when assessing our politicians. 

The urban dictionary says that a hack is “a person who is a professional at doing some sort of service, but does crappy work.” So, to determine if a politician is a hack, we have to determine what their job is and whether they are crappy at it.

In a democracy, politicians ply their trade in a deliberately adversarial arena. Joe Heath’s paper, an “An Adversarial Ethic for Business, outlines how in adversarial institutions, we can distinguish competitors’ goals within the competition from the aims of the competition. Applied to elections, our politicians are supposed to campaign with the goal of winning enough votes to be elected to legislative assembly — even though democratic elections themselves aim to select the best representatives of our interests for the purpose of making good social policy. However, after elections, our politicians are supposed to actually govern, which is to do the job of representing their constituents’ interests to create policy and law to serves those interests.

Politicians are supposed to try to win elections and to make good legislation. But because they need to do the first to be selected to do the second, our democratic system can reward tactics that are great for winning elections and terrible for making just legislation. And there is nothing in the structure of our democratic elections that stops us from electing politicians who are just really good at campaigning but crappy at governing.

We see graphs like this that represent senators’ tendencies toward disagreement over legislation. Sure, it might be the case that they are simply representing constituents’ increasingly polarized interests. Regardless, this sort of disagreement makes it difficult to get bills passed. So, even if our elected officials were voting to represent constituents’ interests, they could still be doing a crappy job of creating social policy.

Maybe I have been a little hard on our politicians. Do I think that all politicians are hacks? No. Some of my favourite people are politicians. 

But in all seriousness — a lot of them are hacks. 

 To be clear, I’m not claiming that all politicians are crappy at every aspect of their jobs. In fact, they seem to be very good at campaigning to win elections. What many of them are not good at, and maybe don’t even care about, is doing the “people’s work” that we supposedly elect them to do. It’s this failure that should lead us to ask, “who are these hacks man?”

Let’s revisit the Vancouver Mayor. Back in 2010, the Mayor’s center-left party, Vision, was part of an official coalition with the city’s far-left party, COPE. Vision realized that if they cooperated with the far-left in elections, they would gain the cooperation that they needed in post-election councils to get their municipal projects off the ground. This was a strategic move, too. By running a non-overlapping slate of candidates with COPE, Vision was able to gain the support and votes of Vancouver’s more liberal constituents. 

COPE eventually decided to end the coalition in 2013.

This is an interesting case study because Vision was able to garner votes by taking actions that were prudent for governing. It seems rare these days to find a political climate that rewards behavior that is strategic to good governance, and not just strategic to winning campaigns. 

We should worry that we are doing something wrong if we believe that our democratic elections are supposed to select for the best representatives for the purpose of governing — these days, it looks like we are selecting hacks. 

– Alex DeForge

Pst! This blog is about to wake up again

(stay tuned)

Why Lance Armstrong isn’t the “Bernie Madoff of cycling”

On another blog, at the end of the summer, I spent far too much space trying to figure out what we should think about Lance Armstrong after his quasi-implicit-wink’n’nudge-pseudo-confession. That statement from Armstrong came as he announced his decision to, in essence, plead “no contest” to the US Anti-Doping Agency’s public hearing of his case. My colleague Chris MacDonald follows up on the case on his Business Ethics Blog — and does so much more concisely, and with special attention to the “adversarial ethics” angle.

On Wednesday (October 10), the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released a small mountain’s worth of evidence against champion cyclist Lance Armstrong. Not surprisingly, comparisons to corruption in the world of business were not far behind. On Twitter, a number of wags referred to Armstrong as the “Bernie Madoff of cycling,” or variants on that.

The comparison with Madoff is to be expected. In both cases, you have wrongdoing of impressive scope. In both cases, the wrongdoing was truly brazen, going on right under the noses of regulators. In both cases, you can’t escape the feeling that someone should have been able to figure it all out sooner. And in both cases, you see the eventual fall of a man who was a hero to many.

But the comparison is also off target in important ways….

 

‘Utmost Good Faith’ Between Adversaries?

Not much has yet been written about the quasi-adversarial relationship that obtains between consumers and the companies from which they buy goods and services, at least not in those terms.

And it’s clear, I think, that the relationship is quasi-adversarial. In game-theoretic terms, it’s a ‘mixed motive’ game — one in which cooperation of some form is useful, but in which each party has some incentive to deviate from maximally cooperative behaviour. When Apple sells me a computer, they would ideally like to squeeze as much money out of me as possible, while giving me a product as cheap-to-produce as possible. And my own preferences are the exact opposite. We both benefit from doing business together, but our interests in the interaction are not quite aligned. In fact, in terms of pure dollars and cents, the transaction between Apple and me is a zero-sum game: every extra dollar they charge for their computer is a dollar out of my pocket and into their corporate coffers. It’s not a fully-adversarial relationship, but it’s still one that needs some rules to keep it civilized.

In this regard, it’s good to know about the legal concept of uberrima fides. This is a legal doctrine, relating specifically to insurance contracts, which says that “all parties to an insurance contract must deal in good faith, making a full declaration of all material facts in the insurance proposal.” The relationship between insurer and insured, in other words, is a game that must be played by very strict rules.

The concept of uberrima fides doesn’t mean the insurer and insured are on the same team, metaphorically speaking. So it implies a relationship quite different from, say, a fiduciary one. A fiduciary relationship, as a famous legal judgment once put it, requires “the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” In a fiduciary relationship (e.g., the relationship between lawyer and client), the commercial aspect of the relationship takes a back seat, and one party (e.g., the lawyer) is expected to put the other party’s interests ahead of their own. In a relationship subject to the uberrima fides standard, the relationship is still at least partly adversarial, but the adversaries in question are expected to play very strictly according to the rules. This makes particular sense for the relationship between insurer and insured, presumably, because both parties are so highly vulnerable to gamesmanship and dissimulation on the part of the other.

This suggests, I think, that we think of various kinds of buyer/seller relationships as existing along a spectrum, from the aggressively adversarial to the utterly fiduciary. The question, then, is not which rules should apply to buyer/seller relationships in general. The question, rather, is which rules should apply to what kinds of buyer/seller relationships, and why.

Link

The Bachelor Reality TV Survey

The Bachelor: Watch it? Love it? Hate It? Judge it? I would really appreciate you taking just a minute to fill out this (very short and totally anonymous) survey.  Results will be revealed in a post here on the Ethics for Adversaries blog early next week!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LCMY75V

Thanks so much for your participation!

Duke Student Government Elections: Students actively avoid adversarial tactics

While national democratic politics are generally adversarial, it turns out democratic politics in the context of student governments at American universities are not. Last week, the Duke Student Government held its annual debate for candidates running for student body president and vice president. The presidential candidates had very similar platforms, so the moderator spent most of the debate asking questions about their leadership styles. In a race where candidates differed on personal, rather than ideological, attributes, the candidates did surprisingly little to distinguish themselves from their opponents. None of the candidates directly criticized the other, and when asked to the name the biggest weaknesses of their opponents, one candidate declined to answer for sake of “constructive conversation.” Interestingly enough, the candidates were willing to scapegoat the school’s administrators on every issue.

Without any conflict, the debate lacked entertainment, for sure—but also substantive value. The platforms of all the candidates were vague and inflated, and they all got away with inaccurate statements. The candidates had plenty of opportunities to go after each other, but none of them did.

Much of this lack of conflict can be explained by the candidates’ relationships to one another. At the end of the campaign, the candidates will inevitably see each other again in class or at a party. They don’t have the luxury of returning to their home states or hiding behind a camera. The candidates have to directly confront each other, and a contention taken the wrong way would make future interactions awkward. On the national stage, it is easy to call your opponent a flip-flopper. On a cafeteria stage in front of a group of peers, a comment with even the slightest contrast can be taken offensively.

In some ways, a government where members are sensitive to conflict will be a government with a lot of mutual respect and cooperation. However, less conflict means fewer substantive policies are crafted on the campaign trail, and candidates win with broad promises without a map to completion. Additionally, voters cannot make informed decisions—without the ability to compare differing platforms or leadership styles, voters inevitably base their decisions on recommendations from peers and name recognition.

At the end of the debate, the uncontested candidate for vice president lambasted the presidential candidates for their remarks about the administration (see it here at 1:00:35), and the audience responded with hoots and applause. The candidates may not like conflict, but the voters sure do.

Eating Caterpillars

When I was in middle school, I lived next door to two boys who were constantly creating ad hoc competitions between themselves.  Of course, their parents thought this was cute when they had bike races down the street or tried to build the best snowman.  Except apparently those little battles weren’t extreme enough.  To up the ante, they decided to recreate Fear Factor in their back yard, and the next thing anyone knew, both boys were gulping down live caterpillars in an effort to outdo each other.  What most people would consider unthinkable suddenly became necessary and desirable in the name of competition.  By making rules for themselves and calling it a game, absurd actions became permissible and exciting.  (If anyone is wondering by the way, the record was thirteen live caterpillars in a row).

This caterpillar-eating frenzy is what immediately comes to mind when I first heard about Ultimate Tazer Ball.  No, that was not a typo.  Ultimate Tazer Ball.  The players carry tasers, self-defense weapons, and zap each other as they fight over a 24” ball.

According to Discovery.com:

The sport was is the brainchild of Leif Kellenberger, Eric Prum and Erik Wunsch, who work in the world of professional paintball.  They were brainstorming ideas for new extreme sports and thought of adding some real energy with the use of tasers. As the concept developed, they dropped real tasers, which can cause cardiac arrest and death, for stun guns that cause pain but are not dangerous. “It’s relatively safe as any contact sport would be” Prum says.

Then they turned to creating a sport that would be more than a gimmick. It includes elements of rugby, soccer and hockey. Teams of four vie to carry or throw a 24″ ball into the opponents’ goal. Tackling is allowed; punching isn’t. Defenders can only taze a player in possession of the ball who is within a designated space around the goals. (Tazing of the shoulders and groin is always illegal.)

Well, as long as shoulder and groin tasing are illegal…

With the creation of Ultimate Taser Ball, Kellenberger, Prum, and Wunsch have transformed assault into a game.  While the tasers used aren’t police-grade one and are set to a lower amperage than would be required to induce cardiac arrest, the players are fairly vocal about the pain.  Of course, in any sport or game, there is a risk of injury that players consent to undertaking.  How much risk, however, can or should someone consent to accepting in the name of competition?  Are games, no matter how dangerous, acceptable as long as the players agree to abide by the rules and accept the relevant risks?  In war, soldiers consent to risk of being killed, but should a civilian be allowed to consent to the same for the purpose of playing a game?

(You can watch videos of Ultimate Tazer Ball on YouTube.  One example can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5_Jlio08k ).

American Politics: Are We Still Playing the Same Game?

Of all the rhetoric that we have heard during this Republican primary, it is perhaps this comment from Rick Santorum that is the most perplexing:

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college.  What a snob.  I understand why he wants you to go to college.  He wants to remake you in his image.”

While Barack Obama’s intention behind the comment was not explicitly to promote a liberal education – but merely to suggest that education, whether it is technical, vocational, preprofessional, or liberal is, on balance, a benefit – Santorum’s disgust for ‘liberal academia’ is quite transparent.  Is this attitude antithetical to the foundations of our democratic society?  Or, to put it another way, are American politicians still playing the same game?

Politics, if it is a game, should be played according to a set of tactical, regulative, and constitutive rules.  Tactical rules are the strategies that are employed by a team or player in an effort to win the game.  For example, if I am playing chess, my opening move won’t be white pawn from h2-h3, since that doesn’t make any strategic sense whatsoever within a normal chess game.  Regulative rules are those guidelines that keep each side from gaining an unfair advantage, or exploiting loopholes that might exist due to the way the constitutive rules are described or set.  It is possible to break regulative rules and still be playing the same game.  The constitutive rules, by contrast, are what defines the game itself, and changing them entails playing another game altogether.  You are not playing chess if, for example, you declare that your winning the game is a result of you, yourself, being checkmated.

To see whether or not American politicians are still playing the same game, it is helpful to get an idea of what the goal of politics actually is.  Is the goal simply to win — to be elected President, for example — at all costs?  Probably not, since we wouldn’t want a presidential candidate to win by intentionally sabotaging the country, for example.  Indeed, this strategy would be contrary to the very purpose of the office for which the candidate is running.  We might say that the point of the political process is to elect someone into a position of public power who promotes the general welfare of the people.

Is this goal consistent with the de-valuing of, or hostility towards, a liberal education?  Historically, a liberal education was a privilege of the elite, or landed gentry – when one’s income was secure, it was appropriate to be educated in rhetoric so as to become an active, engaged citizen, who could not only make arguments, but listen and assess the arguments of others.  In contemporary civil society, it seems like education supports the democratic process, insofar as it exposes individuals to different points of view, and teaches them to critically assess those views, both for their strengths and weaknesses.  In this way, a liberal education promotes tolerance and recognition of divergent values; and so also promotes other-regarding virtues that are necessary for solidarity, and, by extension, the flourishing of a democratic society.  The major difference, of course, is that in our contemporary context, a liberal education is generally democratized among all classes; it is no longer a privilege of the few, nor should it be.

Even if President Obama’s point was to encourage a liberal education (which it was not), would this be so terrible?  I do not see what is so offensive about cultivating a population comprised of well-informed, educated citizens.  Santorum, however, seems to want to foster a climate of distrust and intolerance of opposing views, which might be fine if the goal of politics is to win at all costs.  However, insofar as the solidarity necessary for well-functioning democratic societies is secured best through education, then it seems that conservatives like Santorum would benefit from remembering the constitutive rules of the political game.  Sometimes a win for a particular candidate is a loss for American society, and I do not think that such a loss is consistent with the point of the political process.

I think we’d all do well to remember James Madison and Federalist #10 here, where Madison talks of factions and their threat to the common good.  Of course, to remember lessons from the Federalist Papers, we have to have read them, and what better place than within the academy itself?

Bi-Partisan Markets

Milton Friedman purports in Capitalism and Freedom that the free market allows the individual to express her individual desires, while the democratic system forces conformity.

“From this standpoint, the role of the market, as already noted, is that it permits unanimity without conformity; that it is a system of effectively proportional representation. On the other hand, the characteristic feature of action through explicitly political channels is that it tends to require or to enforce substantial conformity. The typical issue must be decides “yes” or “no”; at most, provision can be made for a fairly limited number of alternatives. Even the use of proportional representation in its explicitly political form does not alter this conclusion. The number of separate groups that can in fact be represented is narrowly limited, enormously so by comparison with the proportional representation of the market.”

Although Friedman argues for the benefits of proportional representation in the market, the economic system can potentially arrive at a similar conclusion as the political system. Consider the situation of the carbonated soda market, where advertising similarly enforces substantial conformity by raising the barriers to entry. Coke and Pepsi hold over 70% of the market share.[1] This sounds dangerously similar to the current political landscape in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats holding over 60% of the “voter market share.” 36% of registered voters are Democrats and 27% are registered Republicans.[2] The competitive landscape is actually slanted more in favor of Coke and Pepsi than our often-criticized bi-partisan political system.

The point that Friedman is trying to make is that 49.9% of the country may be forced to conform to a political situation to which they are opposed. Obviously, if Coke has a majority market share, you are not forced to consume only Coke. However, Friedman argues that the free market constitutes a system of proportional representation, but that is not consistent in the Coke/Pepsi situation. Due to wide awareness of Coke as a result of advertising expenditure, the consumer has a higher subconscious disposition to purchase Coke. It is not the result of actual product preference, but rather brand preference. Even if a company launches a cola competitor to Coke that is a healthier alternative with the exact taste, it will likely fail due to consumer’s requisite knowledge of the Coke brand. Essentially, a consumer purchasing RC Cola has the same effect of a citizen voting for the green party. The consumer is forced to conform to an economic situation in which they potentially are opposed, but is unable to view or obtain alternatives due to Coke’s stranglehold on the market.

One could argue that the consumer is not truly forced to consume Coke; she could simply purchase RC Cola in the supermarket. However, what about the situations in stadiums, theaters, or restaurants where there is only one option? These venue providers will rationally select the most prominent brand in order to appease the most consumers, and thus select Coke. But this leaves the consumer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice in those certain environments; the exact situation in which Friedman condemns. Thus, while liberal economists criticize the conformity in politics and espouse the virtues of the competitive marketplace, both systems are equally susceptible to the concentration of power.


[1]Esterl, Mike. “Pepsi Thirsty for a Comeback.” Wall Street Journal, 18 Mar. 2011. Web. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703818204576206653259805970.html&gt;

[2] “Fewer Voters Identify as Republicans.” Pew Research Center. 20 Mar. 2008. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/773/fewer-voters-identify-as-republicans&gt;.

Is the Supreme Court an arena?

(Posted by Wayne.)

… and if so, is what goes on there like hockey or figure skating?

We standardly think of the adversarial legal system as one of the “classic” deliberately adversarial institutions. (This blog is about whether there are special rules for the design of, and behavior within, such institutions.) The most visible — and tele-visual — parts of the system involve lawyers representing two or more sides of a case battling it out, within the rules, to advance the interests of their clients (or of The People, in the case of prosecutors).

But not all parts of the justice or legal system are adversarial. It’s an open question how we should think about both the theory and the practice of what goes on at the “top” of the system — the Supreme Court (to give a US example; but all constitutional democracies have something similar). It certainly looks adversarial in important ways. Its role is to settle contentious issues in the law, and it does this by dealing with actual cases where one side doggedly disagrees with the other. Like lower courts, it will also listen to lawyers representing the opposing sides. And of course, we can’t ignore the fact that the justices on the Court are nominated by the President and approved (or rejected) by a very adversarial legislature.

And yet, the work of the justices themselves is expected to be entirely professional. They are meant to figure out, individually and collectively, the best interpretation of laws and the Constitution. They are not supposed to be representing any particular interest, and are even expected to set aside their own biases and interests — and if they cannot, on a particular case, to step aside. No individual member of the Court is supposed to be trying to “win” anything. Cases are supposed to be decided on their merits alone — may the best arguments be the winners.

Next week the Court will begin its deliberations on the Affordable Care Act. In advance of the three sessions where the justices will hear arguments, the New York Times has recently highlighted two interesting aspects of the nature of the Court within the deliberately adversarial justice system.

First, it noted that

The White House has begun an aggressive campaign to use approaching Supreme Court arguments on the new health care law as a moment to build support for the measure seen as President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, hoping to shape public opinion on an issue at the center of the battle for the White House and Congress.

Now this would not be unusual as a matter of politics: the President and his party are part of another nakedly adversarial system called democratic politics, and elections are looming. But what is unusual about these current plans is that they suggest that such politics may also be trying to influence the justices themselves.

The advocates and officials mapped out a strategy to call attention to tangible benefits of the law, like increased insurance coverage for young adults. Sensitive to the idea that they were encouraging demonstrations, White House officials denied that they were trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill…

Supporters of the law plan to hold events outside the court on each day of oral argument. The events include speeches by people with medical problems who have benefited or could benefit from the law. In addition, supporters will arrange for radio hosts to interview health care advocates at a “radio row,” at the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill.

The law’s supporters may have to get there early if they want the best patch of sidewalk:

Opponents of the law will be active as well and are planning to show their sentiments at a rally on the Capitol grounds on March 27, the second day of Supreme Court arguments. Republican lawmakers, including Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, are expected to address the rally, being organized by Americans for Prosperity, with support from conservative and free-market groups like the Tea Party Express.

Your guess is as good as mine about what influence all of this will have on the nine individuals charged with the final decision. It is nonetheless a curious “grey area” partisan political activity swirling around a part of the justice system that is supposed to be non-partisan and non-political — or at the very least, not susceptible to the emotional volume of support for one side or the other. The White House’s own cautious framing of their strategy seems to acknowledge that they are toeing close to a line they don’t want to cross.

Meanwhile, we hear whispers that the Chief Justice himself, John Roberts, may be approaching his pending vote among his colleagues with concerns that go beyond the correct interpretation of the law. The guess is that he will not necessarily vote for the side with the best arguments.

The consensus among scholars and Supreme Court practitioners is that Chief Justice Roberts is unlikely to add the fifth vote to those of the four justices in the court’s liberal wing to uphold the law. But he is said to be quite likely to provide a sixth vote should one of the other more conservative justices decide to join the court’s four more liberal members.

Why might he be willing to vote either way?

The case will require the chief justice to choose between two competing instincts.

On the one hand, he views himself as a steward of the court’s prestige and authority, and he has called for incremental decisions from large majorities rather than broad but sharply divided rulings. “As chief justice, Roberts has been extremely careful with the institutional reputation of the court,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University who has filed a brief urging the court to uphold the law.

The court has not rejected legislation as ambitious as the health care law since the 1930s. There is, moreover, only one plausible way for the justices to strike down the law, scholars who study the court say: by a 5-to-4 vote divided along ideological lines.

All of that might augur a cautious approach.

Now this is not unusual practice for judges in constitutional courts: to decide politically charged cases in ways that will serve to uphold the legitimacy of the Court — where legitimacy requires its being perceived as a fair, neutral party.

So what might this tell us about principles for design and professional behavior in other deliberately adversarial institutions? Sometimes “players” have to act in ways that uphold the “integrity of the game” even if this requires refraining from a winning tactic, or from carrying out a routine professional duty.

Interestingly enough, in the controversial Citizens United ruling, the Roberts Court struck down legislation that the politicians had put in place to preserve (some of) the integrity of their adversarial institution. The politicians had agreed to limit the influence of corporate money, along with perceptions of bias and corruption. Not all members of the majority denied that a flood of corporate money would have these consequences for democratic processes, but they felt nevertheless that rights to free speech couldn’t be infringed for the sake of the legitimacy of that process. If the rumors are true now, however, it seems that the Chief Justice may be willing to overlook a fundamental right being infringed by the new health care law for the sake of the Court’s “prestige and authority.”

Redshirting: Holding kids back from kindergarten is bad gamesmanship

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes did a segment on academic redshirting, the practice of holding kindergarten age-eligible children back in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth. The segment also included an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, who articulated a similar phenomenon in the case of older hockey players in his book Outliers (Gladwell calls the phenomenon “accumulative advantage”). In the many adversarial institutions these parents want their children to excel in (little league sports, elementary academics, and the cafeteria social hierarchy), there is a significant advantage for students who are older. The 60 Minutes segment showed a lot of eager mothers who adamantly claim they were not breaking any rules, but just doing what was best for their children.

Within current confines, those parents are not breaking any official rules. But, there is a sense that eager parents are gaming the system. This sort of gamesmanship also signifies a paradigm shift in extracurricular activities. Little league sports are no longer just for fun—they are institutions that cultivate talent and personalities prone to success. Most interestingly, it also appears that the process of raising children has shifted from a once inherently rewarding practice to an adversarial institution where the benefits of winning are permanent.

Football, Business, and the Rules of the Game

The scandal currently engulfing Football’s New Orleans Saints illustrates some important points about adversarial ethics, and in particular holds lessons for business ethics.

The scandal concerns the fact that over a number of years, members of the team (and at least one assistant coach) maintained a “bounty pool,” which paid out money to players who succeeded in inflicting serious injuries on players from opposing teams. Football is a tough sport; so what’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that even tough games need rules, including rules designed to keep the game worth playing.

Drawing on Joseph Heath’s work on adversarial ethics in business, I argue that the limits on adversarial behaviour in business can be defined as those limits that keep the ‘game’ beneficial from a social point of view. Free, competitive markets are enormously beneficial, and behaviour that threatens the benefits of markets robs them of their moral justification.

For the fuller version of my argument, see my blog posting for Canadian Business magazine: New Orleans Saints football scandal highlights limits of competition.

Post-Graduate Fellowship in Business, Law, and Human Rights (open to graduating Duke seniors)

The Kenan Institute for Ethics, in which I spend much of my academic life, is pleased to announce a new “adversarial-ethics-related” fellowship open to a graduating senior from Duke. Full details are here. Its adversarial-ethics connection is obvious: international business, especially in less-developed markets, cannot be “civilized” as easily through strong state regulation. One of the many alternatives to hard regulations that is being developed now is a form of “soft law” and “self-regulation” based on internationally recognized standards of human rights that businesses, and not merely governments, should be expected to follow.

The eventual holder of this fellowship will work “closely with the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights (UNWG). The mission of the Working Group is ‘to promote the effective and comprehensive dissemination and implementation of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.’ The Working Group consists of five independent experts, one from each of the U.N.’s five regional groups, who work virtually with limited support from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.”

Deadline for applications: 2 April. (Full details here.)

Incentives and Rules: Constraints on Individual Autonomy

Posted by KevinJ

In adversarial institutions there are always “rules of the game.” In fact, these rules largely define the institution itself. If you play a game that looks sort of like baseball, but has four strikes and three balls, you are not playing baseball. In adversarial ethics we care about both how to design and evaluate the best rules; and also about what obligations “players” in that institution might have over and above those spelled out in the rules.

But surely there are many different kinds and categories of rules, and we could sharpen our normative theories by distinguishing some of them. Does it matter, for example, whether rules dictate what actors must do or must not do, on the one hand, or whether the rules are structured through the use of incentives to do or refrain from doing certain things, on the other? In a brand new book entitled Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives, Ruth Grant (professor of political science at Duke University) challenges a number of our standard assumptions about the use of incentives in public policy about markets and other domains.

It is commonly assumed, for example, that incentives leave the decision-maker with a free, or autonomous, choice between several options. Of course, even if all autonomous choices are voluntary, not all voluntary choices are autonomous. When given the choice between your wallet or your life, you voluntarily decide to hand over your wallet. But was the choice was not made autonomously.

The same argument could be made for properly created incentives; they place the player in a situation where only one choice is rational. The player voluntarily selects the rational choice, but may not be as autonomous as we would like to believe. Ruth argues that “Incentives ‘strictly speaking’ are a particular kind of offer: (1) An extrinsic benefit or a bonus that is neither the natural or automatic consequence of an action nor a deserved reward or compensation; (2) A discrete prompt expected to elicit a particular response; and (3) An offer intentionally designed to alter the status quo by motivating a person to choose differently than he or she would be likely to choose in its absence.” With each of these qualities, decisions are reached that are not “natural” to the individual.

The upshot: the use of incentives to get someone to do something they didn’t want to do may not be as innocent or uncoercive as we generally assume.

But how do incentives within institutions differ from other kinds of rules and regulations? They both adjust the balance of the costs and benefits of a particular choice and aim to alter an actor’s course of action. Incentives and other regulations may lead to the same end-result — but do incentives do this in a way that is less coercive or more voluntary? Ruth’s answer is: it depends! She looks at a wide variety of incentives used in public policy, and we have different “gut” reactions that are often confirmed by closer ethical analysis. Some we feel perfectly free to take or leave (say, an incentive to file tax returns on time) and some (say, a plea offer to a risk-averse and poor accused man who is in fact innocent) can feel coercive, exploitative, or like abuses of power or authority.

I can’t induce you to read Grant’s thought-provoking and highly readable new book. But I’m pretty sure you will never again assume that incentives are necessarily more freedom-enhancing alternatives to other forms of regulation and rules.

Can Adversarial Contexts Be Socially Integrating?

Recently, Michael Gillespie wrote an article on March Madness and the unifying character of sports in American culture.  What is it about sports, and March Madness in particular, that it is able to organize and direct a group of otherwise — to borrow a term from John Rawls — “mutually disinterested” individuals towards impassioned support of a common goal?  How can a mere game transform a diverse group of individuals into an almost singular consciousness, where personal identities dissolve into a shared communal existence?

Gillespie answers similar questions in terms of Nietzsche’s view of Greek tragedy, which is, at its core, a merging of both the individual and communal elements of life (or the Apollinian and Dionysian).  Nietzsche’s conclusion is ultimately that life is redeemed only as an aesthetic phenomenon, and a sense of meaning is derived from a sense of struggle in which the individual sacrifices his happiness for something greater.

College basketball, and indeed sports generally, might play this redemptive role in American culture, as it is through sports that we experience life in all its peaks and valleys — from the ecstasy of an unexpected win by a buzzer-beating three-pointer, to the despair over an impossible upset in a tournament’s first round.  Insofar as basketball is representative of the unifying character of adversarial institutions, how else might this dynamic play out towards a goal of social integration?  That is, how might conflict help transform a Gesellschaft (society) into a Gemeinschaft (community), to use Max Weber’s terminology.

A similar situation might be seen in the United States during World War II, where civilian support was widespread.  It is well documented that the U.S. contribution to the war effort increased U.S. GDP, through increased productivity and the better mobilization of the workforce.  This had a taxing effect on the U.S. population, but this struggle was tolerated because of, among other factors, some sense of unification expressed as patriotism.

Indeed, this point about economies and markets as an expression of social integration is interesting.  It has been argued* that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, when interpreted in conjunction with his Theory of Moral SentimentsLectures on Jurisprudence, and Letters on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, forms a comprehensive theory whereby markets are not exclusively constituted by interactions of “competitive and strategic individuals to secure their material preferences,” (553), but rather as a central mechanism for social order derived from the “inexorable struggle by human agents for moral approbation and social recognition” (ibid).  This reading, furthermore, goes on to state how Smith perceived markets as an analogue to the classical Greek polis, as the site where people seek mutual recognition.

Before we commit what Alfred North Whitehead termed the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” we would do well to recognize that this represents an idealization, which might be quite undersupported, especially in the context of contemporary market transactions.  While Smith’s Wealth of Nations argues for lack of government manipulation and intervention in markets, the events of recent years has made some people skeptical of the efficacy of this kind of unrestrained free-market capitalism.

Part of the problem is that there is rarely the sense of a common goal among actors within American corporations.  Some economists such as Paul Krugman claim that the U.S. economy has become dominated by the financial sector, and one criticism against financial institutions is that employee’s have no personal investment in the firm beyond their limited tenure.  Performance is usually assessed in terms of a very short time-horizon, and significantly long-term strategies to increase market capitalization might not be implemented if they sacrifice short-term performance.

Obviously, I have no resolution for these difficulties.  Perhaps adversarial contexts could be socially integrating, and the main issue is how might the unifying character of sports, for example, be applied to other adversarial contexts, like markets.  Smith’s model might have been descriptive for its time, but it’s a real question as to whether our contemporary economic climate is one that can ever be socially integrating in this way.  It might be that our attitudes towards the firm is unsupportive of individual responsibility towards the long-term financial health of corporations, insofar as this comes at the expense of short-term personal compensation.

* Kalyvas, A. and Katznelson, I.  “The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 549-579.

David Brooks on Linsanity and the difference between the morality of religion and sports

Posted by Wayne

David Brooks, the New York Times‘s supposedly conservative columnist, regularly looks to sports as a way of making sense of our political and popular culture. This week he used the Jeremy Lin phenomenon as a pretext for some reflections on the gap between the ethos of sport and the ethos of religion (because Lin, like Tim Tebow, is a devote Christian). For Brooks the gap is a chasm that can probably not be fully or safely bridged.

The discussion is relevant for this blog because Brooks claims that the “sporting ethos pervades modern life and shapes how we think about business, academic and political competition.” Our ethical thinking in certain adversarial contexts or institutions will — and ought to — differ from the way we think ethically in other parts of our lives, even if we are deeply religious.

The moral universe of modern sport is oriented around victory and supremacy. The sports hero tries to perform great deeds in order to win glory and fame. It doesn’t really matter whether he has good intentions. His job is to beat his opponents and avoid the oblivion that goes with defeat.

The modern sports hero is competitive and ambitious. (Let’s say he’s a man, though these traits apply to female athletes as well). He is theatrical. He puts himself on display.

He is assertive, proud and intimidating. He makes himself the center of attention when the game is on the line. His identity is built around his prowess. His achievement is measured by how much he can elicit the admiration of other people — the roar of the crowd and the respect of ESPN.

His primary virtue is courage — the ability to withstand pain, remain calm under pressure and rise from nowhere to topple the greats.

This is what we go to sporting events to see

Brooks identifies this ethos with “modern sports,” but take away the inclusion of female athletes and ESPN, and the description of the virtues, goals, motivations, and glories of the athletic hero (or warrior) would not have looked out of place in Ancient Greece or Rome.

Of course, it is easy to see why these qualities are troubling for adherents of many traditional and religious moral traditions in the West and East. A “moral hero” in these traditions would not be described in any of the ways I have emphasized in bold font in long quotation from Brooks. (Although he or she would, presumably, be just as courageous as the sporting hero, even if this was not his or her primary virtue.) Brooks himself goes on to paint a similar broad-brush portrait of the religious life, and explains why he thinks the sporting and religious characters can never be fully reconciled. Following the Jewish theologian Joseph Soloveitchik, Brooks believes

that people have two natures. First, there is “Adam the First,” the part of us that creates, discovers, competes and is involved in building the world. Then, there is “Adam the Second,” the spiritual individual who is awed and humbled by the universe as a spectator and a worshipper.

Note that Brooks is focusing almost entirely on one component of a moral or ethical perspective — the part that concerns virtues or characters traits. But we also care about what rights, freedoms, and duties people have; and with the how to design just institutions (which will, in turn, assign various rights and duties to individuals occupying particular roles). So we might also ask whether the rights and duties of “players” in deliberately adversarial institutions will necessarily conflict with the dictates of a religious follower’s conscience.

Here too the answer seems to be Yes, but for very different reasons than the ones Brooks has highlighted. The best summary I know of for this case comes from Joseph Heath‘s important paper in the Journal of Business Ethics, “An Adversarial Ethics for Business: or When Sun-Tzu Met the Stakeholder” (2006). Here is how Heath sums up an argument explained over several pages:

Much of everyday morality has as its goal the prevention of a collective action problem. It is possible to secure certain advantages by lying, but if everyone did it, no one would believe what anyone said, and everyone would be worse off… This is why the… Golden Rule capture[s] much of the spirit of everyday morality. But because the central mechanism in a competition is an unresolved collective action problem, there are bound to be numerous prima facie conflicts between competitive imperatives and those imposed by everyday morality. This is reflected in the fact that a naïve or mechanical application of the Golden Rule in a competitive situation is likely to generate the wrong results. Before kicking the winning field goal, we do not want football players to be thinking, “How would I like it if the other team did that to me?” Similarly, before lowering prices, we do not want the gas-station owners to be thinking “How would I like it if the station across the street did that to me?”

The bolded phrase is the key to understanding the reason we actively encourage a different kind of ethical thinking or ethos in what we are calling deliberately adversarial institutions (like sports, markets, and democratic politics). These institutions regulate a competition in order to create benefits for “non players” outside the competition — what economists call “positive externalities.” So in all of these institutions we deliberately prevent the competitors from cooperating in ways that will be to their advantage but not to the advantage of outsiders.

Traditional morality is about cooperating and mutual assistance: adversarial ethics is about how to generate social benefits by preventing certain forms of cooperation; but also about how to make sure that the players use only appropriate tactics in their attempt to succeed. Heath’s article is as good a place as any to see the outlines of, and tensions between, these two features of adversarial ethics. But you should also find these tensions in almost every case study we highlight on this blog.

Incidentally, Heath’s article could be of some service to pious, but ferociously competitive athletes like Tim Tebow or Jeremy Lin. They can play hard to beat their opponents, but show self-restraint in doing so by embracing the “spirit of the rules” and by treating their opponents with respect. And of course, they can and should be as cooperative and humble as possible with their own team mates. Within the team itself, there is still no “I” in Golden Rule.

The Adversarial Ethics of Reality TV

Posted by businessethicsduke

The Adversarial Ethics of Reality TV

It has been said that love is a battlefield, or a contact sport. But most people like to think of their own romantic lives or relationships should be all about cooperation and not competition.

But cooperation is so boring! Every Monday night I get together with a group of my girlfriends to watch a two-hour, no-limits catfight.  It’s called The Bachelor and last year it was the most watched reality TV in the United States.  Without the intention of being mean, we all look to the show as source of mockery and amusement.  We are utterly ashamed of the female competitor this season who went to our own college, Duke, and we squirm embarrassedly when she stated, decisively, that after climbing a bridge with the Bachelor, that they could overcome anything through their love for one another.

In The Bachelor, love is war and weapons include low-cut halter-tops, dates on private yachts and skinny dipping in the ocean.  “It’s institutionalized infidelity,” one friend of mine commented last week.  And the more I thought about it, the more her offhanded comment rang true to me.  The entire premise of the show is to allow a man or woman, who is “looking for true love”, to meet and romance 25 members of the opposite sex for ten weeks and then, despite having romantic relations with a number of them during the period, propose to one.  In real life, this type of situation would not only be considered unconventional, but undeniably exploitive.   I certainly can’t imagine many beautiful, educated and successful young men and women exclusively dating one partner while he or she is allowed to explore and choose from an equally qualified pool of 24 others.  If this were to happen in real life in some beautiful villa in the Californian countryside, we would call it a cult.  Charlie Sheen was publicly humiliated for having two Goddesses, yet we continue to watch The Bachelor Ben Flajniak date tens of girls, who all claim to be madly in love with him, simultaneously.

The deception and infidelity that underscore the actions of every Bachelor or Bachelorette, season after season, reminded me of a question posed by Arthur Applbaum in his formative text on Adversarial Ethics.  Applbaum asks. “How can acts that ordinarily are morally forbidden – violence, deception, coercion – be rendered morally permissible when performed by one who occupies a professional or public role?”  Indeed, Flajniak could be questioned in much the same manner:  Is he granted the ability to cheat and lie to loving women simply because he is the protagonist of a popular TV show?  Moreover, does the “profession” of being a reality star entitle individuals to perform acts that would otherwise be morally unacceptable?

With a bit of research, I have discovered that morally questionable and often dangerous or damaging situations are extremely common to reality TV.   In the next several weeks, I hope to explore this topic in much more detail.  An initial list of issues I will discuss are as follows, but I am certain that this will evolve in posts to come!

–       Deception: Is reality TV really real?

–       Reality TV and Lawyers:  The legal framework that makes these shows possible

–       Physical and Mental Endangerment: Of participants, rejects and their circles

–       The Business of Reality TV: Examining Economic Motivations

–       Why are we watching this?! We won’t watch a show about karaoke singers or morbidly obese people working out and losing weight – unless it is a competition.