The question is whether animals can have rights, and the respondent is Carl Cohen, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. His answer is that, although humans clearly have duties to animals that go well beyond treating them as mere units of meat, to translate those duties into ‘Animal Rights’ is to make a conceptual mistake.

He begins by pointing out that people intuitively accept on a routine basis that we have duties to others without those people having a right to demand that we fulfill those duties. A duty is something that a person must do in order to be morally or ethically sound. A right is something that a person is inherently entitled to. When someone has a right, we clearly have a duty to respect and protect it, but the reverse is not always true. A professor has a duty to teach his class in the most effective way possible. After all, the students pay good money in order to be able to learn. If he consciously chooses to teach class in a manner that he knows is less effective, he is wasting his students’ money and time, and he is violating a professional duty. But do students have a right to the most effective teaching possible? If they notice their professor choosing a less effective method, can they appeal to the appropriate authorities because the professor has robbed them of something they are clearly entitled to? The core question is where the source of the duty lies. Does the professor’s duty come from his dealing with a student who has a right, or does it come from his being a professor?

The translation to the topic of animals is simple: do our duties to animals stem from their being entitled to certain rights, or do they come from our status as humans? To a lot of people the distinction would seem insignificant and semantical, but it has serious implications. When we say that humans have the right to be free from suffering, we view it as a categorical imperative. If a person gets run over by a car, struck by lightening, assaulted, etc., we immediately (hopefully) come to the person’s aid to provide assistance. The person’s right is generally not contingent on any circumstantial factor. Animals, however, are attacked and killed millions of times over in nature every day. When a lion attacks an antelope, are the antelope’s rights being violated? If animal’s have an inherent right to be free from suffering, then aren’t their rights being violated all the time, and shouldn’t we do something about it? Clearly not. If we can argue that humans have no right to harm a chicken in a barn, but that a chicken’s being torn to pieces by a lion is perfectly acceptable, then we are not discussing animal rights. We’re discussing what humans should or shouldn’t do.

This reasoning can be taken a short step further. Assume the world chose to go vegetarian. Most would assume that the next logical step would be to release our domesticated animals into the wild. Putting aside the fact that 90% of our domesticated animals would probably die from starvation in the wild, it’s clear that many of the released animals would be killed by predators. Is this a moral problem? Is it not OK for humans to be directly involved in the killing of animals, but OK to be indirectly involved because we took the first step that eventually led to their death? If a vegetarian thinks that this scenario is acceptable, then he/she believes in human duties to animals, but not animal rights.

There’s obviously a lot of nuance that can be fleshed out on this topic, but I just found the general point interesting. It can still be taken to either a vegetarian or omnivore conclusion, but I think it adds a level of depth to the debate that I was unable to appreciate before.

NYT - Economic View - Obama’s Difficult Choices on Medicare Spending

Healthy pursuits become bad only when we lose sight of the bigger picture in which they are supposed to fit, such as a fulfilling and meaningful life. We can and often do fall very quickly into making an idol out of excellence, letting it keep us from those pursuits that, while they may not give us as strong a sense of accomplishment or social affirmation, derive their value from something far deeper and even more vital to our lives.

That brings me to the main observation of this post, which is that, as people become increasingly concerned with improving and perfecting so many aspects of life, moral perfection, what I would call an excellence of the conscience, gets very little discussion. Just think of how many people wake up and think about the definition in their abs, the style of their outfit, their grades, their social status, their career, and a million other things, well before they’ve considered their relationship with their parents or their spouse, whether they’ve been charitable enough, or simply whether their motivations in interacting with people are really sincere. How many people truly place above eating good food, having good clothing, and a good career, just being good.

It’s easy to say that the secularization of the world has a lot to do with this, and perhaps it does to an extent, but I don’t buy that a person’s not being religious defaults to their not caring about being a good person. There are many ‘religious’ persons who lack the emotional commitment to being good for good’s sake, separate from any gain it might bring them. Surely theological disagreements may play a role in people being unwilling to commit to a particular sense of what ‘good’ is, but there are so many ethical and moral universals that transcend religious disagreement. A person with a good heart will know that speaking harshly to a waiter who accidentally delivers the wrong dish is unacceptable, regardless of their theological affiliation.

Many will speak on this topic as a reflection of society’s downfall. That sometime, somewhere long ago people were truly good, and only recently have we become indifferent to moral excellence. I think that’s a bit wishful. The world has definitely become less religious in a sense of people following doctrine less legalistically, but there is a huge difference between religious orthodoxy and being internally motivated to live life in a way that pleases God. Even during the golden ages of the major religions, I doubt that the percentage of people with strong consciences was much higher than it is today.

I honestly don’t have a solid diagnosis for why people place having a good conscience so low on the totem pole. All I can do is make the observation. Perhaps it’s a concern that is just easier to silence, because we don’t have television advertisements, U.S. News Rankings, and paychecks pushing us towards it.

In retrospect, I may even be wrong in referring to all of this as ‘moral excellence,’ which implies an accomplishment/acts-centric attitude as opposed to one committed to the beauty in goodness itself. Semantics? Maybe. I will say that, as society becomes more and more hierarchical and goal-oriented, speaking even of morality in terms of inherent beauty can be difficult without feeling overly sentimental and esoteric.

My claim is simple: that is elitist. Let me clarify. What does it mean to be an elitist? Let’s take a look at Dictionary.com’s definition:

The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.

So an elitist is someone who believes that, simply because they belong to a particular group, they are superior to others. My point is thus made clearer. “People of the people,” these self-proclaimed anti-elitists who snidely rebuke
anyone engaged in reasoned social criticism, believe themselves superior by virtue of siding with the masses. Their indiscriminate use of the elitist label makes them anti-elitist elitists. Sure, I may be bending the definition a bit, but the point sticks.

I’m surely not denying that some people hide behind social critique as a mechanism for constantly placing themselves one step above others, but I’m confident in saying that this happens far less often than the anti-elitist elitists would have us think. The next time someone issues a well-articulated statement about why society should change its ways, engage them, argue back, use that wonderful brain of yours. Just don’t revel in your indifferent mediocrity.

I am not a shy person. In fact, in general conversation I can often be too overt with my feelings and thoughts. I am usually very expressive, and often forget that the average person is not so keen on communicating personal feelings. People too often confuse introversion with general social anxiety. Large, noisy crowds do often make me anxious, but socializing itself does not.

My difficulty with general socializing has less to do with anxiety or fear than with what one might call a feeling of ‘emptiness.’ This feeling often occurs when interacting with people whom I know I cannot really be myself around, and who ultimately have no interest in my company beyond some gain-oriented motive. It’s strange to say, but I really do feel more alone when surrounded by “networkers” than when I am actually by myself. It’s as if my own thoughts serve as good company, but forced, fleeting conversation makes me incapable of hearing them, and true emptiness sets in. I am not a loner, but good company, in a deep sense, is hard to come by.

Adaptability is a skill that every person must learn in life, lest they live in a bubble. But the process of adapting can take on many forms. I am learning to adapt in a way that moderates my discomfort with particular environments, without altering my knowledge of and desire for something more. I think that is what it means to live in, but not be one of the world; to walk calmly in the darkness, while never letting go of the light inside.

Here are a couple of things all reasonable people should be able to agree on:

1. Fee-for-service needs to go - I think that dangling dollars in front of people can be very effective at bringing about optimal behavior in a wide variety of fields, but healthcare isn’t one of them. I’m not saying that doctors do not deserve a good income. No one’s advocating that we go french-style and pay our doctors the equivalent salary of an engineer with a four-year degree. I only think that their income needs to be derived in a way that doesn’t produce perverse incentives to give patients a million-dollar workup when a proper physical exam would do. Imagine if a car salesman, who expects to profit from your purchase, also got to choose the exact car that you end up buying. Would you really expect him to maximize the value you’re getting?

I’ve been exposed to specialists operating under a fee-for-service model (back home in Texas) and under a fixed salary structure (here at Harvard), and I can tell you that the behavior is very different. Salaried physicians have more incentive to analyze the patient’s history, engage in dialogue, and plan out an individualized strategy. They don’t make more money from cutting your consultation down to 15 minutes and bringing someone else in to do more tests on. Fee-for-service physicians, however, love requesting expensive MRIs and CT scans, and suggesting expensive surgical procedures. It’s obviously not going to be as clear-cut across the board, but anyone with an elementary understanding of economic incentives will admit that our medical financing structure serves us premium-priced thoroughbreds, when your everyday mule would do.

2. Costs need to be controlled - Related to #1: somewhere, somehow, someone needs to come up with an idea for forcing medical providers, hospitals, etc. to start focusing on cost-effectiveness, taking the Sharper Image culture out of medicine. Capitation seems to be making a comeback, albeit in a slightly different form. Maybe it’ll work this time. ‘Performance-based financing’ is also getting some talk, but the details don’t seem very encouraging. Democrats plan on using the government, with its concentrated bargaining power, to force costs down. Republicans I think envisioned a more transparent, consumer-driven system not unlike shopping for other consumer products. Quality reviews, prices, etc. would be readily available and patients would vote with their feet.

The Republican perspective has a lot of appeal, but from a practical perspective it doesn’t seem like it could happen anytime soon. There are simply too many technological, cultural, and legal hurdles to establishing a fluid, consumer-driven medical market. Thus any immediate changes to get the system moving are going to come from the supply side, with the government pushing the buttons.

3. More prevention - Duh. Americans are ridiculously ignorant of proper nutrition and general preventive medicine. Even many of the college educated will walk to the mail-box while eating a cheeseburger, call it exercise, and then drink vitamin water, thinking it makes up for not eating vegetables. This also means more general practitioners, who have fallen into serious short supply ever since their specialist friends started earning 2-3x as much money. (see #1 and 2)

4. We need some kind of public plan - This has become somewhat of a contested issue, but I think it’s almost obvious that the gap between Medicaid and those who can afford private health insurance has grown so wide that an expanded form of public insurance needs to be created. From the limited amount of reading that I’ve done, a truly hybrid insurance system has always seemed the ideal structure for our country; with a robust private high-quality insurance market for those who are willing and able to pay, and a public option to pick up the rest.

The big problem emerging is just how that public plan should look. The best analogue that I can think of is transportation. A good portion of people are able and willing to pay the cost of owning a car. For that price they gain convenience, privacy, and greater power over where and when they can get to places; over the past year in Cambridge, I’ve thoroughly missed that power. As a society, we accept that some form of transportation is a virtual necessity, even if you can’t afford a car, so we provide public transportation. It isn’t nearly as convenient as having your own car, and it shouldn’t be, but it meets your needs.

Similar to cars and public transport, some kind of gap needs to exist between the private and public health insurance options to ensure: (1) that we can afford the latter and (2) that the public option doesn’t kill the private market. Imagine if instead of providing buses and subways, cities provided publicly subsidized cars that were close to the quality of a Honda or Ford. First, the tax revenue necessary to support such a program would be enormous. Second, nobody would buy Fords or Hondas anymore.

So at the moment, as Congress debates health reform, my biggest fear is not that a public health insurance program will be created, but that it’ll go too far. In the 2004 election, John Kerry suggested modeling the new public insurance on the generous BCBS plans offered to federal employees. For those who don’t know, the BCBS federal employee program is actually more generous than a lot of the health insurance purchased on the private market. That is exactly the kind of thinking that would kill private insurance and require an astronomically large amount of additional tax revenue. If we’re going to provide healthcare for the less fortunate, while trying to keep the majority of our system intact, then we need to approach it from a welfare mentality. Public insurance is built on other peoples’ money, and when you’re using other peoples’ money, it’s impractical and unjust to demand convenience and treatment equal to everyone else.

Several months ago, Uwe Reinhardt, a political economist at Princeton, wrote that Americans suffer from cognitive dissonance on health policy. On the one hand, we claim to want a private, market-driven, choice-oriented healthcare system. On the other hand, we have an underlying discomfort with the idea of giving people different quality levels of healthcare. It ends up happening subtly anyway, but if a doctor explicitly told a low-income patient that he was administering a higher-risk, lower-quality, but cheaper treatment than he would give to someone of greater means, many would be outraged. Unfortunately, this is exactly the reality that we are going to have to come to terms with if we want a sustainable, but not morally reprehensible market-focused healthcare system.

Americans are slowly reaching the tipping point where they’re going to have to reconcile this inner turmoil of values. I honestly don’t know whether we’ll choose to prioritize equality and go the route of Canada, France, the U.K., etc., or if we’ll try to create a “public bus system” of health insurance, ensuring that the basic healthcare needs of all are met, while leaving a clearly delineated higher tier for those with adequate means. The greatest danger is that Congress will completely skirt the issue by trying to shove high quality, private healthcare into a universal coverage model. The end result: financial suicide.

I personally think that, while the present healthcare disparity in our country is clearly unjustifiable, at some point, healthcare is a commodity, with supply, demand, and price-tags. I don’t think that we can say that every citizen has a fundamental right to $100K gamma knife neurosurgery any more than we can say that everyone has a right to a Mercedes. Ensuring that there is a market of high-priced insurance to pay for such a procedure, however, drives the kind of development and progress that eventually trickles down and creates benefits for everyone in the long-term. So my vote is clearly in favor of the “public bus” option. I wouldn’t be outraged if the U.S. tried to replicate the European models, though, even if the budgets of those systems are starting to grow increasingly strained, resulting in stricter cost-controls (in Texas we call it rationing). Let’s just keep our heads focused on the fact that, even with inequality, a well-funded and sustainable healthcare system is preferable to an under-funded aspiration that eventually results in collapse.

So what was the magical production number of our downsized local slaughterhouse to ensure higher quality and better treatment? Twelve. As in, two more than ten. Let’s do a percentage calculation. 12/20,000 = .0006 x 100 = .06% or let’s say about 1/1600th. If in order to ensure a sustainable, ethical meat supply we need to shrink our practices down to 1/1600th of their present scale, we are completely screwed. Three-quarters of the world will starve, and the rest of us who can afford the boutique food will just have more open pasture to put our pampered animals on. Imagine if we all had to drive cars that are 1600 times more energy efficient than SUVs in order to be environmentally friendly. Screwed, I said. Skuh-rude.

Oh, but the letter went into such beautiful detail about how the animals are free-roaming, only eat pasture, and live stress-free lives in ruminant nirvana. It even ended with the words “in solidarity.” In solidarity? I knew it. They’re communists. Ok, I’m only kidding. I’m starting to think that many of these people would be better off just going vegan, leaving meat consumption for the conscientious, but not completely squeamish. Chickens in barns? No way. Grain-finishing cattle? Deplorable. I’m not even sure if they understand that animals have to be killed in order to become meat.

Seriously though, how far do we have to go in food policy until it’s blatantly obvious that personal aesthetics have completely taken over any rational ethical judgment? We’re going from a society obsessed with myopic efficiency to one that behaves as if the more inefficiently and expensively we produce our food, the better it is.

No matter how imperfect the world may be, the fact that it’s withstood the tests of time commands respect.

A simple message, but it really lies at the core of a lot of my politics. I consider myself a progressive, in the sense that I think we should always question our way of life to ensure that how we actually live matches the values that we claim to hold dear. I believe that, in the aggregate, the world has gotten better throughout history, even if it’s sometimes more gratifying to hold an idyllic, fantasized image of how things used to be. Hypocrisy abounds so much in our world that I sometimes have to catch myself when I begin to notice glimmers of cynicism. All that being said, perfection should always be subordinate to durability, meaning that, no matter how strongly we want to sweep away the world’s injustices, cautious incrementalism should always guide our decisions.

I feel that ‘Liberals’, and by liberals I mean actual liberals and not the millions of people that crackpots like Rush Limbaugh like to label as such, often fail in this regard. Particularly on economic issues, but also in other areas, their devotion to ending suffering leads to quick-fixes, while neglecting the long-term effects of such policies. My conversations with them have also revealed a cynicism of business and economics, as fields somehow developed by “the man” to keep the masses under his foot. If anything has the potential of reducing global poverty and suffering, my friends, it’s business and economics. Start reading.

Conservatives, and again I mean actual conservatives and not anyone who doesn’t worship President Obama, often fail in the opposite regard. They reflect little interest in effective progress, pragmatic or not, but constantly emphasize the dangers of change; throwing around apocalyptic slippery-slope arguments about how the sky will fall and families will collapse if we deviate from the America that God himself wanted us to be. They also tend, particularly in my home state of Texas, to hold a pathological distrust of government. I can’t tell you how many conservatives I’ve known who talk about the “free market” as if they never went past the introductory chapter in their economics textbook. Let’s get something straight here. Adam Smith, staunchly anti-protectionist (as am I), was by no means against social safety-nets. K?

So to liberals I say, “think more long-term, think results.” Yes the world is imperfect. Yes their is unfairness and injustice, but we need sustainable solutions, not expensive band-aids. I’m sure it pains you to think that many of the wealthy actually deserve their success, and that inequality can be a good thing, but it is so. To conservatives I say, “start giving a damn.” I’m sure you’re all charitable people, and that paying taxes doesn’t give you the satisfaction or social benefits of personally donating money, but let’s not kid ourselves here. Governments can do some things very effectively. Stop the crap about liberty and tyranny. You’re not and never will be John Locke.

(1) An affiliated country club or golf course

(2) A wine cellar

(3) Anything purporting to be ‘Tuscan’

If you live in a ‘Tuscan’ style home with a wine cellar and near-by golf course or country club, please keep your distance.  Surely there’s a cheese-tasting course or spa appointment you’ve got to get to anyway.

Corporations: The sentiment around the room of a hundred or so Harvard Law students ranged from “WTH was that?!?” to “I just got my rear-end handed to me.” Not much of a range, you say? Exactly. The exam was terrifying. Thank you Mr. visiting professor from Berkeley clearly reflecting a sadistic desire to show us lowly HLS students who’s boss. You win.

I’m going to take this final bit of time to make a confession to the world, or at least to the 1 or 2 people who probably inadvertently come across my blog. I took a performance enhancer yesterday, because I felt completely burnt out having back-to-back finals. Yes, I said it. My au natural policy took a hiatus in the name of competition and gold star-dom. I had half a serving of half-diluted Earl Gray tea 30-minutes before my corporations exam. My punishment for this trangression? Four hours of insomnia. Stay away from drugs, kids. They ain’t no good.