With Ron Paul’s now-infamous newsletters once again making headlines, I mulled whether I ought to revisit the issue, but ultimately decided that there wasn’t much to add to the long piece Dave Weigel and I wrote for Reason back in 2008, especially since I’d already elaborated in a couple blog postscripts written shortly after that article appeared.

Apparently, The New York Times agreed. On Monday, they ran a piece that amounts to a couple paragraphs of “fresh tops” aimed at trying to make the piece current, followed by a very light, very lazy rewrite of our article. It cites exactly the same essays and materials we did, takes for granted the identity of Paul’s chief ghostwriter and newsletter editor (which our article spent a fair amount of space publicly establishing for the first time), and even interviews exactly the same sources on the same subjects. (I’ll buy that any reporter would have phoned Ed Crane up; I’ll eat my left shoe if the authors had the first idea who Carol Moore or Mike Holmes were before they read our piece.)

Please don’t take my word for it, though: Compare for yourself. This isn’t a “follow-up” story. It’s a sloppy paraphrase whose authors expended the bare minimum effort of getting our sources to repeat quotes anew so they could use our material without citing the original source.  Or very nearly: A few sentences from the very end, they acknowledge one tidbit was “first reported in Reason,” which is a rather brazen implicit deception, given that the same is true of almost everything else in the article. The sad thing is, if they’d been willing to open with a candid reference and link, they could’ve saved the time spent revisiting ground we covered and actually contributed something to the story.

Unlike Dave Weigel, I’m no longer a journalist, so I actually don’t care about being credited for long-ago reporting on a topic I had no intention of ever returning to. What I do care about is de facto deception of the audience by lazy journalists eager to pass off their regurgitation as reporting—which seems to be rather  a habit at the Times. I imagine they get away with it because their scribes are normally lifting from people who aspire to work there one day—but since, again, I’m no longer a journalist, I don’t feel any particular qualms about pointing it out.  

I still probably wouldn’t have bothered with a post just to lob a brickbat at some lazy journalism, but in this case it’s actually germane to the substance of the story. The implication, after all, is that even though the newsletters were a focus of national attention four years ago, Paul’s fellow travelers were content to gloss over this ugly history—quietly complicit in this pandering to racism—until the bold bloodhounds at the Times sniffed out the scoop. It looks rather different if the Times is just rehashing the highlights of what a libertarian magazine explored in greater details years ago.  

As an ex-journalist myself, I get that it seldom makes sense to waste valuable column inches stroking the ego of every hack whose work you looked at before tackling a topic. The hack’s mom may care, but the average reader certainly doesn’t. When it’s an isolated factoid or a quote, I say lift and godspeed. When you’re doing little more than recapitulating an earlier article wholesale, however, and when it is actually directly relevant to the story that this topic has been exhaustively investigated and discussed within the very movement you’re writing about… well, in those cases, if you don’t have any professional scruples, at least have a little fucking shame.

Addendum: Just to clarify, I’m not annoyed about our reporting being “stolen”—you can’t “steal” public domain facts—or looking to get some kind of acknowledgement by name, which would be of no particular professional value to me at this point (and probably generate unwanted interview requests on a topic I’m happy to be done with). I’m annoyed that what I’d thought was a decent piece of writing and reporting got the equivalent of a rewrite by a stoned highschool student adapting a review essay for an overdue book report. So readers got this mangled account—including an incredibly confused idea of what the faultlines in contemporary libertarianism are about, assuming anyone cares about these internecine pissing contests—rather than a simple link to a more thorough treatment. While I appreciate the supportive comments, nobody should really be offended on my behalf here. Be offended that people who subscribe to the Paper of Record aren’t getting the quality of coverage they’re paying for because a couple of indolent hacks are too desperate to give the appearance of being real reporters to provide a reference and do original work.

So, I’m as big a fan as anyone of the birth control pill, even though I’m an indirect beneficiary of its wonders. And notwithstanding my generally libertarian sympathies, I even think it makes an enormous amount of sense to make subsidized—and in some cases free—contraceptives available to people who genuinely can’t afford them, if only because it’s likely to be a lot less costly to the public in the long run than supporting both the unplanned child and the parents who are a lot less likely to escape poverty once they’ve had that unplanned child. You might even want to set the income bar for the subsidy pretty high, to cover people who, though in no position to afford a child, could afford birth control but would be shortsightedly tempted to risk going without and spend the money on other wants.

Still, I’m puzzled by the general celebration over the news that insurers will be required to cover birth control pills without any copay. I mean, I understand why (employed, insured) women in their 20s and 30s might be personally pleased about the short-term drop in their expenses, but looked at more broadly, it’s just a large predictable cost that’s going to need to get baked into premiums. (The very poor, needless to say, are also most likely to be uninsured.) It just means the cost is now shared between women who do use it and those who don’t. I guess that’s nice for the women who use it, but I’m not sure why it’s necessary or, for that matter, fair.

With limited exceptions—I get that birth control can also be a treatment for certain medical conditions—it seems like birth control is just a predictable cost, not a risk to insure against. It’s like food: You might want to subsidize it for the badly off, but you don’t buy “food insurance,” because there’s nothing to “insure.” You just know you’re going to need food, and so everyone who isn’t poor just buys their own; there’s no good reason to pool the expense. 

Actually, it makes less sense even than that, because while everyone needs food, people need birth control only insofar as they’re involved in a sexual relationship (and don’t want children), which (one hopes) is substantially under each policy holder’s control. If that meant everyone in the pool, then requiring coverage would make no difference to anyone, since the exact same cost would just be shifted to the premium. The only reason it makes a difference to anyone is that some people who are having sex get to shift part of their cost to people who aren’t. And that seems a little like salt in the wound: Isn’t it bad enough to not be getting laid regularly without having to pay for the people who are?

If we think it’s of public value to make sure that low income folks have access to contraception when they want it, great, I get that. But it seems like the solution is to just publicly provide it—whether directly or through some sort of voucher. Achieving that goal through the private insurance system just seems bizarre. If, on the other hand, the goal is just to give a free goodie to people who can very well afford it at the expense of those who don’t want or need it… well, that’s just not a particularly worthy goal, is it?

Andrew Cohen at Bleeding Heart Libertarians kicks off what will apparently be a series of posts on moral objectivity by considering the subjectivist position—the view that whether certain acts are right or wrong depends on the values of a particular person or culture. He takes a position I’ve always leaned toward myself, which is that ethical subjectivism is not so much wrong as incoherent. Subjectivists or relativists purport to argue that something may be “wrong for” one person or group, but “right for” another, but it has always seemed to me that what they’re really saying is that there is no genuine morality, but only a set of local taboos or norms.

One could say this begs the question, in that it assumes some objective or universal moral principles as the standard of “genuine” morality, in contrast with “merely” local norms. But the decisive reply, I think, is that on such a view the claim that “X is wrong for group Y” states no further fact beyond the claim that members of Y regard X as wrong, have a negative attitude toward X, seek to punish those who do X, and so on. It is not, on most of these accounts, that X is wrong for Y in virtue of or because Y regards X as wrong; rather “being wrong for Y” just means that members of Y have these attitudes and dispositions. “You believe it is wrong, therefore it is wrong for you,” then, expresses no more than the tautology: “You believe it is wrong, therefore you believe it is wrong.” Subjectivism ends up looking an awful lot like nihilism or non-cognitivism in anthropological drag.

Still, let’s see if this can be made to work somehow. We should dispense, at the outset, with a variety of uninteresting ways in which concrete ethical rules can be “relative” or “subjective” In specific circumstances, of course, what one morally ought to do will often depend on local conventions: In the U.S., it would be reckless and wrong not to drive on the right side of the street; in the UK, it would be reckless and wrong not to drive on the left. But we can easily see how both rules are applications of a higher-level universal principle about not needlessly exposing others to the risk of harm. We could tell a series of far more complex stories that would nevertheless be variants on the same basic idea, depending on cultural conventions about what constitutes a “promise” or a “contract,” which claims about another person will count as slanderous and defamatory, and so on. It might, for instance, be wrong to gravely insult or disrespect people who have done nothing to deserve it, where what counts as as insulting and disrespectful is obviously a subjective matter and depends on local norms. This kind of relativism is true on any plausible view, and can be readily accepted by people who argue that there are universal and objective general moral principles.

To make subjectivism a coherent view that doesn’t just collapse into nihilism or non-cognitivism, we’d need to drive a wedge between “believing X is wrong” (and having the associated attitudes and dispositions) and “X is wrong” so that the latter expresses a further, independent fact. At the same time, to remain distinct from ethical objectivism, this property would have to always be a function of the belief that X is wrong. “Offensiveness,” as suggested above, might often work this way, as does language generally. That is, “snow” (the word) refers to snow (white stuff that falls from the sky) just in case a linguistic community thinks it does, but that I am referring to snow when I say “snow” is a further fact. We can see this by considering cases of confusion or slips of the tongue: I meant for you to turn right, but I accidentally said “turn left.” The linguistic convention is why people nearly always mean left when they say “left” and mean snow when they say “snow,” but the relationship is causal rather than constitutive.

Can we do something similar with “wrong”? To say that X is wrong, that one ought not to do X, is to say that one has some kind of strong and normally overriding or decisive reason to refrain from doing X. There are many trivial ways in which one might have a reason not to do X if and only if one believes (or one’s social group believes) that X is wrong. One might have a purely prudential reason, for instance, to avoid the scorn and enmity of others who believe X to be wrong, whatever one thinks of that belief. Sometimes this applies even to people’s own private beliefs: Someone who believes it is wrong to look at pornography might have a prudential reason not to do so, because they will feel ashamed later—and if the disposition is sufficiently ingrained, they might continue to have this reason even after they decide (at least at an intellectual level) that their previous belief was mistaken. But this doesn’t get us to a distinctly subjectivist view: These are the sorts of reasons anyone could acknowledge one might have.

What we need, it seems, is an account of why one would have a moral reason not to do what one believes is wrong (or one’s group believes is wrong). But here, again, we have a dilemma. If I want to save my life, and believe that a particular medicine will save my life, then in one sense I have a reason (following Parfit, I’ll call this a “motivating reason”) to take that medicine—even if my belief is false and the medicine will kill me. But one could just as naturally say that I have no objective reason to take the medicine—no real reason—because my beliefs are false, and taking it will not fulfill my aims. To say we have subjective or motivating reasons to refrain from doing what we think is wrong flirts again with tautology. But to say we have an objective moral reason to so act implies at least one objective moral principle: It is wrong to act in ways that you believe to be wrong (or your group believes to be wrong). This view can plausibly be described as distinctly “subjectivist,” and it at least jibes with our intuition that someone who constantly violates their own sincerely held moral principles must be seriously morally defective in some way—even if we think the principles they hold are mistaken. But it raises the question: Why this one objective moral principle, and just this one?

One family of views about the general structure of reasons may permit an answer to that question. Many people believe that our prudential practical reasons are all, and only, given by our desires—whether our actual current desires, our desires over the course of a lifetime, or the “informed” desires we would have following some period of ideal reflection, among other possibilities. On such views, the fact that I have decided I want to be a writer, for instance may give me an overriding reason to stay in and work on producing good essays even if I’m strongly tempted to watch a movie or go get a beer with friends instead.

If this is a genuinely desire-based view, rather than a hedonistic view, this can be true even if I would not really be unhappy should I fail in my aim: Perhaps I’d later be able to persuade myself I didn’t really care all that much about being a good writer, or would be having enough fun that I didn’t stop much to pause and feel bad about having fallen short of my goal. Moreover—at least on some views—I would have this reason just in virtue of having chosen and given myself the aim of being a writer, even if there were no further compelling reason to have chosen that aim over various others, and even if (perhaps with the help of hypnosis?) I could rid myself of that desire, with its accompanying frustrations, and be equally happy or happier pursuing some different and less demanding aim. This is no mere tautology: On other views, I have most reason to maximize my happiness or hedonic satisfaction, regardless of my current desires. (This is part of what Robert Nozick’s famous “Experience Machine” is all about: Some people would say we have most reason to strive to really achieve our aims, while others say that it would be irrational to refuse the guaranteed satisfaction of a thoroughly convincing illusion, because all that matters is how life feels to us.) On the views I’m considering, my reason to fulfill the aim I have set for myself—even when, on any given evening, there are other things I would rather be doing, and even if I think I could be just as happy if I failed to achieve my aim—constitutes a further (contestable!) fact above and beyond my having chosen it.

While fleshing out a parallel view for moral reasons would take a good deal of theoretical heavy lifting, we do at least have the rough outline of what a distinctively subjectivist (but not nihilist or non-cognitivist) view might look like. On any of several plausible views about practical rationality, I will have an independent reason to fulfill certain aims I have set for myself just in virtue of having chosen them. It is “true for me” that I have a compelling reason to strive to be a writer, while it is “true for you” that you have a compelling reason to pursue your own different chosen aims, even if we are in all other respects perfectly similar, and could have been equally happy had we swapped life goals. On a subjectivist view, I might similarly have an independent (moral) reason to adhere to the norms I accept (or that the community with which I identify accepts) just because they are my or our norms, and even if it is some sense arbitrary that I ended up accepting those norms instead of another set embraced by another community.

Having given my best go at laying out this sketch, I should emphasize that I don’t find this view convincing. I do not think that this is what the truth about ethics looks like. But it is not—or at least not obviously—an incoherent view.

• People seem initially pleased with the way privacy is baked into the Circles architecture. I wonder whether it doesn’t actually make inadvertent privacy breaches of the “DM #fail” type more likely. The way most people use Facebook in practice, there’s a small amount of content you may (or may not) make generally available, and just about everything else is available to all (and only) approved friends. So you make one decision, more or less, at the outset: How much of my basic profile information am I OK with Joe Random seeing? You make a binary yes/no decision about each friend request. And then, given how strict or loose you’ve been in approving “friends,” the only decision you really have to make about each status update, photo upload, or other content sharing is: “Is this something I’m prepared to have all my so-called Friends see?” If not, it doesn’t get uploaded at all. The circles architecture encourages uploading of content only appropriate for a subset of the persons to whom one is connected. So, of course, does email.  We see more DM fails than e-mail misfires because it’s easier to inadvertently use “@” instead of “D” (or click the wrong option in a client) on a platform where publicity is the default than it is to type the wrong email address in an e-mail TO: field (though autocomplete, while convenient, probably increases the risk of such errors). Making a mistake about which circles you’re sharing to is probably somewhere in the middle, but I expect we’ll start to see a bunch of these as the network grows.
  
  
• An interesting slideshow posted by technologist Vincent Wong suggests that it’s a mistake to think of G+ as essentially a Facebook competitor—one more social network.  Instead, he argues, the real value to Google will be in pre-populating potential collaborative clusters for its many cloud apps. This has a certain logic to it. There are a bunch of ways in which the cloud model has advantages over desktop software: Simultaneous mass update rollouts; data backup; device independence. But a big one is the capability for information sharing and collaboration. This aspect becomes a lot more evident when users are already connected and grouped in useful ways. If I’m e-mailing or calling a group of people to ask them to come to a meeting or a party, which each of them make a note of, it doesn’t make a huge difference whether each of them is using an individual Calendar app or a cloud app like Google Calendar. But when you integrate Google Calendar with G+, where work colleagues and local friends are pregrouped, so that invitations sent to a circle can automatically be transformed into entries in the calendars they’re using in their mobile devices?  Well, that’s a lot easier for everyone.  The utility of the social network becomes much greater when those Circles aren’t just the basis of quick, selective messaging, but also collaboration in Google Docs or whatever cloud app Google rolls out next, and each app becomes much more useful when it comes with personally useful collaborative clusters preloaded (or easily adapted from existing ones).
  
  
• Speaking of privacy and apps, a more general point: We’re accustomed to talking about privacy, especially in the context of social network sites, as being primarily a matter of harm avoidance. Of course, there’s one surefire way to avoid privacy violations: Create a site on which it’s crystal clear that all content is totally public. Then nobody puts any information there unless they’re comfortable with absolutely anyone seeing it, and since nobody expects any privacy, nobody’s is ever violated. Needless to say, this would defeat the purpose of such sites, which is to create spaces in which people do feel able to have valuable interactions (and share thoughts, photos, personal details) with small trusted groups that they wouldn’t necessarily want broadcast to the world.

  Instead of thinking about privacy exclusively in terms of harms, it might be useful—especially in the context of social technologies—to think about what kind of functions different types of privacy enable or disable. When I first got on Twitter, my friends and I mostly used it as a tool for social coordination—a convenient way of seeing who felt like catching a movie or quaffing a beer without spamming those who might not be interested with texts and e-mails. As the service exploded beyond the early adopters, and many of us found ourselves with hundreds or thousands of followers, this began to seem awkward. But the default publicity of Twitter also made it a great forum for broadcast, and for public conversations that anyone with a germane point to make might decide to chime in if (perhaps by a chain of retweets) she were to get wind of it. Some people, unsurprisingly, decided to maintain a public account for general-interest tweeting, and a private one for more intimate conversations.

  Consider, on the other hand, anonymity (which is one type of privacy) on chat forums. In one way, it enables uninhibited discussion by making people feel free to air (or just “try on”) thoughts and views that they’d be wary of having associated with their real names. In another sense—as anyone who’s been a regular on an ill-moderated chat board or comment section can tell you—it can chill speech by removing the accountability that keeps people civil. Even in a closed chat room where everyone is pseudonymous, people may be chary of revealing private details that might be recognizable to a real-life acquaintance, because you can never be sure that one of those other participants in the conversation isn’t actually somebody you know.
  

  As legal scholars have long complained, talking generically about “privacy” often obscures more than it illuminates. Privacy is multidimensional—to the point that many thinkers have suggested we might be better off doing away with it as an umbrella concept altogether, at least for the purpose of detailed policy discussions.
  

  One aspect of privacy is anonymity (and its cousin, “practical obscurity”), which disconnects content—even wholly public—from an identifiable person. Pseudonymity is a sort of compromise that allows some amount of trust building by enabling a persistent idenity to accrue a reputation without linking it to a real-world person.
  

  Another is access control, which can be binary (as in Facebook, where the world is, practically speaking, divided into “friends” and “everyone else”) or quite sophisticated (the Circles architecture of Google Plus).
  

  A related but arguably distinct aspect is use control, meaning that some combination of technological constraints, norms, and contractual or legal rules limit how the persons with access to information can use, reshare, or combine that information without permission. Each of these aspects, of course, could be further analyzed into many subcategories.
  

  Each aspect involves tradeoffs. A network where publicity is the default is useful for broad information sharing and discussion, less useful for intimate conversation or social coordination. If you want conversation that is both frank and high quality, you may need to accept the overhead costs of moderation as the price of permitting anonymity. A platform that’s built to enable trusted small-group interaction or collaboration will work poorly with total anonymity. For some uses, pseudonymity will do, and for others, it will be more desirable to be able to verify a real-world identity for each participant. For still other purposes, it may not matter if participants are pseudonymous to each other if some trusted third-party can verify that everyone meets some membership criterion. For a project like Wikileaks, even pseudonymity might not provide enough protection, because knowing that multiple leaks came from the same person may narrow down the pool of possible whistleblowers. On the other hand, it’s sometimes valuable for someone, such as a credible reporter, to know a whistleblower’s identity so that the reliability of the information can be verified, even if the source is not made public. Fine grained controls are good on a social network, but they’d be counterproductive on eBay if they allowed sellers to decide which comments and ratings from previous buyers would be visible.
  

  The point, in short, is that it’s not always useful to think about privacy in generic less/more or good/bad terms. The right question to ask is what kinds of social functions are enabled by each dimension of privacy, both in isolation and in different combinations.

The really strange thing to me isn’t that restaurants would make these mistakes initially. These are, after all, mostly small brick-and-mortar businesses whose Web presence is pretty peripheral to what they do. The truly baffling thing is that people have been complaining about these exact same things for years; they’re universally acknowledged to be errors by anyone with a lick of design sense. But you find them replicated even on the sites of fancypants restaurants that have obviously thrown at least a moderate amount of cash into site design recently. Is it just that nobody tells them, that the folks in charge of commissioning these things are somehow still unaware that the superficially glitzy bells and whistles are actually annoying obstacles to usability? Or is there some deeper reason they’re purposefully sticking with bad design?

Update: I guess it’s lazy to pose the question without at least trying to cook up a few hypotheses. One possibility is that there’s an unfortunate feedback loop in effect. Lots of restaurant sites made these mistakes initially. The people commissioning the sites are probably general managers who don’t have a lot of time to spare thinking about Web design, and so they rely on a heuristic of seeing what other sites are doing and expecting their designers to come up with something similar. The designers may know better, but they realize that precisely because the site is peripheral, they’re going to be able to charge based on the superficial glitziness of the site’s appearance, not its actual usability—and indeed, given the suboptimal equilibrium, they’d likely have to burn time and energy explaining to the client why a more functional, better-designed site didn’t look like all the others.

Another possibility is that there’s an attempt at signalling going on. All you’re realistically going to need from a restaurant Web site is a few pages worth of basically static information, and maybe some reservation functionality, which is probably outsourced to OpenTable anyway. People probably aren’t going to be interacting with the site for more than a couple minutes. That means there’s limited ability to cue the user via the site that this is a higher-end joint, if that’s what you’re trying to do. (Design still works surprisingly well as a status marker, I’ve noticed—compare even a relatively kludgy major publication site with something like WorldNetDaily.) So you end up with a sort of Veblenesque “conspicuous consumption” on the splash page—lots of sound and graphics that actually detract from the functionality of the site, but broadcast that you’ve got money to burn on your Web presence. The people who just want directions or a reservation will end up using Google Maps and OpenTable anyway, so semiotics trump usability.

That’s a guess, anyway. It’d be interesting to talk to someone who actually makes these decisions at (or does Web design for) a higher-end restaurant to see what the actual thought process looks like.

Update II: Apropos of the aforementioned kvetches, consider this catalog of things never said about restaurant websites.

From the ingenious Fake Criterions tumblr.

Pearl and the Beard – Will Smith Medley from Goddamn Cobras Collective on Vimeo.

I think this situation is rather more complicated than Julian Sanchez makes out. It’s true that on the whole career incentives point in the direction of ideological orthodoxy rather than trying to snag some slot as a token. Still, within that framework of overall orthodoxy, the incentives are still to be somewhat less orthodox and on-message than your colleagues — stand out as the “reasonable” one and get invited to do panels and stuff. But I’ve never been invited to a Georgetown cocktail party.

I don’t know, actually. I think this becomes true at a certain level, for people who are already well established as voices from one camp or another.  Insofar as George Will is already a big-name conservative, it’s interesting that he sometimes breaks ranks and so forth. But for smaller fish, your best bet of getting media exposure is to hew to a strong polar position on some issue so you can represent “the” conservative or liberal viewpoint when some reporter or broadcaster is trying to set up maximal clash in a he-said-she-said story or segment.  Folks who are trying to sell eyeballs want a fight a lot more often than they want a sort of measured “well, there are merits in both views” kind of take, unless you’re recognized as a super-expert in your field. But for that, the go-to will more often be someone without a strongly identifiable ideological valence.