(Disclaimer: as ought to be obvious, I’m not an academic philosopher and haven’t even read all that widely. But one way or another, everyone needs to think about these questions)

I’ve long supported Bob Goodin’s view that utilitarianism (or, more generally, impartial consequentialism) is best understood as a public philosophy, rather than as a system of personal ethics. But that raises (or begs, if you must) the question of how we should think about personal ethics. And it leaves open the question of where, if at all, rights fit into this picture.

After thinking about it for a bit, I reached the view that some kind of care ethic was the best way forward. There’s not as much literature on this as I would have hoped. For example, there’s no entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, only a subsection in the article on Feminist Ethics. So, in thinking about this, I’ve relied pretty heavily on a couple of sources, most importantly Nel Nodding’s Caring, which focused on the “relation between the one-caring and the cared-for”

There are lots of complex issues here, most obviously the questions about gender roles raised by the treatment of care ethics as specifically feminine/feminist (the first edition of Caring had the subtitle “ A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education”. In today’s rather dystopian world, the more urgent need is for a masculine ethic of care, replacing the poisonous alternatives that are offered to us.

My primary interest, though, is in how to relate an ethic of care in our personal relationships to the need for impartial fairness in political and social choices. Beginning with Sidgwick, many utilitarians have taken the view that utilitarian calculations should guide individual ethics, so that we should be willing to sacrifice the interests of our own family, friends and neighbours (in the sense in which Jesus used this term) if doing so would yield a marginally greater benefit to distant strangers. This is, I think, impossibly demanding, and, quite literally, inhuman.

Most of the intuition=pump thought experiments used by critics of utilitarianism (trolley problems, Jim and the Indians etc) rest on some version of this problem, putting us into a direct relationship with some person and then asking us to sacrifice them for a net benefit we are expected to take on faith. Care ethics doesn’t give us simple answers here, but it does provide a better way to think about them (Nodding has some interesting discussion).

On the other hand, while care ethics must have implications beyond direct personal relationships, I don’t think it can provide the basis for a fully formed political philosophy. Rather, I think our care for our neighbours needs to be extended to their neighbours and so on, in a way that extends impartially to the whole community of concern and ideally to the whole of humanity.

And whereas the relationship between one-caring and cared-for must include judgements about what is actually good for the cared-for person, when we are thinking about more distant members of our community, we must leave such judgments to them. That gets you most of the way towards a non-paternalistic and impartial version of consequentialism, though it doesn’t require the psychological baggage that comes with utilitarianism.

As ought to be obvious, I haven’t worked out this derivation in any detail. But it still seems to me to be preferable to Harsanyi-Rawls veil of ignorance exercises where you attempt to make judgments for yourself while stripping away any actual knowledge about what kind of person you are.

I’m always attracted by three-term formulations, so have got to “care ethics for people, consequentialism for governments”, its not surprising that I reached a third term “and deontology for judges”. That sounds like a formulation I would have picked up by osmosis somewhere, but I can’t find it. ChatGPT (which I use as a search engine in preference to Google) confidently attributed it to Simon Blackburn, but was then unable to come up with any link supporting this.

Regardless of its originality or otherwise, I think this is correct, and roughly corresponds to the distinction between act-consequentialism, which should guide discretionary policy decisions, and rule-consequentialism, which implies setting out and enforcing rights and obligations. Courts and judges are part of the machinery for doing this, and should act in accordance with the law, rather than seeking the best outcome in any particular case.

While the formulation looks sharp, the boundaries between personal, political and legal choices are not as neat as it might make them seem. The personal is political and legal decisions inevitably reflect political and social conditions one way or another.

It’s also worth pointing out that this isn’t a simple division into independent domains. Rather, the legal system is downstream from politics which in turn is downstream from a personal ethics of care.

All of this is really messy, and I’m sure it can be picked apart pretty easily if anyone cares to try. But it still seems to me to be a big improvement on attempts to apply a single ethical framework, like utilitarianism or contract theory, across the board.

Affordability is not the answer

Affordability is not the answer One of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign.

The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions, has stalled in Congress and won’t apply to the current election. A further reason for optimism is that Trump is now so unpopular that he would lose even a rigged election, as long as there was some attempt to preserve a pretence of electoral competition.

These points may be correct, but they are contingent and circumstantial. The bigger lesson of 2024 is that a plurality of American voters are willing to vote against democracy, and a majority are willing to vote against or abstain. That’s a depressing conclusion for believers in democracy, and one that runs against a lot of previous evidence. Although there have been many previous periods when government crises have produced a demand for a “man on horseback”, most voters have almost always rejected such candidates. Democracies have been overthrown by coups or (in Germany’s case) by governments which lacked majority support, but rarely in free elections.

So far, we have seen no such rejection. Trump is massively unpopular, but mainly for reasons that apply to many previous presidents: he promised lower prices and instead delivered higher inflation, and he promised to keep the US out of Middle Eastern wars, but started them instead.

By contrast, his attempted overthrow of the constitution in 2021 is barely mentioned. His immigration policies, with masked secret police, concentration camps and deportation of people who have lived in America since infancy, are disapproved of by a slender majority, but remain by far his most popular policy position.

In these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that Democrats have chosen to focus primarily on “affordability”. Relative to the “cost of living”, this framing at least has the merit of implying that wages might be part of the problem. But it does not provide a basis for a repudiation of the Trump regime.¹ Rather, the implied model is one of normal politics, where the Republicans will return to power when and if the economy performs badly under the Democrats.

The one bright spot has been the last-minute shift to focus on Republican corruption.

While concerns about the future of democracy are abstract, corruption is comprehensible and hard to conceal. Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat owed a fair bit to aerial photographs of his country estate, complete with two swimming pools (trivial compared with Trump, but Hungary is a much poorer country). The difficulty is the (historically well-founded) belief that “both sides do it”.

American politics has long been characterised by practices that would be regarded as dubious or unthinkable in many other countries — ambassadorships for some wealthy donors and pardons for others, pork-barrelling on an industrial scale and much more.

And, although the US is not alone in this, there has been widespread toleration of sexual harassment and worse. Trump has extended these precedents and gone much further, with leading Republicans following suit.

But for someone not paying attention, it’s easy to imagine that this is balanced out by the feckless Hunter Biden, or by fraudulent welfare claims. Nevertheless, recent surveys suggest that corruption is emerging as a major concern for voters, and that more people perceive the Republicans as the party of corruption.

Assuming that the Democrats win control of at least the House of Representatives, and that Trump does not succeed in overturning the result, a central focus of the remainder of Trump’s term should be investigations aimed at establishing universal awareness of Republican financial and moral corruption. The broader view of an “Epstein class”, with complete immunity from any consequences, is part of this. To be successful, the perception must match reality. That means Democrats must not tolerate any such corruption on their own side, regardless of the political costs of action.

This seems to be happening. Although he was given the benefit of the doubt for too long, Graham Platner (widely seen as an ideal candidate) was dumped once credible accusations of sexual harassment emerged.

The elephant in the room here is Bill Clinton, not only for his numerous instances of sexual assault and harassment, but for his corrupt pardon of financier Marc Rich. Democrats as diverse as Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders have condemned his actions, but he is still generally regarded as a “party elder”, regularly invited to campaign for Democratic candidates. That needs to stop.

The next step is to extend the critique beyond Trump and his immediate circle to Republicans in general, to the billionaire class that backs them and to the Supreme Court, most obviously Thomas and Alito. There’s ample evidence here, but it will take time to establish it.

Harder, but crucial, is to establish the link between Republican corruption and subversion of democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, billionaire financing and, of course, the insurrection. Only when the majority of Americans, including former Trump voters, conclude that voting for Republicans was not just a mistake but a moral failure and abdication of democratic responsibility, will it be possible to undertake a serious reconstruction of US democracy.

¹ Unless affordability is linked to corruption. We can’t have nice things because Trump and the other billionaires have stolen the money.

When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by  Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money,Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions” .

I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.

Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised, to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy” You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian” has neither.. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.

I take the architectural metaphor to mean that the global economy depends critically on the supposed role of the US Navy in protecting maritime trade. This is stronger version of a claim commonly made by navalists, to the the effect that US naval expenditure is a form of global foreign aid, offsetting the notorious stinginess of the US in ordinary aid (now massively exacerbated by Trump and Musk).

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The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.

This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.

Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.

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The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with the facts. The picture is one of inexorable advance, citing parties such as “the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.”

The New York Times doesn’t mention that:

• The right-wing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders’ party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.
• The right-wing Swedish coalition, which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role, was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining.
• Farage’s Reform party has also split, and Farage himself is now massively unpopular.

There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year, and the party is now splitting. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost office in 2023 and has now also split.¹

Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.

Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.

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Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front page of its website.

A day or two later, the story disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the NYT found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump’s presidential library.

I found one story in USA Today suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that’s about it.

The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stock markets barely reacted.

Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn’t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump — he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires.

Some are relatively trivial, like steam catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential, like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemies. But he never abandons them for good.

And, in the case of cash handouts, he’s had one big success — the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 — as well as some smaller ones.

In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.

But the US is not a serious country.¹ Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn’t even bothered to vote.

Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal,² sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.

As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time.

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¹ Phillips O’Brien has been making this point with respect to foreign policy. ↩

² Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that “this is not who we are”, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are. ↩