Matt Zeitlin

So Matt Yglesias is on some sort of reporters junket in China until June 2 and so he has a stocked lineup of guestbloggers, including me, helping him hold down the fort. Do check it out.

So Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Kentucky’s open senate seat and son of Ron, has caught some heat for implying/saying that he wouldn’t have voted for certain provisions of the Civil Rights Act — namely those that restricted “private” behavior of business owners and what not — on basic libertarian grounds that the government has no right telling people who they should associate with.

It’s worth noting that, following Matt Yglesias, that the position that the core provisions of the Civil Rights Act are not in fact good ideas isn’t necessarily racist, it is instead that Paul has “an excess of honesty and ideological rigor” and simply extends basic libertarian principles to the natural conclusion that the government has no right to interfere with private association and business dealings.

But just because Paul — and, at the time, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley — came to this conclusion in a different way than, say, Strom Thurmond, doesn’t really exculpate them, it is just really good evidence for why serious libertarianism is a bad political philosophy and leads to abhorrent real-world results. That a fairly simple application of a set of political ideas leads one to conclude that truely entrenched and institutionalized racism is something that the government can’t really do anything about is grounds for rejecting the political philosophy.

A similar dilemma often comes up in moral philosophy. For example, one could argue that Kantian deontology would lead you to the rather absurd conclusion that you shouldn’t lie to a murderer who is asking you where his next victim is; and, on the other hand, simple act utilitarianism might lead you to the absurd conclusion that it is permissible – neigh, mandatory — for a doctor to kill a perfectly health person who came into a hospital so that he could give his organs to five people who needed them. Now, some moral philosophers will simply bite the bullet and insist that the underlying principles and premises are so strong that they still support these apparently absurd conclusions and that our moral intuitions are simply incorrect. But most don’t and instead try to come up with moral systems that roughly align with our very strong intuitions. Most political thinkers do this do. That Rand Paul apparently doesn’t isn’t a sign that he is admirably principled, it is a sign that his principles lead him to oppose the core legislative means of rooting out white supremacy and are thus bad principles.

Will Saletan seems to think that he’s an irrefutable argument that we should be really  angry at Richard Blumenthal and not “give him a break” for his fibbing about his military service. Saletan’s argument isn’t so much an argument as a record of a bunch of times that Blumenthal, in his role as Connecticut Attorney General, went after people and corporations for misrepresenting stuff even if they weren’t explicitly lying.

Now, call me callous or cynical, but this just seems very good evidence for why this type of hypocrisy either isn’t real hypocrisy or just isn’t something we should care about very much. A voter in the Democratic primary or the general election isn’t an Attorney General who has a mandate to enforce laws and go after wrong doing with the power of the state behind him; instead, their obligation is to vote for whomever they agree with most or think will be the best Senator. Saletan has to explicitly argue for why Blumenthal’s fibbing should mean that someone shouldn’t vote for him. Sure, in the abstract, one can use the hypocrisy as a justification for thinking less of Blumenthal or not liking him personally or something like that, but there’s really no good reason to think that the standards that an Attorney General uses to pursue prosecutions or legal actions are the same a voter should use in evaluating personal conduct that has nothing to do with the law.

This isn’t apropos of anything more than I conversation I was having with a J-School friend of mine today, but the entire idea of press freedom, especially when it’s instantiated in the form of things like campaigning for the release of imprisoned journalists in countries ruled by oppressive, freedom hating regimes is an odd one.  That’s because the freedom of the press, and especially the idea that imprisoning journalists for political reasons is wrong, is pretty clearly an instrumental value that’s a subset of a broader idea that regimes should allow open debate, discussion and criticism by their citizens. It just so happens that much of this criticism is done by journalists, but it can also be done by dissidents, opposition leaders, religious leader and so on.

For example, when Iran imprisoned Akbar Ganji, it wasn’t necessarily bad that they imprisoned a journalist who exposed bad things the regime had done in the press and as a journalist– after all, journalists can be criminals too and even freedom hating regimes can legitimately imprison people for good reasons — it was bad that they were imprisoning people for criticizing the regime. People can’t pretend, then, that press freedom is some kind of apolitical good that should be protected because it’s just a good thing, when you say that imprisoning people like Akbar Ganji is wrong, you’re making an explicilty political statement in support of a political notion of the freedom to criticize.

Of course, journalists are going to be more willing to devote time and resources to protect their own,and that’s understandable, but they should think that, if they think imprisoning journalists is a major wrong, then they should support groups like Amnesty International who advocate for all political prisoners.