Protagoras by Plato

Socrates' friend Hippocrates asks Socrates to accompany him to visit Protagoras, the great sophist who has arrived in town, so that he can pay him to learn how to be a doctor. Sophists today would be like teachers of rhetoric which instead of teaching knowledge teach the appearance of knowledge, for a fee. The argument of the dialogue is whether knowledge can be taught which Protagoras defends, but by the end of the dialogue he and Socrates see, to switch positions.

Protagoras begins his argument with what I think is the most interesting part of the dialogue which is an account of the state of nature. All animals are equal to each other because they are made by the gods to be suited to their own environment. The weak have swiftness and cunning to balance their lack of physical strength. Birds have wings and beaks to provide for themselves, while camels have large humps for carrying water in the desert. Every animal has what they need to survive, nature exists in a kind of harmony. That is until man comes on the scene. Men do not have much of what they need to survive, needing clothing and fire to keep warm and weapons to ward off predators. So Prometheus stole knowledge from the Gods and gave it to man, for which he was punished. Humans have enough knowledge to provide for themselves, but this partial knowledge makes them unable to live with one other and so exist in a state of near perpetual conflict. So Zeus sent Hermes to give men a sense of shame and justice so that people could live in cities. I get the feeling that Hobbes got his state of nature directly from this passage, though without the gods.

It's from this jumping off point that Protagoras' argument that knowledge is learned comes from. Each of us is good at what we know, but since we all have enough restraint to live together, it is not by virtue of reason but feeling. To be a good citizen is to exercise that feeling wisely. Socrates argues against this by saying that nobody intentionally does wrong and that everybody acts according to what they think good. So the good is synonymous with knowledge. It is not learned it is already there and needs to be cultivated. The same argument is made in The Republic, that a doctor must know how the body works to perform his task. Likewise there must be knowledge which allows the soul which directs all tasks, knowledge which cannot be learned but honed and refined. Oddly at the end the arguments get switched around and Socrates defends the opinion that the good requires knowledge, Socratic irony. The whole story can be seen in the larger context of Platonic thought, which is the idea that knowledge is the source of the good and that knowledge is not really learned but is an act of recollection, recalling what is already known.

Why Should People Vote?

Ancient Athenian leader Pericles gave in what was a speech for honoring the dead from war a defense of democracy which has surpassed the time for which he spoke in. Pericles defended democracy from the common criticism that the liberality of democracy leads to a decline in moral virtue among the citizenry, namely towards selfishness. "The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty". We trust everyone else to make decisions over us because in some sense we see each other as equals, so we trust individuals to rule their own affairs we trust them to rule over each other. However, despite Pericles' rhetoric, ancient Athens did not grant the kind of equality we understand today. Females and non-citizens did not have any rights, as equality was seen as only between equals, meaning those who already had power in society. Today while one person one vote has been established, the increased partisanship of the system has many voters questioning the sensibility of the other half of the country. If we do not agree with the ideology of the other, how can we extend this to their wisdom in the ballot box? This is I believe a misunderstanding of what democracy is good for. The good of having elections isn't to impart wisdom to rulers but to establish legitimacy, by going through the motions of competitive fair elections. Given data from the social sciences, the outcome of an election and individual voter opinions are largely decided beforehand. We should trust the opinions of voters not as being wise enough to decide the common good but wise enough to express their approval or disapproval of government from their own point of view.

Kenneth Arrow in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values demonstrated in that individual voters can choose an outcome which is not for the public good as defined by their own choices. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that a clear order of voter preferences cannot be determined if voters have three or more choices. Formally put an election with fair rules without a dictator will not reflect the preferences of a social group. These fair rules are that every vote is equal to the other one, what a majority prefers is the winner, and no single voter can determine the group's preferences (their choices are independent). From these rules, this situation can happen:
5 votes A > B > C
4 votes B > C > A
3 votes C > A > B
Candidate A is the winner by getting the most votes, yet candidate C is preferred by more voters than A for all voters and would win 7:5 if candidate B did not run. The majority preference did not win because of democratic rules. Even in America's two party system this has happened several times at the Presidential level. In 1912 two Republicans were on the ballot, William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt running on a third party ticket, splitting the vote and giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the presidency with less than a majority of voters, 42%. This happened again in 1992 where independent Ross Perot ran against incumbent George Bush and Bill Clinton. Perot's 19% of the vote, hurting Bush more than Clinton, allowed Clinton to become President with 43% of the popular vote. In Florida, George Bush Jr. won by only 500 votes against Al Gore. Third party candidate Ralph Nader took 97,488 votes, far more than enough to guarantee Gore victory. There is no doubt most of these voters would rather choose Gore than Bush in a three way race, yet they helped elect the candidate the least wanted winning. The point of Arrow's theorem is to demonstrate how easy it is for the system itself to decide an election and not the will of voters. Even if voters did make the right decision, it may not matter anyway.

Political socialization theory demonstrates that by the time we make it to voting age, our minds have been shaped in important ways by our social environment. There is a strong correlation between the party identification of parents and that of the child when they hit adulthood. Given that party identification is thought to be the greatest predictor of voter behavior, much of our political orientation is decided before we are able to cast a ballot. One can predict an individual's vote just by knowing their demographic profile. Black Americans vote for the Democratic Party nearly 90% of the time, Latinos 60-70% Democrat, and Whites close to 60% Republican. Males lean more Republican and women Democratic. By the time anyone heads to a poll their vote can be predicted. Political psychology has cast doubt on whether political opinions can even conform with reality. When misinformed voters are presented with facts, they don’t change their opinions (Keohane 2010). They actually dig deeper into their beliefs.

Given that voters decide their vote from factors not relating to individual campaigns and may not be able to get an outcome in accordance with their preferences, why should we give the public the power to decide who gets into office and influence policy? Its because voters are wise enough to know how their own life is going. The electorate is wiser than politicians and pundits about what they want. Economist Jude Wanniski made this point in his The Way the World Works. He subscribed to the wisdom of crowds in politics. “The electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.” Wanniski’s model described voters as wanting a balance of economic growth and redistribution which only the electorate as a whole could know. Their vote is an approval or disapproval of a state of affairs, not made in hindsight using abstract knowledge. The job of the politician is to listen and sell their ability to listen, not to direct public opinion. A candidate is successful if they can clinch enough voters to win. This a narrow view of what voters are capable of, so voters should be restricted to expressing a preference and not be expected to make particular decisions. This is the essence of a representative democracy.

(For a political behavior and elections class)

Decline of Voter Turnout

The greatest challenge for the oldest representative democracy in the world, the United States, is that of decreasing levels of voter turnout. The modus operandi of democracy is that in some fashion the citizenry are sovereign, and the political system gets its legitimacy from their opinions alone. Yet over the last four decades the percentage of voters turning out for elections has been on a long term decline, beginning albeit more slowly during the early twentieth century and accelerating after the 1960s. The reasons given for this phenomenon are numerous, everything from expansions to voter franchise to the decline in community participation. A larger theory for such a major and continuous trend is what is needed to make sense of these explanations, to discern a general reason for the decline in voter turnout. An examination of these explanations jointly demonstrates that the rise of non-voting in the United States is due to rational decision making by a significant part of the population to changes in the political system and American society itself. These decisions have major consequences for the future of American democracy, the greatest being a distortion of which policy preferences the political system pays attention to and by exacerbating political polarization despite a lack of matched polarization of the public.

Since the 1960s the United States has undergone dramatic social change. De jure segregation has been abolished, we are more tolerant of different lifestyle choices, and community participation has declined. Some of these changes matter more than others for explaining the decline in voter participation. The twenty sixth amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21 in time for the 1972 Presidential election. More people are in prison or have been incarcerated than in the 1960s following a rise in crime levels and the expansion of the War on Drugs among other things. This has increased the population of those who are not eligible to vote. The increase in immigration particularly the illegal variety since the 1980s has also increased the population of those living in America who cannot vote, even though they are counted by the census. These demographic factors aren't enough to explain the decline however. The estimated ineligible population is only 3-5% of the population, if they were included the turnout rate for the 2012 election would rise from 53.6% to 58.2% (Flanigan 2015). Even with the rise in the ineligible population, turnout is still lower even if at a lower percentage.

The social changes which have influenced turnout are the decline of political machines, the dwindling of competitive races, and declining union membership. These changes affect the benefits of voting for the eligible population by making political participation not in the voter’s interest or convincing them it isn’t. The decline in voter participation began in the early twentieth century, partly due to Southern states disenfranchising black voters, but mostly due to anti-corruption reforms. The introduction of the secret ballot, replacing party-line ballots, and voter registration laws reduced the incentive to vote as a public display of loyalty to a political machine and made it harder for immigrants and the poor to vote. Also during this time elections became less competitive. Republicans held the Presidency for 28 years from 1896 to 1932 and held Congress for all but 10 years in the House, and the Senate for all but 8 of those 36 years. In recent years Presidential elections by state and most Congressional races are not competitive. In 1992 the number of swing districts, those within five percentage points of the Presidential vote, was 103. By 2012 the number is 35 (Silver 2012). In Presidential races the number of swing states is now eight or ten out of fifty. Turnout was 9% lower in 2012 than in 2008 in the forty non-competitive states, while turnout stayed the same or increased in the swing states (Silver 2012). Also reducing the incentive to vote is the decline in union membership. Labor union membership peaked at 28% in the late 1960s and today is at less than 12% (Madland and Bunker 2012). There is a positive correlation with union membership and voting, other nations with a higher percentage of the workforce unionized have higher turnout levels as do states with higher levels of unionization. This is because unions decrease the cost of voting and increase the benefits by providing organization and money. Unions educate and organize workers much like political machines used to do.

These changes have reduced voter turnout because they reduce the incentives to vote. The barriers to voting have been reduced over the last several decades without increasing turnout. The Motor Voter Act of 1993 made it easier to register to vote by providing registration forms at government offices, several states adopted voting by mail in the 1990s, and after the 2000 election Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act which allowed provisional ballots and gave states money to move to electronic voting. Still turnout has not increased significantly. The result has been that the political system reflects the preferences of the wealthy and business, who vote and spend more on politics. Studies on government policy outcomes for the last 20 years show that the preferences of average and low income citizens have little to no influence. The preferences of economic elites were 15 times as important (Bartels 2014). This also reflects the growing amount of money in politics, but is partly attributed to the drop off in voting among ordinary Americans. Polarization is also affected by non-voting. While Washington has become more polarized, the majority of Americans remain in the center. Only 21% of Americans are consistently liberal or conservative, while 39% are mixed in their opinions (Steenkiste 2014). Ideological voters are much more likely to vote, creating a feedback loop where political parties and candidates spend and campaign to reach these voters. Those with mixed opinions regularly vote less than 40% of the time, while conservatives and liberals regularly vote more than 60% of the time. Both these trends bode poorly for the world’s oldest democratic republic and are exacerbated by the decline in voter turnout.

(For a political behavior and elections class)

Money as Freedom

During the oral arguments prior to the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, Solicitor General Elena Kagan's deputy Malcolm Stewart was asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if under current election law the federal government could ban a book funded by a corporation engaged in political advocacy. Stewart said this wouldn't happen if the corporation paid for the book through a political action committee. “And if they didn’t, you could ban it?” asked Roberts. Stewart replied "If they didn’t, we could prohibit publication of the book". The resulting 5-4 decision in 2010 became one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of the 21st century, not because the court upheld censorship but because it didn't. Public opinion does not think of spending to influence politics as free speech, and would be surprised to think of banning books as falling under campaign finance regulation. Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address declared that the Supreme Court “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limit in our elections".  It is from this angle, of money as an illegitimate means of expressing political opinions, that prevents most of the public from seeing campaign spending as a form of free speech falling under the purview of civil liberties. This essay will argue that spending money to influence politics is a form of free speech protected by the first amendment.

                 Spending on campaigns to elect candidates or influence the results has been around as long as there have been elections. However federal laws regulating spending in politics did not come about until the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt as a leader of the progressive movement of the early twentieth century in his 1905 State of the Union asked congress for legislation to forbid corporate contributions directly to candidates. This became the Tillman of 1908, the first campaign finance limitation on organizations outside of the government. Now corporations and nationally chartered banks were prohibited from making direct contributions to federal candidates. Congress extended these provisions to labor unions in the 1940s with the Smith-Connally Act and the Taft-Hartley Act.

              The doctrine that money should be seen as free speech didn't emerge until the 1970's. In 1971 a Democratic Congress under Richard Nixon passed the Federal Electoral Campaign Act. Over President Gerald Ford’s veto in the wake of the Watergate scandal Congress passed several amendments in 1974. The 1974 FECA amendments included a limitation on candidate expenditures from their own money. This was challenged before the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, brought by New York Senator James Buckley against Francis Valeo representing the FEC. By a 7-1 vote, the Court invalidated the restrictions on expenditures under the First Amendment. The majority opinion declared that "a restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.  This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money". Contribution limits for donors were upheld as“only a marginal restriction upon the contributor's ability to engage in free communication." Buckley altered the purpose of regulation of money in politics to be "the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates' positions and on their actions if elected to office." Corruption only occurred due to "large contributions ... given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential office holders”, which justifies contribution limits for donors. Most recently in 2014, the Supreme Court struck down total contribution limits, not for individual candidates but in aggregate spending, in McCutcheon v. FEC. Before, individuals could give up to$48,600 to 18 candidates per election cycle (Sullivan 2014). The limitations upheld in Buckley would themselves be challenged using the language of Buckley.

               After Buckley, federal election laws changed drastically. Congress made further amendments to the FECA in 1976 and 1979 in response to First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti to create the division between hard money that is given directly to a candidate which is highly regulated and soft money not given directly to support a candidate which have few restrictions. In 1978 First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti applied first amendment rights to corporations investing in state-level ballot initiatives. The Massachusetts statute prohibiting the expenditure of corporate funds for influencing voters’ opinions infringed on the corporations’ “protected speech in a manner unjustified by a compelling state interest.” Bellotti said that such laws restrict the information a voter has access to and limits free speech. The next series of seminal cases come in the wake of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, also called McCain-Feingold. The law restricted the ability of political parties to raise and spend soft money on elections, and restricted issue advocacy advertisements paid for by corporations and unions 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election. In 2003 the Supreme Court heard objections in McConnell v. FEC by plaintiff Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Whip for the Republican Party. The court upheld most of the legislation as preventing "both the actual corruption threatened by large financial contributions and... the appearance of corruption.” The majority opinion was that not all political speech is protected from government regulation. The majority however was 5-4 and composed of a diverse set of views from more liberal justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and swing vote Sandra Day O’Connor. Seven years later a majority would overturn parts of this decision.

               Citizens United v. FEC is important not for originating the concept of money as speech but applying the concept to donors. At issue was the provision from McCain-Feingold which limited the time when campaign ads could play before an election. Citizens United is a non-profit, tax exempt, 501(c)(3) organization made to promote Conservative principles. They promote their agenda primarily by making documentaries. In early 2008 before the Democratic Party primary elections, it sought to run television commercials promoting its latest documentary Hillary: The Movie airing on DirecTV. The movie was highly critical of candidate Hillary Clinton, and could be described as an elongated version of a negative 30-second television spot. In January 2008, the United States District Court for D.C. ruled that the television advertisements for Hillary: The Movie violated the McCain-Feingold restrictions of campaign advertisements within 30 days of a primary. Dissatisfied with the ruling, Citizens United took it up with the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the majority ruled that Hillary the Movie could be shown, and that the McCain-Feingold provision was a limit on freedom of speech. The Court argued that because previous decisions had established that a right to free speech entailed spending money, limitations on independent spending by corporations and unions was unconstitutional. The restrictions did not survive strict scrutiny serving the previously established definitions of corruption, the legitimate state interest. Citizens United did not break new ground, the principles were established largely in the 1970s. Citizens United applied first amendment protections to independent expenditures, keeping in place the ban on direct corporate contributions established by the Tillman Act as well disclosure requirements.

               Several arguments have been made against spending to influence a campaign qualifying as free speech. The most popular is that corporations are not people, that is having the same rights as individuals since they are legal entities created by governments and given privileges. Corporate personhood precedes Buckley v. Valeo, corporations were given some legal rights in 1819 in Dartmouth College v. Woodward and fourteenth amendment protections in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1896. Further, the right to spend money on elections applies to non corporate entities like labor unions and political parties, as have restrictions. President Harry Truman’s veto message of the Taft-Hartley Act criticized the restrictions on union political contributions and expenditures as going to “prevent the ordinary union newspaper from commenting favorably or unfavorably upon candidates or issues in national elections. I regard this as a dangerous intrusion on free speech, unwarranted by any demonstration of need, and quite foreign to the stated purposes of this bill”.  

             The totality of arguments in favor of money as speech in politics is that the regulation of such activity engages in prior restraint of speech, viewpoint discrimination, does not induce corruption or the appearance of corruption, and does not serve a compelling government interest. Near v. Minnesota in 1931 established prior restraint as an unconstitutional limitation of speech. Prior restraint is when government approval is required for speech activity, which is what laws limiting campaign spending do as the funds are meant to be spent on information and advertising. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1990 gave the argument that spending by corporations with more money than the average voter distorts the political system and prevents others from being heard, both corrupting the democratic nature of the system and making the public believe the system is in favor of big money, the appearance of corruption. Buckley and Citizens United argued against this on the basis that restricting speech removes other points of view that citizens can consider when making their opinions. Restrictions do not equalize speech, it prevents speech and so engages in viewpoint discrimination against the amount of money or nature of personhood of the speaker. First amendment cases, especially relating to political speech, require strict scrutiny which is met by three requirements; a compelling government interest, narrowly tailored, by the least restrictive means as established in United States v. Carolene Products 1938. Corruption by simply giving money to a candidate is not what is at issue with restrictions on donations and expenditures, but influence which in some way is what democratic government is about. We are supposed to be able to influence the government. Banning direct contributions from corporations and unions serves a legitimate government purpose, but spending on elections where voters ultimately decide is influence which is not decisive for who gets into office. Alternatives like matching funds or publicly funded elections have been upheld since Buckley as have disclosure requirements. These laws are tailored to prevent quid pro quo corruption and maintain public trust.

            Money should be seen as relevant to the question of the first amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and its exercise by individuals and associations of individuals. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That the Supreme Court has in recent decades been more skeptical of limitations on activity related political speech follows the trajectory of a Court more involved in controversial issues, for better or worse. A kind of Pandora’s Box has been opened for both sides of the political debate about what constitutes civil rights and liberties, which in turn decides whether the judiciary becomes involved with what previously belonged to legislators. In light of these developments, one should be able to understand the argument on behalf of spending to influence politics as relevant to freedom of speech.

(Essay for my Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Class PLSI 315)

Language, Truth, and Logic by AJ Ayer

Mental ejaculations. That's what most of philosophy is if you follow Ayer. Metaphysics, theology, aesthetics, and much of ethics is cognitively meaningless. The whole book is pretty simple, it is a phenomenalist account of empiricism in which sense data is all that exists, but adds to traditional empiricist accounts the idea that a priori truths are not subject to empirical verification not because empiricism is limited, but that a-priori truths tell us nothing new. This is the crucial innovation of the logical positivists, that a statement like 2+2=4 doesn't need to be continually proved by experience or shows that there is non-empirical knowledge. Our logical constructions are just that, constructions of language related to the phenomenal world. 7+5=12 is true because 12 is defined as containing those numbers. This is course inspired by Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

All meaningful statements, from the radical empiricist view, are either analytic or synthetic. Analytic statements are tautologies, definitions of particular experiences which are either true or false by non-contradiction based on how they are defined. Synthetic truths are empirical statements about differently defined observations which aren't absolutely true or false but only probabilistically. When we say a causes b, we are really saying A and B occur close together enough that we assume the appearance of A brings to mind the appearance of B. All this an updated version of David Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact.

Ayer invokes the old Epicurean argument against those who say that the senses are flawed, limited, or only give us a picture of reality. The senses don't lie, they are passive. It is our expectations based on past experience about what will occur in the future that deceives us. And epistemologically, from what standard do we criticize our senses? How do we know there is a real world beyond our senses if we cannot trust the senses? In reality what we view as reality is a selective construction of certain experiences. The "underlying world" is just experience itself as it enters our perception before we consciously categorize it.

Of all the traditional philosophy Ayer describes as meaningless, only ethics survives in a very limited way. He gives an emotive account of ethics, which does not add truth or falsity to a statement but expresses either our approval or disapproval or a command for someone to do something. All else in ethical discussion is either a clarification of language or metaphysical and therefore meaningless.

The conventional wisdom if there is such a thing among philosophers is that logical positivism especially as presented by Ayer has been refuted. It is said that the verification principle, which gives meaning only to what can be based on sense experience, cannot itself be verified. Or that there isn't really a distinction between analytic and synthetic. Just reading it for myself, it sounds plausible. It is just so satisfying to believe all truths are either definitions or observations. So simple, maybe that's the problem.

For philosophy students, I think that the arguments presented here could be a way to get into analytic philosophy, or at least generate some interest. That's what it did for me, in a very accessible way.

The Environmental Philosophy

The environmental philosophy
9/28/14

There can be only one source to our thoughts, that which is sensation and that which derives from experience. The mind is born with no knowledge other than what has been impressed upon it. These impressions become experience as they remain impressed into our mind after the source is no longer apparent. This decaying sense is experience, which forms memory. Experiences and memories form ideas, which link experiences together according to the principle of expediency.

All the thoughts which are expedient are those which increase action in response to a sensation or decrease action away from a sensation.

There are two sources of knowledge, that of deduction and induction. Something is deductively true by definition, a given phenomena has characteristic assigned to itself and not to others. Something is inductively true by observation, a given phenomenon is observed with another phenomenon and we infer a connexion.

True knowledge involves these two principles. Our knowledge begins with experience but ends with verified knowledge.

Utopia by Thomas More

A classic of political philosophy and the book that launched the genres of utopian and dystopian fiction. It is the story of the traveller Raphael Hylothloday (however that's spelled) who tells of an island in South America which has abolished poverty by adopting communism. There is no money as all receive what they need from the government and contribute as much as they are able. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.

The most difficult thing to learn from this book is whether More actually supported communism, it is a guide for the church, or a social satire. The title represents this conundrum, utopia is Greek for both nowhere and a good place. More is actually a character in the story who meets Raphael, and at the conclusion notes how strange utopia is, but how some of its measures should be replicated.