A typically insightful post from danah boyd examines why campaigns against “bullying” and, perhaps especially, “cyberbullying” so seldom manage to accomplish much. Part of the trouble, boyd argues, is that teens are reluctant to see themselves either as victims or aggressors, and therefore define as mere “drama” much behavior that adults are prone to class as “bullying.”

On the victim’s side, even a teen who is conscious of being the victim of bullying might feel ashamed to admit it. But it’s actually more complicated than that, because once we move out of the realm of bullying as simple physical assault, the difference between psychological bullying and more innocuous types of ribbing or reciprocal verbal aggression ultimately comes down to how the teens themselves feel about it. So a teen who denies being “bullied” and appears to shrug off various kinds of social animosity as just “drama” is not necessarily in denial about the independent, objective fact that they really are being bullied. Rather, insisting on adopting the attitude that they’re on equal footing with their aggressors (and so not bullied) may be a primary determinant of whether or not this is, in fact, the case. We all know, of course, that there’s often a sharp disconnect between internal feeling and external performance: We pretend to be unruffled by remarks that, in reality, cut deep. But we also know that these are hardly totally separate domains: Telling yourself that you don’t care what those jerks say about you is often part of the process of actually ceasing to care what those jerks say about you—or at least, ceasing to care much. On the victim’s side, then, psychological bullying is hard to quantify, because “bullying” is not always an observer-independent natural fact: Denying that you are being bullied is sometimes a means of making it true that you are not (successfully) bullied—though when that gambit fails, it may prevent some students from seeking necessary help from adults. Call this the Bullying Heisenberg Effect.

On the aggressor side, as boyd observes, part of the problem is that nobody likes to think of themselves as a bully, and so the teens who are dishing it out find other descriptions that minimize the harm they do. More than that, however, because bullying is so often a social phenomenon, it may literally be impossible to evaluate whether “bullying” is happening at the level of the individual agent—even for the bullies themselves!

As regular readers know, I’m fond of invoking a thought experiment from philosopher Derek Parfit called “The Harmless Torturers.” Parfit imagines one scenario in which 10,000 torturers each torture one of 10,000 victims using an electrocution machine. Each torturer clearly inflicts terrible agony on an individual victim. In Parfit’s second scenario, each torturer’s machine is configured so as to deliver one-ten-thousandth of the same voltage—a quantity so small as to be utterly imperceptible to the victim by itself—to all of the victims who were individually electrified in the first scenario. In the aggregate, the torturers inflict exactly the same amount of pain on exactly the same number of people. But in this second scenario, each torturer can—with some justice—claim that his actions are “harmless.” Each, in other words, can claim: “If I stayed home, there is not one of those 10,000 victims who would feel any difference.”

As applied to physical torture, the scenario is fanciful. As applied to psychological torture, it describes the norm. Only a few really horrid people commit themselves to relentlessly harassing and abusing a single individual. But many teens—and not a few nominal adults—will make a handful of snarky and cutting remarks to numerous different individuals over the course of an ordinary day. It would often be overblown to characterize any particular remark as bullying: In isolation, all but the most fragile of us would shrug it off. In the aggregate, they may be intolerable to even the most self-assured.

One reason “cyberbullying” may present special problems is that the Internet and social networks dramatically increase the realistic number of people who can pile on a single victim in a short period of time. Each aggressor might rationalize their own part in the distributed bullying as just one or two comments, though the victim perceives an overwhelming assault when these are all combined. For an analogy in the physical world, we can look to street harassment, which is enabled by the high volume of anonymous, brief public interactions characteristic of urban environments. Some men, of course, engage in vulgar and intimidating speech that anyone would consider harassing in itself. But often, the harassment is a distributed phenomenon. Many of us would not particularly mind a single stranger yelling out “Hi, gorgeous” or “You look good today!” once every other month—and I’ve seen men (inexcusably obtuse, to be sure, but not obviously malicious) react with genuine surprise when such remarks are not welcomed as compliments, not realizing they’re the tenth person in as many blocks to volunteer a similar comment to the same woman.

It may be hard to stamp out bullying, then, not just because victims are often unwilling apply the label to their own experience, but because individual aggressors can plausibly—even if somewhat disingenuously—deny that their individual actions qualify. Insofar as it may be counterproductive to encourage the victims of psychological bullying—cyber or otherwise—to consciously identify themselves as such, the more fruitful strategy may be encouraging teens on the aggressor side to be better Kantians, as it were—to imagine whether each mean offhand remark would qualify as “bullying” if it were multiplied by a dozen daily interactions, day after day, week after week.

Scene: Friday evening, 9 p.m., a group of friends are gathered around a living room table for poker night.

Harry: OK, folks, snack time. I’m thinking we should order a couple pies from that new gourmet pizza place.

Darrell: What, Mama Solyndra’s? That place is so overpriced! Let’s just go with some chips and salsa from the corner store; I was planning to make myself a sandwich when I get home anyway.

Mary: Show of hands? [The group votes.] Bad luck this time, cheapskate, Mama Solyndra’s it is.

Barack: OK, everyone throw in, I’ll call for a couple extra-larges. Oh, and Harry brought the beer, so everyone chip in for that too.

Darrell: Hmph, alright, alright, lemme find my wallet.

Half an hour later, the food arrives.

Darrell: Let’s see, I guess the pesto and ricotta looks like the best…

Mary: Woah-ho-ho there Grabby McGrabberson! What do you think you’re reaching for there? As I recall, you didn’t think Mama Solyndra’s was worth it. You wanted us to tighten our belts and cut our snack spending. And now you want a slice? Guess that was all a lot of empty talk—what a hypocrite!

Darrell: Hey, I still think we should go with chips next week, but I threw in like everyone else, so unless you feel like returning my $10…

Harry: What are you, a comedian? You know the rule. We all vote on what we’re getting, and everyone splits the check.

Mary You’ve got some serious chutzpah! Sitting there with a slice in your hand, and you’re still talking about how you want to gut our pizza budget? Well actions speak louder than words, Darrell: If you had any integrity, you’d drop that slice right now.

Barack: You are looking pretty hypocritical there, Darrell. I don’t know how you expect anyone to take you seriously when you start badmouthing Mama Solyndra’s next time.

Darell: What? You guys, I said I don’t think it’s worth it. I wouldn’t have bought any if we were getting single slices, but it’s not like you gave me a choice about paying in! Now I’m not even supposed to enjoy any of the food I got outvoted about paying for?

Mary: Not really; it just means that from now on, you have to shut up about how overpriced it is and start voting for Mama Solyndra’s.

Fade to black.

While the ruthless corporate CEO as villain is pretty much a stock character in modern pop culture, superhero comics have always conspicuously placed successful businessmen on both sides of the hero/villain divide. Yet an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, pattern recently occurred to me. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the most prominent superhero characters who have, for some significant chunk of their histories, been portrayed as CEOs of large corporations:

• Bruce Wayne (Batman)
• Oliver Queen (Green Arrow)
• Tony Stark (Iron Man)
• Ted Kord (Blue Beetle)

Here are the first four CEO supervillains who spring to mind:

• Lex Luthor
• Wilson Fisk (Kingpin)
• Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias)
• Norman Osborn (Green Goblin)

Ok, comics geeks, pop quiz: What do the four heroes and the four villains each have in common?

The answer is that none of the four heroes founded the corporations that bear their family names: Each of them inherited their wealth. In some cases the heroes bear substantial responsibility for the success of their companies, but in the case of Stark and Kord, this is primarily a function of their scientific and inventive genius, not their business acumen. All but Wayne have, for some portion of their history, faced financial difficulties as a result, either losing or surrendering control of their companies at least temporarily.

For the supervillains, precisely the opposite is true. While the TV show Smallville and a handful of one-off comics depict Luthor as born to wealth, he has typically been portrayed as a child of abusive, impoverished parents who rose from the mean streets of Suicide Slum to found LexCorp. Fisk, too, grew up poor and bullied. Veidt describes his parents as an ordinary, unremarkable couple, and it’s implied that they are working or lower-middle class. [Update: As a commenter notes, I'm misremembering: Veidt's parents were actually wealthy, but he chose to give away his inheritance to charity as a teenager in order to start from nothing.] Osborn’s father was an industrialist who raised Norman in relative luxury… but also an abusive alcoholic who lost the business and his fortune before Norman was college aged, requiring him to effectively start over from scratch. [Update: I could have added Stark's bete noire Obadiah Stane—played by Jeff Bridges in the movie—whose "degenerate gambler" single father left him orphaned as a child thanks to a round of Russian roulette.] While Kingpin’s wealth comes almost entirely from his criminal operations, with the “legitimate business” of Fisk Enterprises serving primarily as a front, the others seem to have earned most of their wealth by more-or-less legal means.

Now this ought to be at least somewhat surprising. Conventional wisdom, and the vast majority of popular film and fiction outside the superhero genre, suggest that the heroic characters—the ones we admire and identify with—ought to be the ones who earn success through their own merits after a long struggle, while the villains are snobbish children of undeserved privilege. When it comes to the most famous businessmen in comics, though, we find that just the reverse is the case! While on the surface, for instance, the rivalry between Luthor and Superman pits cosmopolitan, urban corporate wealth against humble American rural values, it has also often been stressed that Luthor resents Superman for simply being born with spectacular abilities that dwarf Luthor’s hard-won achievements. What might be going on here?

While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th century in the form of Old Money’s contempt for the nouveau riche.  Jane Jacobs, in her book Systems of Survival, contrasted this aristocratic view, which she dubbed the “Guardian” moral complex, with “bourgeois” or “mercantile” ethics. In this worldview, while wealth and the leisure time it affords may be necessary preconditions of cultivating certain noble qualities (whether that’s appreciation of classical art and literature, or the martial, deductive, and scientific skills of a masked crimefighter), the grubby business of acquiring money is inherently corrupting. The ideal noble needs to have wealth, while being too refined to  be much concerned with becoming wealthy. It’s permissible for Stark and Kord to be largely responsible for the success of their companies because their contribution is essentially a side effect of their exercise of their intellectual virtues. Along similar lines, while the Fantastic Four have plainly become enormously wealthy from the income stream generated by Reed Richards’ many patents, I don’t recall many scenes in which we see Richards stepping out of the lab to apply his intelligence directly to their commercialization: His inventions are presumably sold or licensed to others who concern themselves with transforming Richards’ genius into cash.

A similar pattern holds for literally noble or aristocratic power in comics. Princess Diana (Wonder Woman) and T’Challa (Black Panther) are hereditary royalty. Doctor Doom and Magneto are members of despised and oppressed minority groups (Doom is Roma; Magneto a Jewish mutant) who actively seize leadership of Latveria and Genosha, respectively. Democratic power doesn’t fare too much better: Lex Luthor was briefly president of the United States.

The logic of this, as I apprehend it, is that the hero must wield enormous power in order to effectively perform the superheroic function, but cannot seem to seek it too eagerly, even for admirable ends—perhaps particularly when we consider that they typically make use of their great economic power by translating it into a superhuman capacity for physical violence. Spider-Man is always reminding us that “with great power comes great responsibility”—but the responsibility is the noblesse oblige of one who has (often reluctantly) found that power thrust upon him.

Bruce Wayne is perhaps the most obvious exception to this general pattern. While for Spider-Man, unasked-for power comes with the burden of responsibility, it is the burden of an obsessive sense of responsibility that comes first for Wayne, driving a protracted quest for hard-won mental and physical power. While every superhero has an iconic “origin story,” Batman is  unusual among costumed crimefighters in that his long and laborious efforts to acquire his skills and powers are themselves a major part of the narrative. In Wayne’s case, this deliberate striving after power is at least partially purged of its ordinary villainous connotations because it is itself depicted as an unwanted compulsion, thrust upon him unasked (like a radioactive spider bite) by the ghosts of his murdered parents. It is not, I think, an accident that this most calculating, ruthless, and unsentimental of the major superheroes is also the one super-CEO most commonly depicted as being exceptionally skilled qua businessman. He  is allowed this quality in part because, in sharp contrast to Tony Stark, he is not depicted as deriving much genuine enjoyment from the luxurious playboy lifestyle he uses as a smokescreen to cover his compulsive crimefighting. (It’s interesting, incidentally, to contrast the apparent business savvy of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster with that of Batman scribe and artist Bob Kane—evident not least in the fact that Kane is often given solitary credit as creator, though there’s a pretty ironclad case for considering Bill Finger an equal partner.)

Protagonists in ordinary popular fiction, like most of us most of the time, are allowed to seek their own happiness—and we’re allowed to share that happiness, through our identification with them—in line with ordinary bourgeois morality. But what makes superheroes “super” (and not merely heroic) is precisely their extraordinary capability to exercise coercive power and dominate others. In their case, bourgeois norms have to yield to the Guardian ethos—which, when their power is partly economic in origin, requires turning pop fiction’s ordinary meritocratic ideals on their head, at least in that limited domain.

Ronald Dworkin is probably the most prominent living liberal political philosopher in the United States. Unsurprisingly, he favors a national system of universal healthcare. But at a philosophical level, Dworkin also very clearly holds exactly the same position a lot of viewers seem to regard as not simply wrong, but self evidently monstrous when it was ascribed to Ron Paul (or at least Republicans in the audience) after the recent Tea Party debate. That is, Dworkin believes that if someone enjoys a fair share of social wealth and resources, and makes a free and informed choice about the level of health coverage and care they wish to purchase, then justice is satisfied when they receive the care they have chosen to pay for (either directly or by way of insurance). If it turns out that someone then needs care beyond what they chose to purchase under these conditions, it is not morally incumbent on society to provide that care. If you want to be melodramatic about it: Society (or at least the government) should “let him die.”

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course: Go read chapter 8 of Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin’s major work of political (as opposed to legal) philosophy. As he makes clear there, he believes government should provide some level of universal coverage under conditions where wealth and genetic luck are unjustly distributed, and the difficulty of becoming properly informed about the state of medical care and relevant statistics is so great. But he also reasonably he rejects a general “rescue principle” for healthcare—the principle that society must never “let someone die” or go without care if there is money in the public coffers to intervene—as “useless,” “preposterous,” and one that “no sane society” would adopt. The correct standard for what kind of coverage a society should provide, he argues, is given by trying to figure out what kind of health insurance policy and coverage most members of a particular society would choose if they were well informed and had whatever fair share of social resources is specified by general principles of economic justice. (Those principles might specify that people just born with unlucky ailments are independently entitled to a larger share; Dworkin is mostly thinking here about people who begin life reasonably healthy and will require different levels and types of care over time owing to the vagaries of life.)

Most people, Dworkin acknowledges, would reasonably forgo coverage for many types of risks or treatments, preferring lower premiums and greater present consumption. He suggests, for instance, that most reasonable people under his idealized conditions would not find it worthwhile to purchase coverage that would support their indefinite sustenance in a persistent vegetative state, or heroic and expensive interventions likely to extend life by a few months in old age.

In a society where Dworkin’s background conditions are met:

[H]owever health care is distributed in that society is just for that society: justice would not require providing health care for anyone that he or his family had not purchased. These claims follow directly from an extremely appealing assumption: that a just distribution is one that well-informed people create for themselves by individual choices, provided that the economic system and the distribution of wealth in the community in which these choices are made are themselves just.

Now, again, Dworkin’s premise all along in this argument is precisely that our society does not meet his background conditions, requiring government to supply care as a kind of second best. In our far-from-ideal world, he writes, the government should simply “construct a mandatory coverage scheme on the basis of assumptions about what all but a small number of people could think appropriate, allowing those few who would be willing to spend more on special care to do so, if they can afford it, through supplemental insurance.” In Dworkin’s view, then, if someone needs medical care that the modal informed consumer would not have chosen to cover under conditions of economic justice, that patient should get that treatment if and only if he has chosen to purchase supplemental insurance. If he has not chosen to purchase that coverage, there is no moral requirement for the public to provide it. Or again, if you still want to be melodramatic, society should “let him die.”

In a society that did satisfy Dworkin’s background ideal of economic justice—a society not perfectly egalitarian, but clearly far more so than our own—it follows from his argument that someone who made a free and informed choice to purchase less coverage than most also need not be provided by society with additional care. Our own society, of course, does not meet Dworkin’s background conditions. But Wolf Blitzer’s thought experiment at least arguably does satisfy them, if we take the liberty of reading his stipulation that the imagined patient “makes a good living” to imply that the person enjoys an economically just share of social resources, and has made the choice to forgo coverage after informed deliberation.

So under appropriate conditions—clearly not satisfied for very many poor Americans, but at least arguably satisfied within parameters of Blitzer’s hypothetical—the most prominent living liberal philosopher gives pretty much the same answer as Ron Paul: People should bear the consequences of their freely assumed risks, and “society”—or at least the government—should let them.

“But,” I hear the indignant cry, “Dworkin still advocates universal healthcare as a matter of public policy!” Well, yes. But you don’t pose stripped down, idealized, and unrealistic hypotheticals about single individuals to answer complicated public policy questions. You use them to get at very elementary moral principles. If the question is really about what kind of complex institutions should be established by statute in light of all we know about healthcare markets, reducing it to a single decision about how to respond to one imaginary person is obtuse. If the point is to reveal underlying principles, then those are valid or invalid independently of how they interact with other moral or political principles, or empirical considerations, to generate a real-world policy view.

Anyone who thinks Ron Paul’s answer to the hypothetical is appalling and outrageous, then, should direct some appalled outrage at Dworkin, because he gives exactly the same answer within its artificial, stipulated parameters. If Paul is a ghoul but Dworkin’s cool in virtue of their different policy positions outside the conditions of the hypothetical, then those who see Paul’s view as appalling should acknowledge that the reaction to the Blitzer thought experiment is an irrelevant red herring, and what matters is (say) Paul’s awful views on economic justice, where he pretty clearly does differ from Dworkin. Then at least everyone can work up a righteous lather about the correct issue.

Yahoo found itself at the focus of some brief fuss today, after their e-mail service’s spam and malware filters started blocking many emails that contained the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” or linking OccupyWallStreet.org in connection with an ongoing protest that had attracted some 3,000–5,000 people over the weekend, with a few hundred die-hards remaining on Tuesday as the protest entered its fourth day.

The conspiratorially minded hinted that this might be overt political censorship, which was presumably good for clicks, but also completely ludicrous if you thought about it for ten seconds or so. Try to imagine the conversation:

Suit: Hey, Steve, listen, I know it’s sorta winding down, but I’m starting to worry this little Wall Street protest could spell the end of our nefarious system of capitalist exploitation. So I want you to start giving people error messages when they try to send legitimate e-mails about the protest. Sure, it’ll piss off our user base, and it’ll probably be terrible PR, but it’s a small price to pay for crushing the Revolution. We’ll fix the block within a day or so and blame it on a “technical error.”

Tech: But, sir, listen… most active Internet users these days have a second e-mail account, not to mention Twitter, Facebook, IM, Google+, blogs… won’t blocking people’s e-mails in such an obvious way just annoy our users for no reason, and draw more attention to the protest? I mean, the blocking in Egypt was a lot more comprehensive and sophisticated, and they still ended up having to shut down the whole Internet—do you really think one provider’s crude filter is going to make that much difference in a protest that’s already been so widely announced? Also, uh, I’m no lawyer, but political censorship doesn’t sound like a “routine business purpose.” Even if our lackeys in the corporate press can be persuaded to look the other way, aren’t we opening ourselves to a federal felony prosecution under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act if anyone figures out we did this on purpose? What exactly is the benefit to Yahoo! of inviting a potential shitstorm just to block a tiny percentage of emails about one more demonstration?

Suit: Hell’s bells, Steve, where’s your ruling class solidarity? Your career, my career, even the company itself—all well worth the risk if our dear friends at Goldman Sachs have one less hippie to wade through on the way to work!

Here’s an ever so slightly more plausible scenario. There’s suddenly a huge uptick in e-mail traffic, maybe a lot of basically identical messages CCed to large numbers of users by enthusiastic activists, with a link to a very recently registered domain. Lots of recipients who got a copy from vaguely-recalled acquaintances blasting their address books flag it as spam, and (whoops) the Yahoo filter algorithm decides the URL is a spam marker. Also, given that Anonymous has been one of the more vocal champions of this particular protest, it’s not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that some overeager supporters might have tried to do some kind of automated mass notification. Let’s tentatively say that this is at least as plausible as the whole pointless-and-risky-conspiracy-that-makes-no-sense theory.

So this is a “move along, nothing to see here” kind of story? Ah, not at all! The second scenario is actually still pretty disturbing: It means a bunch of legitimate political speech got blocked on the basis of some very superficial similarities to mass emails that the algorithm might well have reasonably pegged as spam. That’s still a fail on Yahoo’s part, and a sign they really ought to take another look at their detection algorithm.

Still more worrisome, though, is the possibility that if they don’t fix it, this incident makes it clear that it’s possible to exploit Yahoo’s algorithmic overkill to block third-party messages containing certain phrases or (especially) links. In this case, it was probably an inadvertent, distributed own-goal scored by people whose sincere attempt to promote a cause backfired. It could just as easily be exploited deliberately by someone sending pseudo-spam seeming to promote a cause they actually wanted to harm. In a way, this would be a modern variant of a classic political dirty trick: A campaign starts putting out offensive flyers or annoying, repetitive dinnertime robocalls purporting to come from their opposition—and the bewildered opposition suffers the backlash. Imagine what an unscrupulous political operative could do in the 48 hours before election day with a false-flag spam campaign? Not only do they pepper voters with hard-to-attribute misinformation, but as a lagniappe, they manage to block the opposing campaign and its supporters from sending genuine get-out-the-vote messages!

I guarantee you that somewhere out there, the Karl Rove of the Social Media Douchebag set has already thought of this—sits steepling his or her fingers and emitting a guttural “eeeeexcellent” at the prospect. That gives Yahoo about 13 months to fix the problem before it resurfaces in a way that might actually make a difference.

I’ve seen plenty of outraged online discussion over past week concerning this exchange—and especially the audience reaction to it—from the recent Tea Party debate:

“A healthy, 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: You know what? I’m not going to spend 200 or 300 dollars a month for health insurance, because I’m healthy; I don’t need it,” [moderator Wolf] Blitzer said. “But you know, something terrible happens; all of a sudden, he needs it. Who’s going to pay for it, if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?

“In a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him,” [Ron] Paul replied. Blitzer asked what Paul would prefer to having government deal with the sick man.

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said. ”My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not before —”

“But he doesn’t have that,” Blitzer said. “He doesn’t have it and he’s — and he needs — he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?”

“That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.,” Paul said, repeating the standard libertarian view as some in the audience cheered.

“But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die,” Blitzer asked.

“Yeah,” came the shout from the audience.

I don’t have very strong or well-formed views about the appropriate shape of American health care policy, and I’m generally pretty happy to live in a society where someone who collapses in the street gets care without the need for a credit check first. At the same time, I doubt these kinds of stripped-down thought experiments, useful though they often are for clarifying principles or moral intuitions, are especially illuminating on questions of public policy.

Some very roughly predictable number of people will die each year from skiing accidents or drowning in natural bodies of water. Should “society” just “let these people die”? Obviously anyone who happens to be present when someone is drowning ought to intervene to save them, if they can, and we’d call anyone who just sat on the beach watching a ghoul.  But some people will, predictably, die because nobody is around to save them. So “society” (meaning, in this case, state governments or the federal government) could try to prohibit anyone from engaging in these risky activities, or fence off most bodies of water, and post lifeguards at all the others. We don’t intervene before the fact—by prohibiting unsupervised swimming and similar risky activities—in part because even if we thought it were enforceable, we think people should be free to take risks. We don’t post lifeguards everywhere, partly because it would be costly and infeasible, but also partly because it seems unreasonable to force everyone to foot the bill for risks others have chosen. (Some people, of course, do not really “choose” to go without insurance in a meaningful sense, and we could have a separate argument about what “society” owes those people, but the person in Blitzer’s example pretty clearly doesn’t fall into that category.)

The fact that people aren’t intuitively horrified by “letting die” in this situation is almost entirely a function of how the question is framed. If we ask whether to prohibit everyone, collectively, from unsupervised risk-taking before we know who will be fine and who will be harmed or killed, the intuition that adults ought to be allowed to take risks usually seems to win out. When we ask what we ought to do about a particular individual, where “society” is effectively put in the role of the bystander at the lake, a principle of rescue usually seems to win out: Of course you shouldn’t sit idle! For the kinds of ethical dilemmas we face as individuals, that’s fine, but when it’s posed at a policy level, we effectively face both situations simultaneously, and so need to reconcile conflicting intuitions that didn’t appear to conflict when we considered them at the level of individual choice and obligation.

A lot of people seem to think that just triggering the “bystander” intuition provides some kind of moral clarity, because again, what sort of ghoul doesn’t share that intuition? But this is just a way of ignoring a real moral tension between intuitions, in effect by blowing one horn of a dilemma more loudly, not a serious attempt to grapple with it. From the synoptic perspective of policy, whenever we are committed to affording adults the freedom to take serious risks, we are effectively committed to “letting” some people die. Almost nobody is actually prepared to endorse the level of compulsion or precautionary supervision (which avoids direct coercive prohibition by socializing the cost of chosen risk) that would eliminate such cases, which means now we’re just haggling price. We’re all prepared to “let people die” in a huge number of cases; the interesting question is which ones and why, not whether.

Slightly tangentially, even if we stick to the example of the 30-year-old needing medical treatment—I note that very few people are quite as vocally outraged that we routinely let people in even this precise situation die, so long as they’re people in other countries. So if our 30-year-old is in Utah, and neither his friends, nor his family, nor the government of Utah are prepared to foot the bill for his treatment, we’re supposed to regard it as just obviously morally monstrous that the federal government would not step up to the plate. From California to Maine, it’s our responsibility because he’s one of us. But if he’s in Mexico, or Kenya? We might think it’s awful, or hope someone will volunteer their assistance, but most of us don’t seem to think it’s just obviously our collective political obligation to intervene.

There are a lot of obvious practical considerations one might invoke to explain why we treat the cases differently, but if you think the fundamental moral issues are illuminated with optimal clarity by thought experiments where we just zoom in on these individual cases, then there’s no getting around the fact that (American) society is “letting people die” in huge numbers, provided they had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of a border. Whatever the practical relevance of those people’s nationality, it has no bearing whatever on their basic moral status. If we insist on framing the question as a “bystander problem,” then the nationality of the fellow drowning in the lake should be morally irrelevant. The only salient facts are that we could do something, and whatever other players might be capable of acting aren’t, in fact, doing so.

One respectable and consistent way to deal with this is to infer that we ought to be spending vastly more money on foreign aid to billions of people around the globe who are vastly worse off than almost all of our fellow citizens. Another is to conclude that the “bystander” frame is not actually that helpful when evaluating questions of public policy or collective action.

Finally, and I know I’ve harped on this before, but I think discourse about issues of public health would be immensely improved if we just ditched the misleading phrase “saving lives,” which grossly oversimplifies the actual choices and problems we really face. Death is non-negotiable, so no lives are ever really “saved”: Our actual choice is typically whether to take an action which, at cost C, has probability P of increasing lifespan by time T with quality Q, relative to all the other actions we could take. Until we have infinite resources, then for some array of values for those variables, the federal government is going to have to determine that the expected value of the intervention doesn’t justify obligating the public to bear its cost—though a particular patient’s state or family or friends or church might weigh things differently and decide to foot the bill themselves. What sets describe the morally acceptable ranges for C, P, T, and Q? And how far outside the “correct” ranges do you have to fall to be a moral monster?

As a young boy, I was an avid reader of a series of biographical picture books called ValueTales, which illustrated such virtues as confidence, kindness, and imagination through lightly fictionalized accounts of the lives of historical worthies ranging from Confucius to Louis Pasteur and Harriet Tubman. At the same time, I was enamored of ancient myths, devouring illustrated kids versions of the stories of Hercules, Jason, Theseus, and (the Germanic one-off) Siegfried. I’m pretty sure I understood at the time that the former were stories about real people who had actually existed (even if some of the details were invented), while the latter were fantasy. A couple years later, when I became enthralled by Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the PBS Mystery series (originally produced by Granada for BBC), I think I may have needed to ask my parents for clarification about whether these were made-up stories, or dramatizations of a real historical detective’s famous cases.

The thing is, in a sense it didn’t really matter that much what was true and what was made up. The point of these stories—or at any rate, part of the point—was to have engaging and memorable tales of, if not “virtue” in every case, then at least various types of “excellence” to be inspired by or emulate. To be sure, it might be more effectively inspiring if you knew that a story described some achievable real-world accomplishment, but this wasn’t the essential thing. The same goes for parables that illustrate behavior or dispositions to avoid: There’s no shortage of real-world stories one might use to convey the moral “pride goeth before a fall,” but a fictional one will do as well if the point is just to memorably capture an important lesson. Did the historical George Washington really fess up to felling a cherry tree because he “cannot tell a lie”? Almost certainly not, but unless you’re a historian, how much does it really matter whether all your beliefs about the Washington’s life are accurate?

All this is apropos of a piece by Jonathan Rée arguing that the so-called New Atheists misunderstand religion when they treat it primarily as a set of truth-claims on par with a scientific theory. When we read or watch explicitly fictional stories, we sometimes talk about the “suspension of disbelief” that’s necessary to become truly immersed in a tale. We need to find the story, in some sense, “believable” in the sense that it has a kind of internal coherence, without being committed to it’s literal truth. This is the sense in which it’s “unrealistic” for Booster Gold to win a one-on-one fight against Darkseid, even though, of course, there’s nothing remotely realistic about either character.

Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety “believer,” I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a “suspension-of-disbeliever.” (Somewhere in the back of my head is that CollegeHumor video about religion as a species of fanboyism.) When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story. On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense. (Wouldn’t characters with “super strength” would really need super speed as well to do stuff like punching through concrete? Shouldn’t Cyclops be propelled backwards when he unleashes those concussive eye beams?”) It’s not annoying because we literally believed the stories, but because our enjoyment depends on our not attending too explicitly to their unreality. People can, on one level, be powerfully committed to the idea that Han Solo shot first, dammit—while on another being perfectly aware that, really, nobody shot anybody, and it’s actually just Harrison Ford and a dude in a green rubber suit with some laser effects added in post production.

Fanboys, of course, know their cherished fantasy worlds are fantasy, and will admit as much readily if you press them. For many ordinary believers, I suspect the situation is closer to what I think my initial view of Sherlock Holmes probably was: I knew that Watson “was” Holmes’ faithful sidekick, and that Moriarty “was” his archenemy, but if you asked me whether I meant this “was” in the sense of a historical truth claim or only as a “truth” about a fictional narrative, I suspect I would have initially been surprised by the question, because nothing about my relationship to the narrative or my reasons for enjoying it turned essentially on whether the events it depicted had really happened.

Update: It’s clearly true, as a commenter argues, that Dawkins & co. are themselves quite capable of appreciating religious and mythical narratives as narratives. What Rée seems to be positing, though, is that they may underestimate the number of soi-disant Believers who appreciate it on something like the same level. The people most motivated to debate and respond to New Atheist arguments, after all, are almost certainly not a representative sample, but likely to be heavily composed of those with a strong, reflective commitment to the literal accuracy of religious narrative. (Just as the small number of Atheist evangelists are pretty unrepresentative: Most of us don’t have all that much interest in talking people out of their favored narratives, as long as they’re not actively bugging us with them.) I’m not suggesting many believers appreciate their own narratives exactly as Dawkins does—that they’re ironists reciting their credos with a knowing wink, like the nuns at the end of DeLillo’s White Noise or the villagers at the end of Book of Mormon—though there are plainly a few of those. But I think there’s a vast fuzzy space between the ironists and the literalists, where the ontological level of the commitment to the narrative is left deliberately vague precisely because reflectively understanding it as fictional would weaken it, but endorsing it as a literal truth on par with everyday factual claims is unnecessary, and maybe even a little weird.

Update II: Just because so many commenters are focusing on it: I really like Richard Dawkins! I own and have enjoyed many of his books, including the athevangelist ones, and expect to purchase more! I’m just suggesting that it may be more common than we appreciate to “believe” in a way that engages with a story without needing to know whether things really happened that way. (“What a great period movie!” “Was it based on real historical events?” “Not sure, now that you mention it, I was just enjoying the movie.”) If that describes a nontrivial number of nominal believers, Dawkins’ (correct!) arguments may not be relevant to those people.

As the Internet scratches its Hydra-head over Netflix’s announcement that it’s splitting off its DVD-by-mail rental service under the unlovely heading of “Qwikster,” Tim Lee tweets that Bill Gurley’s speculation is the most plausible explanation he’s seen for a move consumers seem to be universally panning:

So here is what I think happened with Netflix’s recent price change (for the record, I have no inside data here, this is just an educated guess). Netflix has for the past several years been negotiating with Hollywood for the digital rights to stream movies and TV series as a single price subscription to users. Their first few deals were simply $X million dollars for one year of rights to stream this particular library of films. As the years passed, the deals became more elaborate, and the studios began to ask for a % of the revenues. This likely started with a “percentage-rake” type discussion, but then evolved into a simple $/user discussion (just like the cable business). Hollywood wanted a price/month/user.

This is the point where Netflix tried to argue that you should only count users that actually connect digitally and actually watch a film. While they originally offered digital streaming bundled with DVD rental, many of the rural customers likely never actually “connect” to the digital product. This argument may have worked for a while, but eventually Hollywood said, “No way. Here is how it is going to work. You will pay us a $/user/month for anyone that has the ‘right’ to connect to our content – regardless of whether they view it or not.” This was the term that changed Netflix pricing.

It does sound bizarre at first blush, but I think it makes a certain amount of sense when you think about substitution effects, and the real reason people choose to own movies rather than rent them.

The simplest answer might be that it’s a straightforward function of how many times you expect to watch a movie. If the price of purchase is lower than the number of expected viewings multiplied by the rental cost, it will be cheaper to buy. 

Except I don’t think that adequately captures why people buy movies. I have a reasonably large DVD and BluRay collection—somewhere in the ballpark of 100 movies and TV seasons. There’s a handful I never seem to get sick of—The Big Lebowski, The Dark Knight, Brazil, episodes of Firefly—and maybe 20 all told that I’ve watched (or am likely to watch) five or more times, which I’d guess is the average rent/purchase break-even point. If that were the only consideration, the other 80 might seem like irrational purchases. Quality is another factor—a BluRay still looks and sounds noticeably better than a streamed movie on a big screen with good speakers. But that’s not all there is to it either.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of purchase over rental is having ready access to a collection. That is, if I’m lounging around with my girlfriend on a rainy Sunday evening, and decide we want to watch a movie right then, we have a pool of 100 movies to choose from without either of us having to truck out to a store or rental kiosk. Maybe we’ll never get around to watching Apocalypse Now or Repulsion five times, but the point is that we could watch them anytime. 

Netflix streaming changes the calculus by giving you a huge pool of instantly-available movies without requiring you to own a large collection. For the 20 or 30 favorite movies, I might want to own them anyway, especially if they’re not necessarily going to be perpetually available to stream. But the “long tail” of my collection consists of a lot of movies that I own because I want to have the option of watching something pretty good in that genre anytime, not necessarily that particular movie. With Netflix available, I’m more likely to buy the 30 percent of favorites, and then assume they’ll have something acceptable streaming when we want to watch something new. There’s no need for a big collection of physical discs.

Now it’s easy to imagine the studios initially seeing streaming as primarily displacing rentals. That’s pure gravy for them, because the First Sale Doctrine means they’re not making any revenue from rentals after the initial purchase. Then—whoops!—they realize it’s actually displacing sales, because ready access to a pool of movies is actually a pretty good substitute for ownership. So it’s not so mysterious that they might suddenly want a fee based on the total number of subscribers with access to a streaming film. Because some percentage of those, even if they don’t end up watching a particular movie more than once or twice, will think: “I could buy it, but why bother if I can just stream it whenever I feel like seeing it? Even if that one movie gets pulled from streaming, there will be plenty of others about as good to choose from.” The mistake—perhaps natural for folks who spend their time making and marketing individual films—was not seeing that consumers often aren’t so much interested in watching some particular movie as they are in the ability to watch something. Just as many people spend hours “watching TV” rather than watching any particular show, people often just want to “watch a movie”—de dicto, rather than de re, as the philosophers say—or rather have the option to watch any one of a number of movies, more than they want to see any particular one.

A few days ago, Ars Technica asked me to comment on a class action lawsuit against Paxfire, a company that partners with Internet Service Providers for the purpose of “monetizing Address Bar Search and DNS Error traffic.” The second half of that basically means fixing URL typos, so when you accidentally tell your ISP you want the webpage for “catoo.org,” they figure out you probably mean Cato. The more controversial part is the first half: When users type certain trademarked terms into a unified address/search bar (but not a pure search bar, or a search engine’s own home page), Paxfire directs the user to the page of paying affiliates who hold the trademark. So, for instance, if I type “apple” into the address bar, Paxfire might take me straight to Apple’s home page, even though Firefox’s default behavior would be to treat it as a search for the term “apple” via whatever search engine I’ve selected as my default.

The question at the heart of the suit is: Does this constitute illegal wiretapping? A free tip if you ever want to pose as an online privacy expert: For basically any question about how the Electronic Communications Privacy Act applies to the Internet, the correct answer is “It’s complicated, and the law is unclear.” Still, being a little fuzzy on the technical details of how Paxfire and the ISP accomplished this, I thought about what the end result of this was without focusing too much on how the result was arrived at. The upshot is that Paxfire (if we take their description of their practices at their word) only ends up logging a small subset of terms submitted via address bars, which are at least plausibly regarded as user attempts to specify addressing information, not communications content. In other words, I basically treated the network as a black box and thought about the question in terms of user intent: If someone who punches “apple” into their search bar is almost always trying to tell their ISP to take them to Apple’s website, that’s addressing information, which ISPs have a good deal of latitude to share with anyone but the government under federal law. And it can’t be wiretapping to route the communication through Paxfire, because that’s how the Internet works: Your ISP sends your packets through a series of intermediary networks owned by other companies and entities, and their computers obviously need to look at the addressing information on those packets in order to deliver them to the right address. So on a first pass, it sounded like they were probably clear legally.

Now I think that’s likely wrong. My mistake was in not thinking clearly enough about the mechanics. Because, of course, neither your ISP nor Paxfire see what you type into your address bar; they see specific packets transmitted to them by your browser. And it turns out that the way they pull out the terms you’ve entered in a search bar is, in effect, by opening a lot of envelopes addressed to somebody else.

Some quick Internet 101: When you type “apple.com” into your address bar, your browser first checks with your ISP (or, if you’re a techie, maybe with some other Domain Name System server you’ve specified) to look up the computer-friendly numerical address corresponding to the human-friendly URL. Then the browser sends a GET request—basically just a packet saying “give me this page please”—to the IP address of the machine where it think apple.com lives. But if you just type “apple” into a lot of modern browsers, then depending on their settings, they may not pass that on to your ISP’s DNS server at all. Instead, the browser recognizes that you’ve entered something that isn’t formatted like a URL, and sends a packet straight to your default search engine, whose content is “please give me a page of results for the search term apple.” That’s annoying to the ISP, because it means they get cut out of an opportunity to monetize your eyeballs by (for instance) charging Apple to send you straight there, or delivering you their own search results (with their own ads).

According to some network researchers who explained their findings at EFF’s site, here’s how Paxfire and some of its ISP partners have apparently solved the “problem.” When your browser goes to look up the IP address of your default search engine—that is, when it asks your ISP’s domain name server where it can find “Bing.com” or “Google.com”—the ISP just systematically lies. It tells your browser that one of Paxfire’s servers is really Google.* Paxfire then acts as an invisible proxy, or “man in the middle”: It looks at the request your browser was trying to submit to Google, and in most cases resubmits the identical request to Google itself, then passes along Google’s response without logging anything. An ordinary user wouldn’t notice that Paxfire had been involved at all. But! When their servers see a search that was both originated from a browser’s address bar (the search parameters apparently reveal this) and matches their list of trademarked terms, they’ll log the query and instead return their own page.

The crucial point here is that by the time the packet gets to Paxfire, it’s no longer ambiguous whether “apple” was supposed to be an address or a search term. By the time it gets to Paxfire, “apple” is the content of a message addressed to Google, which reads “please send me search results for apple, and by the way, I’m asking from a Firefox address bar.” The mechanics are opaque to the average user, but Paxfire is in effect combing through all these messages to find the ones that maybe, possibly, perchance the user really meant to be an address rather than a search request, because they don’t really understand how their browsers work. And thaaats kinda wiretappy.

Except, of course, it’s still complicated. If an ordinary citizen taps your phone or your Internet connection, they’re guilty of wiretapping (a felony, for those keeping score at home) the instant they “acquire” the communication, regardless of what they do with it. If I rig your computer to send me copies of all your emails (without your consent), it makes no difference whether I ever read any of them or use them for any purpose. If, for some bizarre reason, I’ve done this and then set my system set to automatically erase the e-mails upon receipt, I’m still equally guilty of illegal “interception” of your communications. (It’s a separate offense to “use” or “disclose” communications that have been illegally intercepted.) The crime occurs at the instant of acquisition.

The rules are different for telecom companies, because the only way to have communications on a packet switched network is for various intermediaries to “acquire” your communications in order to pass them along. So the Wiretap Act’s definition of “interception” explicitly excludes acquisition by a provider’s computers in the “ordinary course of business.” It’s a separate offense for the provider to “divulge” the contents of a communication to any third party, and here there’s no loose “ordinary course of business” exception. Third-party disclosure is allowed when it’s a “necessary incident” of providing the communications service, or when the contents are passed to an entity whose facilities are used to forward the communication to its intended recipient, or with the consent of one of the parties to the communication. (There are a bunch of other exceptions, but they’re not relevant here.) The interesting wrinkle here is that while for most of us, it’s simple to determine when we’ve “intercepted” a communication, for telecom providers it’s kind of complicated: Unlike the rest of us, they’re allowed to acquire and disclose other people’s communications in the ordinary course of business, so whether an illegal interception has occurred doesn’t just depend on where the data goes, but on what they’re doing with it, and why.

Unsurprisingly, Paxfire’s reply to the suit against them seeks to invoke the “ordinary course of business” exception, among other arguments. Exactly what qualifies as the “ordinary course of business” in this rapidly changing industry is an open question, and circuit court rulings are all over the map, with none directly on point. If that were what we had to assess, I might say flip a coin. But the standard for “divulging” to third parties is more stringent—which makes sense, when you think about it. The law essentially gives providers more leeway in deciding what kinds of internal monitoring or processing are necessary, but sets a higher bar for disclosure to others.

Claiming that redirection of search traffic to Paxfire is a “necessary incident” of service seems like a nonstarter. The more obvious out for the ISPs here is 18 U.S.C. 2511(3)(b)(iii), authorizing disclosure to a person whose facilities are used to forward the message. But a little common sense is needed here: Anyone eavesdropping on a realtime packet-switched communication would normally forward the intercepted packets to their intended recipients. We can’t read this as a sort of blanket loophole for wiretapping executed as a man-in-the-middle attack.

What seems dispositive here is that, while Paxfire is ultimately forwarding most query packets to their intended recipients, ISPs aren’t routing traffic through Paxfire as a means of getting it to the intended recipient, Google. The more direct way to achieve that would be not lying to our browsers when they ask for Google’s IP address, and letting our requests go through normally. Rather, the only rationale for routing the traffic to Paxfire is what they do other than the normal routing and forwarding Internet switches do. The only difference Paxfire makes is that it sometimes doesn’t just forward packets to their intended recipients in the normal way, but sends the user to some affiliate’s page instead. It would make a kind of nonsense of the statute to apply the forwarding exception to these circumstances.

Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s not nearly as clear that Paxfire itself falls on the wrong side of the law here, because a court might well regard their actions as covered by the telecom provider’s “ordinary course of business” restriction on the statutory definition on “interception.” If everyone whose traffic was routed through Paxfire had clearly given informed consent to the filtering and occasional rerouting of their search queries, what Paxfire’s doing would clearly be legal, and one could argue it’s really the ISP’s problem to ensure they’re allowed to pass along the traffic they do.

That, of course, brings us back to the crucial question of consent. All of this is moot if the ISPs had the informed consent of their subscribers to do this. Paxfire says they all did, pointing to privacy policies like this one on RCN’s website. But it’s not clear that this does or should meet the relatively high standard for consent to interception under the Wiretap Act. Congress clearly wanted to establish a pretty strong presumption against the interception of communications content. In this case, that means that when monitoring or disclosure go beyond the “ordinary course” and “necessary incident” exceptions, it seems appropriate to demand that each individual whose communications are intercepted have actual, specific, effective notice that their communications are subject to interception. In considering a case involving workplace monitoring of an employee’s personal calls, the 11th Circuit gave an indication of the stringency of the consent requirement:

It is clear, to start with, that Watkins did not actually consent to interception of this particular call. Furthermore, she did not consent to a policy of general monitoring. She consented to a policy of monitoring sales calls but not personal calls. This consent included the inadvertent interception of a personal call, but only for as long as necessary to determine the nature of the call. So, if Little’s interception went beyond the point necessary to determine the nature of the call, it went beyond the scope of Watkins’ actual consent.

Consent under title III is not to be cavalierly implied. Title III expresses a strong purpose to protect individual privacy by strictly limiting the occasions on which interception may lawfully take place.

Your mileage may differ, but that sounds hard to square with the claim that “consent” exists for each user provided that whichever member of the household pays the bills checked a box next to a link to a dozen pages of dense legal boilerplate, which studies suggest nobody actually reads. Title III, after all, is to a substantial extent a regulation of telecom operators themselves—which means it would be contrary to the purpose of the statute to let them so easily disclaim liability, and to pile broad new exceptions atop the detailed list Congress created.

The key point to bear in mind here is that the strong statutory presumption against interception is of enormous benefit to the providers. People normally don’t scrutinize the legal boilerplate on ISP privacy policies, I want to suggest, because they take for granted that wiretapping is illegal, and that ISPs will not, in fact, routinely allow marketers to sift through the contents of their private communications. If users and customers had to fear that a communications provider was likely to assert the right to do this, based on item D(3) on page 12… a lot of providers would lose a hell of a lot of business, because most people don’t want to have to get a JD in order to be able to feel confident they can communicate securely. I know some of my libertarian friends will say it would be better if everyone did have to pay close attention to all these clickwrap contracts, but in the world we currently live in, people do rely on the strong statutory default prohibiting interception and disclosure. Providers whose business depends pretty heavily on consumer expectations of a strong default shouldn’t be allowed to turn around and assert that the default is actually so weak as to be almost trivially overcome when it might permit them to rake in a few extra bucks on the side.

* Actually, they’ve apparently stopped proxying Google specifically, but roll with me for illustrative purposes.

Gallup reports a record high number of respondents telling pollsters they “approve” of marriages between blacks and whites. In one sense, this is obviously great news, but something about the question itself bothered me.

In part, it was that the framing still embeds the assumption that “marriages between blacks and whites,” a term that encompasses about half a million distinct relationships in the United States, constitutes some kind of useful conceptual class, toward which people might coherently be expected to have a gestalt “pro” or “con” attitude. Imagine someone asked you whether you approved or disapproved of marriages between people with surnames whose initial letters fell in different halves of the alphabet. Would you say “approve,” or just give them a funny look? Or, for that matter, suppose you’re asked whether you approve of “relationships,” period. Most of us could only answer: “What do you mean? Which ones?”

Perhaps the more fundamental problem, though, isn’t with the category so much as with the choice between “approval” and “disapproval” itself. My own instinctive reaction was: “What possible business of mine could it be to approve or disapprove of the relationships of thousands of strangers?” Now, I’m not being deliberately obtuse here: Obviously Gallup is only asking because large numbers of people have taken it to be their business to disapprove of interracial relationships as a class for most of our history. But it seems to me that progress does not consist in shifting people’s attitudes from “disapprove” to “approve.” (And I suspect most of the people responding “approve” really mean something more like: “Don’t think there’s anything wrong with…”) To approve, after all, is still to implicitly reserve the right to disapprove, to assert the right to judge. The closest parallel is probably with “toleration,” which, however clearly preferable to its opposite, has always carried the uneasy suggestion of an indulgence the majority charitably extends at its discretion. Nobody likes to be on the wrong end of “intolerance,” but it should also be a little unnerving to hear that your neighbors “tolerate” you.

The oddness of expressing “approval” or “disapproval” is a bit clearer if you think of it in personal terms. If a few casual acquaintances tell you, not just that they “like” the person you have just started dating, but that they “approve” of your burgeoning relationship, you might take that in the spirit of friendly (if somewhat nosy) advice. If they say the same about your spouse, or your partner of many years, you’re more likely to feel indignant: “And who are you to ‘approve’ or not? Who asked you?”

Pollsters, of course, do ask everyone—or enough of us to take a stab at generalizing about everyone, at any rate. And judging by the relatively low numbers that tend to follow “don’t know/no opinion,” most of us feel obliged to come up with an answer when asked, whatever the topic. While relatively few of those questions invite impertinent judgements about the private lives of our fellow citizens, they do expect us to have views on a seemingly unlimited range of topics, regardless of whether the average person can reasonably be expected to have an informed view on the question: How would you rate the Obama administration’s handling of the economy? Has the Patriot Act made us safer? In contrast to questions about other people’s romantic relationships, it’s obviously not presumptuous or inappropriate for citizens in a democracy to have views on these matters, but the honest answer for most of us, most of the time, is: “You know, I really couldn’t say.” The pollsters, needless to say, don’t care about our answers to these questions because the popular answer is likely to be correct, but because the majority perception is politically significant. That’s one reason they often exclude “I don’t know” or “no opinion” as an explicit option, though they’ll record that answer when respondents volunteer it: It’s not like they think the people who do readily express an opinion have any real idea either; they’re just looking for attitudes.

Fair enough for the pollsters, but you do have to wonder how the ubiquitous reporting of public opinion polls influences our thinking about politics. If just about everyone has an opinion on these questions, it tends to imply that the questions are easy (wouldn’t more people be saying that they just don’t know otherwise?) and that everyone ought to be expected to have an opinion on all these topics. If you don’t have a lot of spare time to do intensive research into complicated policy questions, of course, you’re probably going to have to outsource your opinion to someone who seems ideologically congenial, whether it’s a wonkier friend or a professional pundit. Once we do adopt those views, though, they’re ours—and we’re more likely to take umbrage if someone suggests that they aren’t supported by the best evidence.

Then you have polls like the 2010 study that showed Americans not only vastly underestimate the existing level of inequality in this country, but overwhelmingly prefer a much more egalitarian income distribution—something closer to Sweden’s than our own current status quo. This was taken as signalling that Americans’ underlying attitudes about social justice are really quite progressive, even those who (presumably out of confusion or ignorance) describe themselves as “conservative.”

This interpretation again neglects the implicit question invariably embedded in opinion polls: the assumption that the respondents ought to decide the answer. If you insist that anyone, however conservative or libertarian they might be, imagine themselves in the position of a parent doling out cake at a birthday party, then naturally they’re going to be inclined to favor a pretty equal distribution. But conservatives and libertarians don’t accept high levels of inequality because they think hugely disproportionate concentrations of wealth are intrinsically wonderful, or even just because they think unequal rewards are necessary to spur effort and productivity. Rather, they think holdings ought to be emergent, and that they are justified insofar as they arise from uncoerced market choices subject to certain constraints. (Between two societies, they might find more attractive the one in which the market produced a more equal result, but it’s not clear what would follow from that preference as a political matter.) On this view, asking what the “ideal” income distribution ought to look like is a bit like asking how many interracial marriages there ought to be—and the answer in each case will be “Who am I to say? Whatever people choose.”

Maybe these results reveal less about Americans’ political views than they do about the implicit political tendencies of polling itself. The background message of most polling is that every question, on every topic, is a fit subject for a majority vote, and that every opinion is equally valid. It’d be nice to see more polls adding an explicit “don’t know/don’t care” option—and while they’re at it, maybe a “why are you asking me?” and “that’s none of my damn business, is it?” for good measure.