Apparently I have some really good timing with my posts since just today the 9th circuit apparently handed down an interesting decision about the fair housing act. Here is a link to the post about it on the Volokh Conspiracy that gives a good description of the decision. Also Eugene Volokh has an interesting legal argument that these restrictions are unconstitutional (I’m not endorsing all the policy views there of course). While there may be no direct logical connection I tend to find it suspicious that many people accept abortion as a constitutional right to abortion but would reject a right to be free of government interference in these sorts of cases.

Also for those of you who wanted a very rough idea of what the Federal Fair Housing act Prohibits here are two very basic explanations.

Finally I just wanted to end with a little rant about how absuredly totally ridiculous the portion of the Fair Housing Act that prohibits discrimination against people with children is. Not only can you not prevent people with children from living in a building/dwelling (except for old people homes) you can’t even place them in a certain area to leave those without children a little relief nor can you deny them access to the recreational facilities in your building. Additionally it’s pretty damn annoying and stupid that one isn’t allowed to create apartment buildings for singles or do most other things to create a good dating environment.

Absolutely NONE of the traditional justifications for anti-discrimination laws even apply to the children case. People with children are hardly an aggrieved or disadvantaged class and there is no history of discrimination. If anything it is the childless who are frequently required to support other people’s reproductive hobby who are the disadvantaged class. Unlike race, sexual orientation and the like the reason people deny families with children housing is not ignorance, prejudice or bias (everyone was a kid once) but is based in real behavior differences between children and adults. In fact the reason this law exists at all in a society where the vast majority of people like children is because of the real harms they create to neighboring apartments and costs they incur to the owner.

In short the provision about people with children isn’t an anti-discrimination provision at all but a demand that people discriminate in favor of children just because it sucks for some parents when they find it hard to find an apartment to live in with their children. But it also sucks for patents when they have to buy expensive clothes for their children, take them to the doctor, pay for extra airline seats when they go on vacation and so forth. Why not pass a law that says airlines have to price by the family so that a single person, a married couple, and a family with a gaggle of children all fly for the same rate? Or any number of other ways we could force single people to bear the extra costs that children incur?

But fine if we really must help parents find housing with their children then let’s just fucking give them money equal to the average extra rent it costs to rent a similar dwelling for a family and a single individual. As with all rationing system or other non-market solutions simply forcing people not to exercise their preferences (not letting us get together and have a no-child apartment building) is inefficient (not even praedo optimal). No matter what this sort of rule doesn’t belong in a law billing itself as being anti-discrimination.

So a week or so ago there was a story on the news (I think in the SF area) about a landlord who was likely to be sued/fined (by HUD I believe) for housing discrimination. The landlord in question apparently refused to rent to a tenant with HIV (a disability), but only because he was renting out an open room in a shared house (may even have been a shared room) and the other tenants objected to sharing personal space, especially restrooms, with someone who was HIV+. Apparently they feared infection.

While I believe there is a clear cut need for laws preventing discrimination by landlords but I don’t think that is a fair description of what happened in this case. Rather the landlord adopted a neutral policy of only renting to individuals the other house members found acceptable. Certainly this should not be an acceptable defense for apartments or other private residences. Indeed I suspect the reason that this isn’t now accepted as a defense is that some slimy building owners tried to use the objections of white families in the apartment buildings to keep out blacks. However, the presence of individuals in the same house is a wholly different situation. For the remainder of this post when I say ‘the law’ I mean to refer to the lack of an exception to the Fair Housing Act for decisions based on the preferences of ongoing occupants of a genuinely share housed.

As a policy matter applying discrimination law in cases like this is likely to lead to bad consequences. Unlike the business arrangement between the owner of my apartment and I which be bearable even if I didn’t get along with my landlord living in a shared house with people who resent/hate you is unlikely to be desirable. Thus the law only provides access to an undesirable commodity while at the same time restricting access to a very valuable one, knowledge that your potential housemates hate people of your race/religion/sexual orientation (some places don’t know about federally). Without this law your potential housemates would say upfront in their add, or at least when you applied, that they don’t like your sort. Some potential victims of discrimination will only find out after they move in that their housemates hate them (rented remotely) while others will just find themselves turned down for ‘personality conflicts’ after wasting their time applying to rent a room in a house the law prevented them from knowing was filled with bigots. Any change in outcome one can imagine such a law making is likely to be bad.

Also, this law puts landlords renting shared houses between a rock and a hard place. I mean what was the landlord in this situation supposed to do? Does he tell the potential tenant that the other tenants don’t want to live with him? Even that increases his exposure to a discrimination claim. Does he let this poor guy take the room without telling him he is walking into a house that doesn’t want him? Additionally letting this guy take the room alienates his current tenants. The whole situation provides a strong incentive for landlords simply not to rent shared rooms individually but instead rent the whole house out and let someone sublet. While this avoids liability for the landlord it also screws poor people who don’t have rich parents to countersign the huge initial rental.

Finally, even if we imagine a perfect world in which none of the unintended consequences or the difficulty with enforcement this sort of law still enacts a large cost. Choosing who one lives with is an important and basic autonomy that a free society should protect. Indeed, the housing laws recognize this fact and grant an exception from the discrimination rules for landlords living in the house and renting out only one room. However, giving this right only to owner-occupants effectively restricts it only to those rich enough to own their own homes. If an exception to the discrimination laws is justified for owner-occupiers there is no good reason not to grant it to renters choosing to sublet as well.

The impingement on personal liberty by this law doesn’t just affect traditional racists and homophobes. On it’s face the law also prohibits blacks who want to live with other blacks or jews who wish to live with other jews. Indeed, it seems quite reasonable to me to prefer to share a space with those of the same religious persuasion. For instance it seems particularly cruel to require a bunch of observant theists to let someone like me rent a room in their house. Most infuriatingly this law even prevents one from offering child free housing. Theoretically if I am trying to rent out a second room in my house (renting out two rooms puts you out of the exception) or sublet a room in a shared house I can’t choose a childless pair of adults over a mother and her squalling, peeing and generally horrible child.

One might argue that the law is rarely if ever enforced in these situations but that just makes it worse. Creating situations where people are punished because of someone’s moral whims rather than for breaking a publicly available rule is in and of itself a harm. Whether or not I get fined for advertising for childless renters or one of my gay friends gets punished for asking for another gay roommate should not depend on some officials attitude towards children or gays. Moreover, if the law shouldn’t be applied generally it is unclear what the justification for imposing it on some of the cases is supposed to be. Unlike classical anti-discrimination law there is little reason to believe this law will do anything positive to reduce prejudice in our society.

Also just because someone’s fears and preferences might have been born out of ignorance or from growing up surrounded by prejudice doesn’t mean they won’t be unhappy being forced to live with a person they fear/dislike. If there is an asian girl who was raped by a white guy and as a result is horribly afraid of living with white guys should we tell her, “Too bad. That’s just a prejudice formed from incorrectly generalizing from one incident.”? In this AIDS case just because this potential housemate wouldn’t really give them HIV doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be afraid. Besides, while the risk isn’t great living in a house with someone who has HIV really does increase their risk of exposure (say he cuts himself, or he is really hot and they can’t resist trying to sleep with him). Wouldn’t it be better for everyone involved for the government to simply give AIDS patients extra money which they could use to pay any premium price they may have to pay in the housing market thereby finding the solution where the people who least mind living with the HIV positive (and will make him the best housemates) are the ones who actually do.

Ultimately if we have good reason to believe a law or policy will be effective in ending racism and prejudice we should be willing to endure substantial costs to implement it. However, an individuals ability to choose who they live with is an important and psychologically significant right we should try to extend to as many citizens as possible (including various sorts of housing assistance). In the absence of a good reason to believe the law will help we should not infringe on the known good of individual autonomy in choosing their housemates. When we have good reason to believe that the policy will actually hurt those it is designed to help and comes along with a raft of undesirable side effects it would be absurd to let mere moral indignation at the practice the law bans (that we can’t even define in the law) justify keeping it.

So frequently one hears people (mostly women but some men too) about how the women in mass media are ‘unnaturally’ skinny or create unrealistic expectations. Now some of this is no doubt just undirected bitching, the same way guys always bitch about assholes getting the girl. However, other people clearly think this is a serious problem that can be changed. For instance the rule barring exceptionally skinny models from some fashion shows. Or this article about Leonard Nimoy’s nude photographs of heavy women. A perfect example of the attitude one usually hears is this snippet from the article.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

Notice that the essential argument leveled against skinny models and actresses is that most women can’t look like them. In other words the complaint really is that models are prettier than most women. This is like objecting to holding up famous scientists as role models for children (or scientists) because most people are not smart enough to live up to that standard. Of course the standard objection is that beauty is culturally relative so, unlike intelligence, it’s not true that models are objectively prettier than most women. Of course this accepted point of view is very much in evidence in Nimoy’s comments.

Mr. Nimoy …. admits that before he began this project, it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven, that a fat body in Africa is treated quite differently from one in the United States. “In some cultures their weight is a sign of affluence: their husbands can afford to feed them well,” he noted.

As I’ve argued before valuing heavy women as status symbols is not necessarily the same thing as finding them pretty. However, studies do seem to back up the claim that weight preferences vary from culture to culture (though it is more unclear for the waist-to-hip ratio). But one should remember that these cultures face different pressures so it is unclear if you could have a culture valuing heavier women where, as in the states, it is poverty associated with obesity. In fact, far from revealing the comforting fact that beauty is malleable these results are suggestive of the far more troubling hypothesis that beauty always tracks social status.

But so what if beauty is culturally relative? This doesn’t change the fact that every society will find some women to be prettier than others. Whether our culture finds fat women, skinny women or women with one breast to be the most attractive our models and actresses will still be chosen to be the more attractive than the vast majority of people can hope to achieve. Sure we could replace diet pills and fad diets with other forms of cosmetic alteration but the idea that we could change the fundamental human drive to improve our looks or stop rating some people as more attractive than others is absurd. Besides, as I’ve observed before (e.g. with my post on enzyte) their is nothing special going on here with body image. Their is always a trade off between showing people/items/situations people find desirable and making them feel bad because they lack them.

Now perhaps one might think that weight is a particularly harmful thing to base attractiveness upon. Indeed there are some reasonable arguments for this point of view. Since weight often appears to be under individual control but often isn’t really people tend to be blamed/blame themselves for looking unattractive. On the other hand weight is partially under our control which means that to some degree the ‘goods’ of attractiveness will be biased towards those who care the most about them. One also might argue that a focus on weight encourages particularly harmful patterns of behavior (anorexia). However, the evidence for this point of view is scanty at best.

Despite what is often claimed most sex symbols are within the healthy weight range and the vast majority of men prefer women who are not unhealthily skinny. Certainly anorexia is a problem but it seems to be a particular sort of psychological issue that drives women to exaggerate a sexual characteristic far beyond what is actually considered attractive. I fully expect that if our model of attractiveness was heavier than the average woman we would have girls fattening themselves up to dangerously unhealthy levels. Given almost any notion of an ideal body shape their is some way to exaggerate that (in the direction it is from average) that is unhealthy. Frankly I find the whole thing with banning super skinny fashion models particularly ironic as these models are chosen for a certain aesthetic look and are not what people find ideally attractive and some women naturally have these body types at some ages. Thus the same groups that oppose telling women their body type isn’t okay are doing just that.

I know I’ve posted about this before but the whole situation just boggles my mind. It seems that these people who protest skinny models identify skinniness with attractiveness so strongly themselves they don’t realize that most of the things they object to are a consequence of any shared notion of beauty.

Now this doesn’t mean that projects like Nimoy’s aren’t beneficial. Our culture would certainly be better off realizing that their preferences about looks may not be shared by everyone. While I think a shared culture will always entail a common notion of attractiveness (the unfortunate tracking of social status) the harms could be mitigated by greater awareness of minority opinions about looks. We could also do with less moral derision of overweight people as this greatly increases suffering. Despite the example of cigarettes it is possible to believe that (too much of) something is really unhealthy and a bad idea without imbuing it with moral significance.

This is still a bit rough around the edges but I wanted to finally get this argument out there.

There are two possible views one might have about content (mental, linguistic or whatever). One view holds that there are certain events/relations/objects that intrinsically have certain content. That is what makes certain objects/states express content is a brute ontological fact. Searle’s belief that certain sorts of experiences just come with satisfaction conditions is a good example of this view. At the most basic level some components of the experience posses content like properties directly not as a consequence of any other facts about them. Alternatively you might not add content to your fundamental ontology and instead try and layer it on afterwards. For instance any attempt to define content in terms of counterfactual dispositions or other non-content bearing property. Let us call the former view content non-reductionism (CNR) and the later view content reductionism (CR). Note that the CR/CNR distinction is almost exactly analogous to the debate about ontological reducibility/irreducibility for experiences.

Generally any physicalist will hold CR as they obviously will be reluctant to add content to their fundamental ontology. While not logically required anyone who believes in content externalsim (e.g, supporters of the causal theory of reference) or is otherwise a proponent of broad mental content will endorse CR. Though some philosopher might endorse a crazy view like the extended mind hypothesis and thus reasonably hold both CNR and externalism it is a very rare and extreme view. The original and primary aim of most externalist theories is exactly to explain what gives rise to content they tend to be an alternative to views which hold that content is a fundamental constituent of reality.

In short most popular modern theories of content (Searle excepted) and almost all proponents of externalist theories of meaning endorse CR. This is particularly ironic as CR is incompatible with there being any fact of the matter about content externalism or a substantive dispute between internalism and externalism. Ultimately CR forces one to view content as a mere convenient approximation, much like classical physics and the supposed content it talks about is, like the rigid body, merely a useful idealization.

By definition content is not a part of the fundamental ontology under CR. Thus any statements about content are either fictional/formal (like mathematical statements about ideal objects) or reduce to a claim about objects in the fundamental ontology. Assuming that content claims aren’t totally formal then any physicalist must believe that claims about content are really heavily disguised claims about physical events. For instance the Kripke causal theory of reference must be interpreted as a (very high level) statement about the behavior of point particles (or strings or whatever). Already this should give one reason to doubt the more categorical claims about content as almost always high level approximate theories have exceptions.

In such a situation what it is for some theory of content, like Kripke’s causal theory of reference, to be ‘correct’ is simply to make accurate predictions. Since none of these theories aspire to give exact predictions about fundamental particle we can only evaluate it’s virtue as a convenient approximation as we do with classical mechanics. For the physicalist content externalism is only as good as the physical predictions it makes. In other words Kripke’s theory of reference is (approximately) ‘true’ if it gives accurate predictions of when people say, “Ohh yah he was referring to the such and such Socrates,” plus similar reactions.

Understood in this fashion we have no good evidence for content externalism. I tend to think our best predictive theory is the semi-internalist fold theory. But regardless of where you think the evidence lies the best theory of content would be an empirical matter to be studied by psychologists/anthropologists/social scientists. It doesn’t even make sense to employ the sorts of thought experiments about twin earth commonly used to argue for content externalism since the possibility that content externalism is literally true isn’t even on the table. Besides these thought experiments would now come out against content externalism. For instance it’s absurd to make the predictive claim that people wouldn’t (eventually) respond to swamp man as if he really was referring (even with words he has never heard).

Now I expect a few objections at this point. One might claim that content externalism is an idealization and these thought experiments shows the internal coherency of the idealization. However, once we know a theory (like classical mechanics) to be literally false purely theoretical virtue takes a back seat to pragmatic value and the theory fails in it’s original intent either way. Also one might try and claim that content externalism was merely a definition of reference, i.e., saying it is a fully formal theory. Yet if so this whole area of philosophy is not only misdirected but actually misleading. Content externalism would then be a pretty uninteresting branch of mathematics with fancy names that tricked us into thinking it was saying something about pre-theoretical notions of content or meaning.

The argument goes through just as effectively only assuming CR rather than full on physicalism. It doesn’t matter whether we have to reduce claims about content to fully physical properties or to some other (non-intrinsically contentful) set of properties. In either case it just doesn’t make any sense to talk about theories like content externalism being ‘true’ in any sense other than an approximate or trivial one. They certainly aren’t saying what they intuitively claim (there are actual states that have content prior to the theory and the theory describes how that content works).

The upshot of all this is that there are pretty much three choices we can take as philosophers when dealing with content.

1) Give up Kripke and Davidson and (like Searle) accept that content is really a basic constituent of reality.

2) Give up the idea of content as anything but a folk concept and leave it to the scientists to generate/test theories about how we actually assesses content.

3) Accept that we can only give approximate predictive type theories and try to come up with a simple theory describing actual human/societal norms about assigning content. Effectively we would be doing much the same thing that people do when they compile the rules of grammar. There is nothing ‘true’ or deep about the rules of grammar but a precise agreed upon statement can be helpful as might also a catalog of the societal norms about ascribing content. This too might require experiments.

So I’ve blogged before about how stupid the “No on is illegal” slogan is. It’s an absurd and wholly unjustified parsing of a common linguistic form. I mean would anyone raise a protest about the use of the term ‘illegal bicyclist’? Obviously not because an ‘illegal bicyclist’ is someone who is bicycling illegal just as an ‘illegal alien’ is someone who is illegally in this country. Neither term suggests that the person’s mere existence is illegal. Not only is this slogan wrong but it makes the whole movement look silly, stupid and irrational.

Terms aside in some sense I very much support the goals of this movement. Quite clearly the number of immigrants the US is taking in is nowhere near an unsustainable amount (consider them as a percent of population to earlier waves of immigration). Also while I used to worry that highly skilled immigration would cause a brain drain I’ve been convinced that in fact it causes the exact opposite. Since highly skilled workers retain many ties to their homelands it actually encourages high tech development in the home country as well as bringing economic benefit to the US.

However, I’m bothered by the fact that most of these protesters seem to support the status quo. The more I learn about illegal immigration from Mexico and further south the more I’m appalled at the horrible price it exacts upon the immigrants themselves. This price is primarily an indirect result of the illegality. Rather than being able to cross openly migrants must put themselves in the hands of coyotes and rather than taking out loans or other financial instruments for legitimate passage to the US they must catch free rides on gang controlled trains or otherwise engage in dangerous types of transit.

Illegal immigration really does need to be stopped in the same sense that illegal drug use needs to be stopped. We need to figure out a way to legitimatize the process to eliminate the harms that illegality brings. A guest worker program combined with amnesty and real employment enforcement is a good start but we need to both give the workers the chance to stay here permanently (even if we deny them social services that we might give citizens) and ensure that we allow in more guest workers than we are now allowing in illegal immigrants. Also we must exempt them from minimum wage laws otherwise their will be too much incentive for companies to hire genuinely illegal migrants. I know many people might not like the idea of exempting them from minimum wage but it’s a choice between legally doing so and the harms of illegal immigrants working for below minimum wage.

I know I’ve posted about this far too many times already but articles like this one just make me so mad. So you don’t have to read the stupid article it calculates the “salary” a stay at home mom would make if she were paid for all the aspects of her “job” ($138,095 if you cared). While this might be a useful number to know if you were trying to figure out the right settlement in a wrongful death suit or the amount of child support a woman who abandons the family should owe the implied valuation of the work a single mom puts in is so absurd I don’t even know where to start.

One place might be to note that if you added up all the work anyone put in cooking their own dinners, doing their own shopping, cleaning the house and the like they would all deserve a large ’salary.’ So if we subtract all the work housewives would have to do for themselves anyway it would be a much smaller number. Not to mention the fact that housewives are paid for their work (housing, food, spending money). But what about the work stay at home women do caring for the children or husband? This question is best answered with another question: what about the benefit women get from the children and the chance to stay at home with them?

I propose a simple test for these child raising fairness questions. Would you feel the same way if we replaced children by dogs. Imagine that we find out that it is primarily men who want to get dogs (though women benefit from them too) and that therefore men spend far more time and effort caring for the dog than women do. Would you conclude this was obviously unfair? Of course not, like any other hobby it is only reasonable that the parter who gets more benefit out of it take more of the responsibility. In particular many men would probably not choose to have kids on their own if they had to put in the work for them that women generally do.

Ultimately one can’t simultaneously hold that women are getting a raw deal in terms of child rearing, are intelligent enough to know this, yet still desire to have children as much or more than men do. If women thought that doing what they do for the kids was a net negative they could simply choose not to have them. Moreover, since women often choose to be stay at home mothers without any threats other than the fact the man’s unwillingness to make this sacrifice to have kids it gives us prima facia evidence that they must judge the trade off to be worth it. Sure one might argue that this is a result of an income disparity in the workplace between men and women (but once you discount childrearing choices much of that disappears) but even so it is not an additional harm women suffer but actually a minimization of the salary unfairness (rather than taking a lower salary they would prefer to stay at home).

Ultimately people’s choices are the only real evidence we can get about their preferences and hence the only grip we have on what is a fair distribution of work and reward. If we take these choices into account we can’t possibly conclude that the greater work women put into child care is unfair though it still might be better social policy to encourage men to take a greater hand. On the other hand if we refuse to take choices into account for fairness and we really believe that having children is the great benefit people seem to assume it is then it is the people who don’t have children who are really getting the raw deal and deserve extra vacation time and other benefits.