The Anti-Male Craziness at Yale

Link: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2013/09/another_anti-male_move_at_yale.html (via shareaholic.com)

What is "nonconsensual sex"? Rape, right? Not at Yale, where the term can be applied to a variety of acts generally accepted as minor offenses or non-offenses in the real world. Since 2010 Yale has become the national center of efforts to whittle away the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault in campus hearings. Those efforts, undertaken to appease "activists" who want more males convicted in campus proceedings, have included Orwellian word games to expand the definition of rape. One of the first signs that this was happening came in 2011, when Yale concluded that causing someone to worry could come under the heading of sexual assault. In a footnote in a lengthy 2012 report on this new process, issued by deputy provost Stephanie Spangler, Yale conceded that the university uses "a more expansive definition of sexual assault than is commonly understood." Claiming that a "worry" constitutes sexual assault is expansive indeed.

This issue, alas, seems unlikely to be explored by the Yale Daily News. Campus newspapers can play an important role in standing up for students' rights--an excellent example is the Duke Chronicle, whose coverage of the lacrosse case was consistently on-target, and whose articles and editorials demonstrated an impressive mastery of the importance of due process.

The Yale Daily News, unfortunately, doesn't appear up to the task. In an editorial last Friday, the paper complained of the "University's ineffective and embarrassing response to sexual violence, as we learned that those guilty of sexual assault remain on our campus." Had the editors actually read any of the Spangler reports, or Yale's own policies, and discovered that at Yale, being found "guilty of sexual assault" doesn't mean the same thing that it does anyplace else in New Haven?

The editorial asserted that "the preferred punishment for nonconsensual sex at Yale must be expulsion." Again, keep in mind that Yale's definition of "intimate partner violence" includes threatening your roommate with "economic abuse." The "preferred punishment" for such an offense, according to the student newspaper, "must be expulsion." Expulsion for withholding money from a girlfriend or causing her worry? That ought to satisfy the "activists."

From the comments:

the solution, Yalies (and at many other liberal campus locations) is not to date the women there. Don't speak to them, don't look at them. Leave the room when they come in, if possible.
Make the femenazis and their collaborators own it.

Posted by garrett | September 11, 2013 1:26 PM

Posted on September 11, 2013 13:26

Bill Lawrence:

What happens when men give up on Yale? Do we lose out on some career advantage or does Yale stop being taken seriously as an institution?

Posted by Bill Lawrence | September 11, 2013 1:58 PM

Allergic to Bull: Prejudice Towards George Zimmerman

Link: http://allergic2bull.blogspot.com/2013/09/prejudice-towards-george-zimmerman.html

The George Zimmerman case, of course, was based on prejudice from the beginning and most of it seemed to be racial prejudice.  Right at the beginning of the case involving the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I started to get a "Duke non-rape case" vibe.  Read that analysis: virtually everything I wrote held up, and what little didn't was merely because of the development of the evidence.  In the Duke case, no one was there but the accused and the accuser, and yet people half a country away acted as though they were personal eyewitnesses, and absolutely convinced of the lacrosse players' guilt.  But by the end of it, it turned out they were guilty of nothing more than a rowdy college party and positively innocent of rape.  And the same was true in the Zimmerman/Martin case.  Right away people acted like they knew what happened—often with blatant appeals to racial bigotry (i.e. "white people have been victimizing black people therefore this allegedly white man must have victimized Martin"), when what should have happened was for everyone to wait for all the facts being in.

Yesterday, we saw a microcosm of that exact same dynamic when the news hit the web that George Zimmerman had been arrested, for allegedly threatening his wife with a gun.  The press and much of the Twittersphere declared Zimmerman guilty almost immediately... based on the word of a woman who has just recently been convicted of perjury.  I mean, there is no guarantee that a perjurer would lie at every opportunity (though rules barring perjurers from testifying do make a great deal of sense), shouldn't that have given some people some pause?

But before long the story started to fall apart.  According to MSNBC (whose bias against George Zimmerman is well-documented), the police said that George didn't have a gun, and according to USA Today, Shellie Zimmerman has admitted that he didn't.  So it should be no surprise that CNN is reporting that the police absolutely will not file charges against George Zimmerman.  Shellie Zimmerman's credibility is utterly ruined.

Mind you there is still plenty of disinformation and misinformation, as well as unanswered questions, involved here.  News outlets, for instance, keep reporting that Shellie and her father are "not pressing charges."  You see, on the 911 call, Shellie claims George punched her father and smashed her iPad.  But lawyers know that the term "pressing charges" is largely mythological.  The victim doesn't get to decide if charges are filed.  The state does and they can go forward despite the victims' insistence that the charges be dropped.  But having worked in a domestic violence unit in a state district attorney's office, we often defer to the wishes of the victim in a domestic dispute if only because we expect the victim to lie about what happened.  Also the CNN article I cited above treats it as proven fact that Zimmerman smashed her iPad, but I am doubtful that they really know this to be true.

Update: Can I call it or what?  Now Shellie is back-peddling.  Previously she said he had a gun, now she is saying she assumed he had a gun because he touched his stomach.  But why didn't she just say that, instead of positively stating that he was armed and touching his gun?

Review & Outlook: More on Fracking and the Poor - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324094704579065432802151184.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

A new report from IHS Global Insight estimates that fracking added the equivalent of a cool $1,200 to real household disposable income on average in 2012.
Lower costs for raw materials were passed on to consumers via lower home heating and electricity bills and lower prices for other goods and services. Wages also increased from a surge in industrial activity. On present trend, IHS predicts that unconventional oil and gas will contribute more than $2,000 a year by 2015 and $3,500 by 2025.
Overall the industry lifted economic growth by $283 billion last year—$533 billion in 2025—and was responsible, ahem, for $74 billion in federal and state tax payments. The politicians should be doing cartwheels that the figure will rise to $138 billion in 2025.

More Zimmerman stuff

Boo-ya spelled backwards has additional posts on the Zimmerman trial.

PART 15: TALK AT THE SCENE, TALK ON THE STAND?

Why did Zimmerman talk when he did, and why didn't he when he didn't?

Only Zimmerman and his defense lawyers can tell you why he didn’t take the stand, but I can give you an educated guess: He didn’t have to. The state’s case had imploded even before the defense began theirs, with virtually every prosecution witness turning into a defense witness. Zimmerman’s walk-through at the scene, when everything was fresh in his mind, was already in to the jury…and it was the best evidence. There was simply nothing important enough to add.

I will continue to recommend that people involved in these confusing, high-stress incidents not submit themselves to detailed questioning and re-enactment in the immediate aftermath. That said, it worked for George Zimmerman. I will continue to warn my students that they can expect to take the stand to explain why they shot their attacker…but in this case, George Zimmerman had already done that very well during police interrogation, and had nothing to gain by repeating himself.

The Impact on the Black Community

When propagandizing media made this case out to be something other than what the evidence showed it was, a hoax had been played on the whole country. It was a particularly cruel hoax on the African-American community.

The cops

In the first installment of this series, I mentioned that the cops were among those to thank for justice having been done in this case. Let’s look at that.

Every commentator has noted that it was the police witnesses called by the state – civilian dispatcher and community watch coordinator and evidence technicians, as well as the responding and investigating officers – who cut the legs out from under the prosecution’s weak case before it could ever get to its feet. Fewer commentators have spoken of the price paid by many of those honest members of the criminal justice system.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee, a highly respected CLEO (chief law enforcement officer) resisted powerful demands from elected officials to file a case even though he knew there was nothing there. He did his duty and did the right thing. He was fired for that.

Detective Chris Serino was the lead detective in the case. He took a lot of heat for not wanting to file a case because he knew he didn’t have probable cause. He wound up as a patrolman back in uniform.

Doris Singleton was in the role of investigator on the night of the shooting. She handled things competently. She comforted Zimmerman when she saw he was emotionally devastated by having had to end a young man’s life. And she was at the rank of patrol officer at the time she testified almost a year and a half later.

Ben Kruidbos, IT director in the office of the special prosecutor, realized that the office had failed in its duty to turn over full discovery material to the defense. He fulfilled the office’s duty and got that information to Zimmerman’s defense team. As soon as the trial was over, special prosecutor Angela Corey fired him for doing what she should have done.

The aftershocks

MP3s

Link: http://www.aprilwinchell.com/audio/ (via shareaholic.com)

A collection of odd and offbeat MP3 tracks

Laffer Curve

(From a letter to Jerry Pournelle)

For the most part, I accept the Laffer curve as fact.  The 0% and 100% tax rate boundary conditions are obvious, and some sort of curve must connect the two points.  We can also offer a hand-waving argument to the effect that the revenue is nonzero at all points in between.

While I haven't read any of the technical literature on the Laffer curve, the popular discussions seem to assume there is one true shape of the Laffer curve, rather like Mark Twain's one true shape of the Mississippi River.  I'm not sure I buy that.  Indeed, I think it's a mistake to treat the subject as if the tax rate is the only relevant variable.

For example, I imagine there are different Laffer curves for different income levels, as the poor have fewer options than the rich for sheltering income. 

It's probably an error to treat the tax rate as if it's a single variable.  The tax rate is a function of the income level in many cases.  The exact shape of this function probably has considerable effect on the shape of the Laffer curve.  The shape of the curve is not given by R = L(tax rate), but R = L(tax rate(income level)).

And to make matters worse, discussions of the Laffer curve all seem to assume the economic system is in equilibrium. Economic activity will have one pattern if tax rates are assumed to be fixed over time, and a different pattern if rates are expected to change.  A tax holiday of 18 months will encourage a lot of activity, but it will be biased toward the sort of activity expected to pay off in a year and a half or less.

Just as non-equilibrium thermodynamics becomes very complicated very quickly, so I suspect does non-equilibrium economics.   (FWIW, Google finds 10,300,000 results for "non-equilibrium economics", and Wikipedia has a stub on the subject.  "non-equilibrium thermodynamics" yields 322,000 results, but Wikipedia has a much meatier page on it.)

I think the tax holiday would be good because it selectively rewards the people who produce, as opposed to extending unemployment benefits which rewards people who are not producing.  But that's another area where equilibria can be perturbed.  If you print money to pay unemployment benefits, eventually the money illusion takes hold, and each unit of money is depreciated in proportion.  But the unemployed benefit because they represent a local increase in the concentration of money.  Inflation is called a "hidden tax"; printing money to pay unemployment checks is "hidden redistribution" due to temporary variations from the equilibrium. 

Just a few thoughts, and some work is now calling for attention.

Gender pay gap: The familiar line that “women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar” simply isn’t accurate. - Slate Magazine

Another analysis of the 77% myth...

Link: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gender_pay_gap_the_familiar_line_that_women_make_77_cents_to_every_man_s.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=sm&utm_campaign=button_chunky (via shareaholic.com)

How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let's shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.

The point here is not that there is no wage inequality. But by focusing our outrage into a tidy, misleading statistic we've missed the actual challenges. It would in fact be much simpler if the problem were rank sexism and all you had to do was enlighten the nation's bosses or throw the Equal Pay Act at them. But the 91 percent statistic suggests a much more complicated set of problems. Is it that women are choosing lower-paying professions or that our country values women's professions less? And why do women work fewer hours? Is this all discrimination or, as economist Claudia Goldin likes to say, also a result of "rational choices" women make about how they want to conduct their lives. 

Tags -- I'm it!

I've been making a lot of posts on this blog, but most of them have involved forwarding articles that pique my interest or curiosity. A lot of these articles are ones I decide I want to be able to find later.

I have a number of tags I've used over the years, intended to make it easier to find posts on certain hot topics.

I just looked in on the blog today and realized I've let too many posts stand without tagging.

The first step is to assign the "*untagged" status to everything with no tags at all (since Blogger doesn't have a way to filter the display to only posts with no tags), and then start editing the ones that only say "*untagged" to give them the tags they deserve.

In a lot of cases, I'm also going in to posts that have only a link and posting an excerpt of the linked piece.

This should be enough work to keep me busy for quite a while.

Darwin Derangement Syndrome (DDS) Strikes Again!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html
Jonathan Haidt has been exploring the underpinnings of moral thought and philosophy.
On one hand, it gives a theoretical explanation of the ways in which left-wing and right-wing morality differ, and it comforts the right to hear their morality is sensitive to more factors than the left's is.

On the other hand, when it gets to the notion that our morality may be hard-wired, and that it's the result of evolutionary processes, people get to be a little uncomfortable.

January 13, 2008
The Moral Instinct
By STEVEN PINKER

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug?

And which do you think is the least admirable?

For most people, it’s an easy question.

Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers.

Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done.

Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.

So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.

The Moralization Switch The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.” The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.” We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate. Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles. Reasoning and Rationalizing It’s not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love? A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom. A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner. Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).

When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another.

But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

A Universal Morality?

The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.

The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be. Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes). People given diagnoses of “antisocial personality disorder” or “psychopathy” show signs of morality blindness from the time they are children. They bully younger children, torture animals, habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery.

Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger their own children and can’t think through even the simplest moral dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save his dying wife.

The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?

This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.

Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky’s theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize?

The Varieties of Moral Experience When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality. The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm. Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.) Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.) Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation. Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.) Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.) In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism.

The Genealogy of Morals The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.

The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking”). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions. Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn’t pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.

Juggling the Spheres All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

Is Nothing Sacred?

And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.” And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves.

Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn’t follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. “Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were “selfish” in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish. Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear. In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.

Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.

Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone always sacrificed themselves for another’s good would be as preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did. Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don’t make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process. Is Morality a Figment?

So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself?

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things. The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it. Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings. Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound.

At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries’ agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other’s concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend.

As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.”

Reynolds’ Law

I haven't been blogging much lately, because I haven't had many thoughts that haven't been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

I dub this Reynolds' Law: "Subsidizing the markers of status doesn't produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them." It's easy to see why. If people don't need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they'll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

Link: http://philoofalexandria.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/reynolds-law/ (via shareaholic.com)

This applies to housing, college, and other material things.

It also applies to social institutions. 

I have to wonder what will happen to marriage when the law effectively subsidizes the status of married couple for people who previously couldn't qualify for it.

Massad Ayoob � Blog Archive � THE ZIMMERMAN VERDICT

Massad Ayoob (Boo-ya spelled backards.  Coincidence?) has written extensively on the Zimmerman verdict.  Here is a 14-part series on the trial and verdict.  (At least 14 parts so far.  The latest one was today.)

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/13/the-zimmerman-verdict-part-1/

Several blog followers have asked me why I haven't written here (or spoken anywhere) on this, the most important armed citizen case of our time. The answer is this:

I did write on it once, on Friday, March 23, 2012.  The following day, I received a phone call from Craig Sonner, George Zimmerman's original legal counsel, to retain me on the case as an expert witness for the defense.

In the meantime, to get the commentary and analysis of the case that most of the mainstream media denied you, go to the excellent day by day writing of Andrew Branca, an attorney who specializes in this sort of case, at www.legalinsurrection.com.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/16/zimmerman-verdict-part-2-the-unarmed-teen/

"Unarmed?" Actually, NO.  The history of adjudicating deadly force actions shows that Trayvon Martin was "armed" two or three times over.
First, the haters (like the prosecution) assiduously ignored George Zimmerman's statement that while Martin was "ground-and-pounding" him, Martin saw Zimmerman's gun in its now exposed holster, told Zimmerman that he was going to die tonight, and reached for his victim's pistol.
If I'm your criminal attacker, you don't have to wait for me to shoot you before you can shoot me to defend your life, and you don't even need to wait until the gun is in my hand. If I announce my intent to murder you and reach for a gun, I'm bought and paid for right there.  And it doesn't matter whether the gun I'm reaching for is in my holster, or yours. That's why every year in America, when thugs try to grab a policeman's gun and are shot, the shootings are ruled justifiable.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/17/zimmerman-verdict-part-3-who-started-it/

The evidence indicates that Zimmerman didn't get out of his car until the operator asked where the suspicious person was, and where the police should meet Zimmerman, the complainant.  Taking that as a request for information, Zimmerman obligingly got out of the car to gather the intelligence that seemed to have been implicitly requested of him.  He was, after all, the elected (not self-appointed) captain of Neighborhood Watch, and his function as Eyes and Ears of the Police had been drilled into him and the other Watch members through the Police Department itself. When the call-taker asked if he was following the man, Zimmerman replied in the affirmative. He was then told, "You don't have to do that."

The evidence indicates that he stopped following Martin at that moment. His former rapid breathing returned to normal and wind noise from his phone stopped, consistent with his testimony that he stopped following and had lost sight of Martin. The dispatcher did not "order" him to stop following, and later admitted in court that he had no authority to do so. Nonetheless, it was clear that Zimmerman was simply following Martin to keep him in sight and report his whereabouts, not "pursuing" with any intent to "confront."

Who struck the first blow? Virtually all the evidence supports Zimmerman's account; no evidence contradicts it, and no evidence supports the theory that Zimmerman assaulted Martin first, in any way.  If as some conjecture Zimmerman had drawn the gun at the first, why did he wait until his scalp had been split open on the sidewalk and his nose smashed before he pulled the trigger? And if Martin really believed he was in danger from the man watching him, why didn't he simply call the police from the phone he was already speaking on?

Within the totality of the circumstances presented in court by the prosecution itself, it would seem that saying "Zimmerman started it" is like saying that a woman was raped "because she asked for it."

It's about evidence, not about "what-ifs." The simple fact is, no matter what some want to believe and no matter how much the brainwashers of the media have twisted the facts, there is no solid evidence to support any theory other than that Martin didn't like being watched, attacked Zimmerman violently, and was shot in self-defense by the man whose head he had been smashing against the sidewalk with potentially lethal effect.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/19/zimmerman-verdict-the-stand-your-ground-element/

The evidence showed incontrovertibly that Zimmerman, straddled by his attacker in the MMA mount and being savagely beaten while supine, could not possibly have retreated or otherwise escaped at the time he pulled the trigger.  His wise lawyers knew that from the beginning, Craig Sonner when I spoke with him in March of 2012, and Mark O'Mara and Don West when I discussed it with them a couple of months later.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/21/zimmerman-verdict-part-5-the-gun-stuff/

The take-away is not to avoid such unmeritorious courtroom attacks by carrying a .25 auto with an empty chamber. The take-away is, be able to logically explain your choice of gun and method of carry.  The defense did exactly this, to their credit.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/23/the-zimmerman-verdict-part-6-what-if-versus-what-is/

"What if Zimmerman hadn't gotten out of his car, and just driven on to his destination, the Target store?"  Well, certainly, the confrontation would not have occurred. But that pales in comparison to what if Trayvon Martin had not attacked him and smashed his head into the sidewalk? In following a strange man who was looking into windows in a community riven by burglaries and even a home invasion, Zimmerman never broke the law. Indeed, had it not ended in death, most would have appreciated him taking notice and calling the authorities…as people had done earlier, when the head of the homeowner's association in that community had chased down and captured a burglary suspect.

"What if" is not the standard of the law, nor the standard of logic. "WHAT IS" remains the standard for both.  The evidence, not a hypothetical "theory of the case," is what counts in every aspect of the real world…the real world of the courts, and the real world of the streets.
A duly empanelled jury determined the truth from the facts in evidence and the testimony presented.  Even the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses overwhelmingly favored the defense.
And that was only the evidence the jury was allowed to see.  There was much more evidence which was confirmatory to Zimmerman's account of a clear-cut self-defense shooting. We'll get to that soon in this space…and why the jury was not allowed to see it.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/24/zimmerman-verdict-part-7-why-the-jury-didnt-learn-about-trayvon-martin/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/26/zimmerman-verdict-part-8-the-quantity-of-injury-argument/

Professionals in the justice system knew that the prosecution was desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel when they tried to make it look as if George Zimmerman wasn't justified in shooting Trayvon Martin because Martin hadn't hurt him badly enough yet.
Anyone smart enough to pass a bar exam and research the laws of self-defense and use of force, would know that you don't have to sustain a gunshot wound before you shoot the criminal gunman pointing his weapon at you. Similarly, you don't have to let the guy fracture your skull or spill your brains onto the sidewalk before you are justified in stopping him with lethal force.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/28/zimmerman-verdict-part-9-the-propaganda-factor/

When Ms. Corey announced that she would bypass the grand jury, it was clear to any criminal justice professional that she was going to indict him on her own, via an offer of information. There is generally one reason why a chief prosecutor will take a case away from a grand jury: the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn't think a grand jury that has heard the evidence will deliver one.

At this point, the die was cast. The show trial was inevitable, and America had experienced a triumph of propaganda that would have been worthy of Joseph Goebbels or Josef Stalin. Even today, after the opportunity to watch three weeks of intensive trial broadcast live minute by minute which brought much of the truth to light, a majority of Americans seem to be ignorant of the facts and still convinced that a self-appointed vigilante racially profiled a black child and murdered him.  Never mind that the facts in evidence clearly showed otherwise.

When that TV station in California realized they had been pranked on the "Sum Ting Wong" broadcast, they admitted it and apologized.  The mass media, sadly, has not done the same in the Zimmerman matter.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/31/zimmerman-verdict-part-10-the-semantics/

Anyone who has trained with me in the last few years has heard me talk about what I call "combat semantics." Smart debaters know that many words in our language have multiple shades of meaning, and they'll often try to tell people that one of those words meant "B" when you used it, when in fact you really meant "A". We saw this in more ways than one in the Zimmerman case.

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/04/zimmerman-verdict-part-11-rating-the-lawyers-defense/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/08/zimmerman-verdict-part-12-rating-the-lawyers-prosecution/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/12/zimmerman-verdict-part-13-angela-corey/

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/08/18/zimmerman-verdict-part-14-the-judge/

"in defense of carbon dioxide" : Search Results

http://blog.heartland.org/2013/07/in-defense-of-carbon-dioxide/

Which Americans in denial about race? | Cogitating Duck

Link: http://cogitatingduck.com/2013/07/22/which-americans-in-denial-about-race/ (via shareaholic.com)

Over the past week, conservative media have consistently hammered away at the issue Elspeth Reeve and her Atlantic Wire colleagues deny: African-Americans, particularly young men, commit violent crimes at a grossly disproportionate rate.  Blacks make up about 10 percent of the population, but are responsible for half of all violent crimes, including murders.  And about 90% of those murder victims are African-American.  It's simple math then that nearly half of people murdered in America are black.
The Wall Street Journal has run a number of excellent editorials on the problem.  Black conservative Jason Riley opened the salvo by reminding us how far back the problem goes.  Consider his quoting of a prominent black civil rights leader:

"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

And this week, Shelby Steele–another Black intellectual off of the liberal reservation–explicated on the concept of "poetic truth," a cudgel with which today's morally diminished civil rights leaders try to exercise influence.  Steele authored one of the more compelling books I've read.  It's full title says it all: White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

Education Spending Soars, Test Scores Stagnate | National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/355271/education-spending-soars-test-scores-stagnate-deroy-murdock (via shareaholic.com)

As this chart by the Cato Institute's Andrew J. Coulson irrefutably illustrates, the trouble with U.S. education is not a scarcity of tax dollars thrown in its general direction. The spending curve of government outlays on K–12 education from 1970–2010 is essentially an upward-sloping 45-degree angle. The curves representing reading, math, and science test scores are all 0-degree angles. These commonly are called flat lines.

Can GMO corn cause allergies? Don’t believe Elle’s scary story. - Slate Magazine

Link: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/can_gmo_corn_cause_allergies_don_t_believe_elle_s_scary_story.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_3

Shetterly's narrative is emotionally compelling, but only that; it just doesn't withstand the critical scrutiny of science. Let's start with her central premise: Genetically modified foods, or more specifically genetic modified corn, can cause allergic reactions. Is that even possible? Can the process of genetic modification create allergies?
"Not likely," said Pamela Ronald, an internationally respected plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis and a pioneer in developing sustainable agricultural solutions. "After 16 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no documented adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops."

But what about the undeniable fact that the rise in autoimmune disorders tracks GMO consumption? The rise in such problems, including allergies, started long before GMOs were introduced. Incidences of these same conditions across U.K., Europe and in other countries where there is no consumption of GM foods match U.S. trends. To put this claim in perspective, the upward slope also tracks with the cumulative wins of the New England Patriots under Bill Belichick, the GDP of China, and indeed the increased consumption of organic foods over a similar period of time. In other words, the alarming connection that Shetterly alludes to in her piece is completely random.

Then there's the question of whether Shetterly's quoted sources stand by their quotes. Let's put ourselves in her shoes as she set out to make sense of her illness and recovery. She could have presented a broad range of opinions. She could have carefully portrayed the measured views of physicians and scientists whose research in this field has been vetted by the medical community. But that's not what happened.
Shetterly quotes a few experts who assert that genetically modified foods are safe, but the majority of her sources seem sympathetic to her plight and Mansmann's GMO-corn allergy theory. I talked to or exchanged emails with almost all of them. The feedback was consistent: Her article was variously described as "ridiculous" and "absurd." To a person, the sources I reached complained that Shetterly had misused their statements. 

Reference:Guns and Self-Defense by Gary Kleck, Ph.D. [feedly]

Reference:Guns and Self-Defense by Gary Kleck, Ph.D.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/07/referenceguns-and-self-defense-by-gary.html

via feedly.com

Supply-Side Economics in One Lesson : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Link: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/supply-side-economics-in-one-lesson#axzz2a1PEyRIA (via shareaholic.com)

Obama’s Misleading Obamacare Claims

Link: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-misleading-obamacare-claims/?utm_source=AIM - Daily Email&utm_campaign=5495ae5eb9-email072513&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c4ddfc8d9d-5495ae5eb9-221577449 (via shareaholic.com)

The New York Times, in its oft-cited article, said that "State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York."
"Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly."
At least the Los Angeles Times had the conscience to write that these types of "savings" are an aberration. "New York, for example, announced this week that the average premium will be 50% lower for individuals who buy health coverage on their own, in large part because the state has some of the highest rates now," they report (emphasis added). "New York may have been more ripe for savings than other states," notes Bloomberg.
And even The Washington Post, a champion of Obamacare, points out, "But it shouldn't be shocking: New York has, for two decades now, had the highest individual market premiums in the country." USA Today led with the title "Most states won't see N.Y.'s drop in insurance rates." This The New York Times cleverly left out of its reporting.

Look deeper at preconceptions about race and self-defense - Cathy Young

Link: http://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/young-look-deeper-at-conceptions-about-race-and-self-defense-1.5744782 (via shareaholic.com)

As proof of pervasive bias, some cite a June 2012 Tampa Bay Times report based on a study of cases involving self-defense claims since 2005, when Florida passed its "stand your ground law": 73 percent of defendants who killed blacks were cleared, compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white person. Yet, since most homicides were between people of the same race, this also suggests black defendants were more likely to win. Indeed, the study found that "black defendants went free 66 percent of the time in fatal cases compared to 61 percent for white defendants." In mixed-race cases, "four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free."
Of course, one study in one state and a few anecdotes do not prove a national pattern. Critics point to an Urban Institute analysis of FBI statistics for 2005-10 which shows that firearm homicides are far more likely to be ruled justified when the shooter is white and the victim is black than vice versa. But without knowledge of the specific circumstances of these homicides, it's impossible to say how much of the disparity is due to bias.

One Florida case has been widely cited as a contrast to the Zimmerman verdict and a shocking injustice: the case of Marissa Alexander, a black woman said to be serving 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to scare off her violent ex-husband. But that's not quite what happened. Alexander's "stand your ground" claim was rejected because, after the altercation with then-husband Rico Gray, she went to the garage, returned with a gun and fired a shot that Gray said narrowly missed his head (a claim backed by forensic evidence). Gray was indeed abusive, but Alexander was no innocent; she also assaulted him while out on bail for the shooting. Her 20-year sentence, required by a mandatory minimum for firearm offenses, was a travesty; her conviction was not.

Origins, evolution, and phenotypic impact of new genes

Where does "new information" come from?

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945180/ (via shareaholic.com)

George Zimmerman Trial | Legal Insurrection blog

Link: http://legalinsurrection.com/tag/george-zimmerman-trial/ (via shareaholic.com)

This blog has very extensive coverage of the trial.

Doubting Stephen Meyer's 'Darwin's Doubt' : The New Yorker

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/doubting-stephen-meyers-darwins-doubt.html (via shareaholic.com)

Political Diary: Democrats' Prop. 8 Veto - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328204578569430263679950.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h (via shareaholic.com)

Recall that both Mr. Brown and Ms. Harris declined to defend the initiative against a challenge in federal courts. Thus, the initiative's proponents took on the job, as permitted by the California Supreme Court. However, an ideologically mixed majority on the court (which included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, Antonin Scalia, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) has ruled that they lacked standing to do so.

"Once the District Court issued its order," which was to strike down Prop. 8, "respondents no longer had any injury to redress, and the state officials chose not to appeal. The only individuals who sought to appeal were petitioners, who had intervened in the District Court, but they had not been ordered to do or refrain from doing anything," wrote the chief justice for the majority. Thus, the lower court's decision holds.
Many Californians are no doubt celebrating the decision. Public opinion has swung sharply in favor of same-sex marriage since a bare 51% majority of voters approved the ban five years ago. However, the decision is a huge blow to the principle of popular sovereignty, which underlies California's initiative process.
California's initiative system originated in 1911 to bypass entrenched and often unaccountable state politicians. As Justice Anthony Kennedy points out in his dissent (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor), "the initiative system 'grew out of dissatisfaction with the then governing public officials and a widespread belief that the people had lost control of the political process.'"
As the California Supreme Court has determined, "this purpose is undermined if the very officials the initiative process seeks to circumvent are the only parties who can defend an enacted initiative when it is challenged in a legal proceeding . . . Giving the Governor and attorney general this de facto veto will erode one of the cornerstones of the State's governmental structure.
"And in light of the frequency with which initiatives' opponents resort to litigation"—over one-third of the initiatives approved in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington between 1900 and 2008 were challenged in court—"the impact of that veto could be substantial."
The court's ruling means that state officials and a single district court will be able to nullify initiatives on every thing from school choice to tax reform. The danger is particularly acute in California, where federal courts with jurisdiction are notoriously liberal, though the implications extend to any of the 26 other states with an initiative or popular referendum system.
Liberals may rejoice now, but perhaps they should consider the flip side: a Republican governor and attorney general who refuse to defend, say, an environmental initiative which is struck down by a federal court. Liberal proponents would no doubt want to appeal, but by the court's reasoning they couldn't.