Mike Masnick finds another MPAA flack in high dudgeon in response to the simple factual observation that, especially a rough economy, studios and networks risk audience flight to BitTorrent if they don’t make their own digital offerings more consumer-friendly:

In other words: movie and TV theft is inevitable. Why? Because it’s easy to steal something that, in physical form, exists only as data, and easy to justify stealing it as a result?

First, as Masnick notes: Yes! However huffy you get about it, however morally outrageous you might find it, online copying clearly isn’t going anywhere. Lots of bad things are, indeed, pretty much inevitable regardless of what we think about that fact.

Second, a couple things worth pointing out about this familiar copyright maximalist trope. You know the one: “If you wouldn’t shoplift a CD, you shouldn’t think it’s any less wrong to ‘steal’ music and movies just because it’s easier to get away with!”

I always find this an odd line to take, because one of the reasons it’s easy to get away with copyright infringement than theft is that copying has no direct impact (and in many cases not even an indirect impact) on the rights holder, which means they don’t just have to expend resources to find infringers—it takes some work just to find out how much infringement is happening! And this seems relevant to the aptness of the equivalence with stealing.

Suppose I tell you that assaulting people is wrong, and it doesn’t become any less wrong just because it’s easy to get away with, owing to the fact that the victim doesn’t notice. You might think a reasonable response is that, while it’s surely possible for a genuine assault to go unnoticed by the victim under certain circumstances, that sounds like a prima facie reason to wonder whether what we’re talking about really is an assault. It’s a little odd to lean on this “don’t forget it’s theft just because it’s so easy!” when the reason it’s easy is also a reason it’s not a whole lot like real theft.

The other point to make is that, while I’ve certainly never done it, shoplifting actually also seems pretty easy. I suspect a well-dressed person who’s minimally clever about it could routinely just walk off with small items from brick-and-mortar shops. For someone in the habit of doing it, safely pocketing a couple items from a low-security store now and again probably is not appreciably more difficult or risky than hunting down a new movie on BitTorrent. Probably some small percentage of adults do just that. But the vast majority of people who download pirated music or movies clearly don’t. Indeed, probably the reason it would often be easy is precisely that the vast majority of people think stealing is wrong, and so most people don’t do it even when they can easily get away with it. Since most people are honest, shops that don’t sell especially expensive items generally don’t find it worth investing in higher security to deter the few exceptions, since the security would often cost more than the stolen items.

That makes this, too, an oddly counterproductive comparison for copyright maximalists to make. Because once you acknowledge that physical stealing is, in many circumstances, effectively about as easy and low-risk as pirating, you need to come up with some other story to explain why vast numbers of people who’d never dream of doing the former will do the latter. And the obvious answer is that despite a relentless propaganda campaign aimed at equating the two, most people intuitively see a difference between copying and stealing, for reasons that have nothing to do with how easy or risky it is. That doesn’t mean people who pirate necessarily think it’s morally unproblematic—they might do it a bit guiltily, thinking they really ought to be paying—but regard it as a venial sin, not something on the same order as real theft.

Of course, a widespread moral intuition is no infallible guide—plenty of societies countenance grossly immoral practices—but it seems at least like an important data point, at least. First, because it seems wildly out of wack to impose such enormous penalties (often, indeed, far in excess of what would apply to someone who did shoplift the same music) on actions that most people sincerely do not regard as wrong. Even if it were the efficient thing to do (because only very high penalties will deter piracy enough to save valuable industries) it would not seem particularly just. Second, because any system of rules relies overwhelmingly on voluntary compliance—on people respecting the rules because they dovetail with people’s views about what’s right and wrong, not because of formal enforcement measures. That makes law and regulation that run contrary to people’s moral intuitions vastly more costly to enforce, precisely because so much more actual enforcement is necessary to achieve the same level of compliance. That, in turn, means that the social gain from achieving given level of rule compliance has to be much higher to make the rule worthwhile.

I recently did a diavlog with my friend Tim Lee on the new BloggingHeads spinoff site TechHeads, during which I had a thought that seems like it might be worth spinning out. We’re all accustomed to seeing horror stories about ludicrously broad, bad technology patents that have given rise to a wasteful arms race between real tech companies and patent trolls. A growing body of scholarly literature suggests that two decades of software patents, in particular, have been a hindrance rather than a net plus for innovation, and I think it’s worth thinking a bit about why that’s especially likely to be the case.

It has probably always been the case that our intellectual property policy has been skewed by a romantic vision of the lone genius in his workshop crying eureka! as some radical breakthrough strikes—when real innovation is more a matter of gradual, cumulative evolution. But I suspect it’s also true that one kind of innovation is more likely when you have a small number of pioneers working in a new field. A Newton or an Einstein born today wouldn’t be as likely to make similarly earthshattering contributions, partly for the simple reason that Newton and Einstein already did it (you can’t write the Principia twice), and partly because with thousands of people making small, incremental additions to our knowledge pool, it’s harder for even a genius to outpace them in a single bound. But we still want our genius—an identifiable individual to credit with the latest leap forward.

The thing is, as technologies mature, and innovation is more likely to proceed by a series of increments that shouldn’t be individually patentable, it also becomes much harder to police the quality of patents, which makes it more likely bad patents will slip through. To see why, consider the old economist’s aphorism that “division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” That is, the more people are connected in an extended system of economic cooperation, the more specialization becomes possible. Robinson Crusoe has to be a generalist—has to know how to produce everything he’s going to consume. In a small isolated village, most people need to be food producers first and foremost, and a few others can focus on providing other necessities. In a globally networked marketplace, an incredible amount of specialization is possible—which is why, notoriously, there’s almost no type of porn so bizarre or niche that someone hasn’t created a website dedicated to providing it.

When my parents were children, “computer programmer” was not even an occupational category. Now we have thousands upon thousands of people who specialize in working on very specific types of software: Web applications or encryption or databases or first-person-shooter games. Crucially, an innovation developed by one person can be circulated to a whole community almost instantaneously—which makes it less likely that we need a “genius” to make huge innovative leaps because small components of his big idea, if they do already exist, are scattered across obscure journals in other languages where he’ll never encounter them. Predictably, this enables an enormous amount of very rapid progress.

It also makes it a lot harder to evaluate patent quality. Patents are not supposed to just be a pointless monopoly granted to the first person who happens to file a description of a particular invention with the Patent Office; the justification for granting the monopoly is that it (in theory) elicits innovations that would not exist but for the incentive a patent provides. To that end, patents are only supposed to be granted for inventions that are “non-obvious.” But of course, “obvious” is a relative term: You wouldn’t want to give an industrial engineer a monopoly on some minor improvement to a production process just because it might not be obvious to me. The standard, rather, is whether it would be obvious to a person “skilled in the relevant art” applying reasonable diligence and effort.

The more highly specialized professionals are in rapid communication with each other, the more likely it becomes that you’ll see innovations that are “obvious” because they involve combining various disparate kinds of incremental prior innovative steps, but which don’t have “prior art”—meaning nobody has taken that exact step before, because it required a bunch of other pieces to be in place before it was viable. So searching for “prior art”—if that means exactly the same preexisting invention—becomes a less reliable guide to what is “obvious” in the relevant sense. But as specialization increases, it also becomes vastly more difficult for a patent examiner with broadly relevant training (engineering and electronics, say) to use his own understanding and expertise as a guide to what is truly “obvious” to someone trained in the specifically relevant domain (say, engineering mobile cellular data networks). It’s increasingly unreasonable to expect even the smartest and most diligent examiner—even assuming away all the bureaucratic and institutional incentives to err on the side of granting patents—to judge the “obviousness” of innovations across an ever-proliferating array of subspecialties.

As specialization increases the number of eyes on each particular type of problem, it also shifts the degree of non-obviousness that makes the granting of a patent monopoly a wise bargain for society. As I suggest above, when a small number of people are working on a problem, and in only sporadic communication, then you’re more likely to need someone to make a big leap to hit on an innovation rather than relying on the accumulation of many small incremental insights. (Perversely, patents may create an incentive to keep quiet about those incremental insights along the road to a functioning, patentable idea.) But sheer numbers also make it vastly more likely that someone—and more likely many someones independently—will arrive at even less-obvious ideas. If only 1 in 100 people working on a type of problem would hit on a specific solution, it seems a stretch to call it “obvious.” But if there are 10,000 people working on the same class of problems, that’s still 100 independent inventors.

That very much changes the shape of the problem patents are meant to solve. If you’re in a market with a dozen other players, then in the absence of a patent monopoly, your inventive might be to take measures to keep that one-in-a-hundred innovation secret so your competitors can’t copy it. (Send me your raw materials and I’ll apply my new improved production process behind closed doors, rather than making a machine to sell.) The public loses the benefit of learning how the invention works because secrecy is an effective alternative means of maintaining a monopoly. If there are a thousand other players in the same market, the perverse secrecy incentive drops away, because you can be reasonably sure lots of other people are going to hit on the same invention, and it’s likely that your costly efforts to maintain secrecy won’t actually leave you with a monopoly, or even ultimately prevent the knowledge of how the invention works from getting out.

More specialization, in short, means that society can get the benefit of even less-obvious innovations without having to pay the cost of an inefficient monopoly grant. Needless to say, the greater the efficient standard of “non-obviousness”—the larger the logical leap it makes sense to require from “prior art” to a new innovation before that step becomes patentable—the harder it is for a non-specialist examiner to correctly apply that standard.

So there’s an irony here: As a sector becomes more innovative, as even “good” patents become less necessary and more likely to hinder rather than spur innovation on net, and as the economically efficient “non-obviousness” standard for patent issuance rises, patent examiners necessarily become less likely to be able to discriminate effectively between good and bad patents. In other words, the circumstances under which it is efficient to be granting fewer patents are the very circumstances under which patent examiners lose the ability to accurately judge “obviousness,” and therefore become more likely to grant more patents. No wonder it’s such a mess.

The makers of Sesame Street released the following message today, in response to a Facebook petition that had called for Bert and Ernie to finally come out and get married:

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.
Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

Now, I don’t know a lot of “best friends” who share bedrooms in an apartment that size, but fine, let’s roll with that part. What I want to note is that the (presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation that puppets “do not have a sexual orientation” is just manifestly false. Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples.

Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. The human characters Gordon and Susan were married from the outset (and later adopted a child), while Maria and Luis famously got married on the show.

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show.

What Sesame Street gives us, then, is a picture of reality (in New York, of all places) where loving coupled relationships are exclusively presented as heterosexual. That exclusion is a choice. And the implicit message sent by that choice is that the very existence of same-sex couples is, like swearing or violent street crime, an aspect of urban reality that’s inappropriate for children to be exposed to, unlike all the normal, unremarkable heterosexual couplings depicted on the show.

That omission is not neutral. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships on a show that otherwise routinely celebrates family is, in itself, a message and a value judgment. It relegates them to the category of shameful or unpleasant topics that are not to be mentioned in front of the children. Obviously, this cannot keep children from noticing that Uncle Ron and Uncle Pete live together, or that Heather from kindergarten has two mommies. But they will surely notice, at least subliminally, that those relationships never seem to make their way into the idealized world of Sesame Street—where the air is sweet, and evidently the sun chases away the gays along with the clouds.

That doesn’t mean Bert and Ernie, or any other particular pair of Muppets, need to have a coming out party. [And to clarify: Having been depicted as best friends for so long, it would probably be a mistake to retcon them as gay.]  It does mean that the makers of kids shows should probably think harder about what message they’re sending when they embed in their scripts a double standard about what types of affectionate relationships are “appropriate” for children to see.

Update: Doug Mataconis articulates what I think is the natural reaction to this kind of argument, which is that “the mission of Sesame Street doesn’t really have much to do teaching children about sexuality at any level.” Whether it’s the “mission” or not, however, that’s what it does. It’s just that when it teaches us about heterosexuality, the teaching is invisible.

As long as human relationships are depicted, though, something is being modeled and taught. We’re learning something about sexuality when Telly contemplates the possibility that Bob and Linda (who, incidentally, was for a long time the most prominent deaf character on television) will get married and have babies. We’re learning something about the nature of family when Herry Monster and his relations sing about the physical features he has inherited from each of them, or when a family of Anything Muppets sort themselves by age and gender. Not teaching about “sexuality” in the broadest sense is just not an option as long as recognizably human couples and families are shown with any regularity.

That doesn’t mean there needs to be overt discussion of sexuality, any more than the presence of black characters requires an explanation of the horrific conditions under which African slaves were transported to the new world, or how their ancestors won civic equality decades later. It just means that having a cast with human characters of multiple races is a choice, even if “race” is never discussed, and a choice that implicitly “teaches” something different from a show where non-white faces are never glimpsed, or where characters of different races are present, but never interact (even if, again, this fact is never mentioned). If the show had nothing but Muppets, of course, the question wouldn’t arise at all. But if, for 40 years, every human adult or child face on the show were white, we would not be much impressed with the defense: “Well, it is not Sesame Street’s mission to teach kids about race relations.” If the ideal community represented by Sesame Street were 100% Anglo-Saxon in a country that’s about 64% non-Hispanic white, the complete absence of race relations would be teaching kids something about race relations. That’s one reason Sesame Street has always maintained a diverse human cast—and taught kids something precisely by showing all these friendly neighbors who don’t ever have to bring up the topic of race.

Update II: From the comments:

I’m a straight, 42 year old, at home father of a 4 year old girl. She happens to have 2 loving aunts that have been in a committed relationship for over 10 years.
Watching Sesame Street a few months ago she actually asked me why there is “nobody who look like aunt Erin and aunt Sara”.

Reading Jeremy Waldron’s new paper on torture and “moral absolutes”, the following setup for an action movie that will probably never get made sprang more or less full-formed into my head.

The film follows two protagonists: One is a recent recruit to an elite antiterrorism unit (think 24), the other has just stumbled upon (and effectively, if grudgingly, joined) an underground resistance movement that is fighting against what they believe to be an alien invasion conspiracy (think V or They Live). The alternating scenes are shot in different styles, and genuinely hew to the different conventions of gritty-realistic-thriller and mindbender-scifi.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the terrorist group sought by protagonist A is the resistance group joined by protagonist B. While A is given to understand that the group is planning to release a lethal biological weapon that will kill millions, B believes that it will be harmless to humans, but render the environment toxic to the aliens, who are on the verge of implementing their genocidal takeover plan.

As the story moves back and forth between the two protagonists, evidence that seems to confirm one character’s view (spectacular alien technology, and even a real-live alien) is debunked in a later scene (cinema-grade special effects with a dose of psychedelics employed by a sinister cult to gull its members, the antiterror chief explains), and then de-debunked again (a clever hoax by the aliens to ensure none who discover their plan will be believed). By the time of the grand denouement, the audience should be thoroughly confused as to who is the dupe—though it should be clear that each believes himself to be the hero.

At the climax, protagonist B agrees to act as a decoy while he sends off another member of the resistance group/cult to activate the dispersal device that will release the biological agent. He is, of course, apprehended by protagonist A, who attempts to extract the location of the device by a series of increasingly desperate threats and physical assaults. (But couldn’t he lie? Well, fine: He needs to speak the code phrase to remotely deactivate the device, which makes confirmation instantaneous.) Though horrified at each step, A insists he will not let millions die because he was too squeamish. Protagonist B is, of course, in terrible agony at this point, but “knows” everyone on earth will face a still grimmer fate if the aliens aren’t stopped.

Realizing he can’t do much to step up the physical pain without causing B to lose consciousness (which makes it less likely the information will be obtained in time), A finally has B’s young children brought in and—though clearly nauseated by what he’s been forced to resort to—begins threatening them in B’s presence. Because they are too young to be persuaded to act convincingly, he ultimately has to begin harming them. Unfortunately, because B at this point knows A to be somewhat honorable, ruses will not be effective: B must see some kind of non-trivial harm really inflicted in order to believe that A is truly capable of it.

As it seems that A is on the verge of dealing a horrific, fatal injury to one of the children, a clearly broken B finally agrees to cough up the information. Fade to black.

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.

So, I’m as amused as anyone when the umpteenth “ex-gay” evangelist is spotted leaving a leather bar after another triumphant speech about how Jesus magicked away their sinful homosexual feelings. I’m as incredulous as anyone at folks who insist that homosexuality is a “choice,” seemingly without ever having paused to ask themselves when they “chose” to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. But I nevertheless find it a bit odd that so many people seem so axiomatically certain that every ex-gay personal narrative can only be a tale of confusion and denial.

Here is a story I think we all agree describes something that happens all the time—though not as much as it used to. A young person who naturally feels same-sex attractions suppresses them—perhaps not even allowing himself to be consciously aware of them—because of overwhelming social or familial expectations and norms. They go on to have a series of heterosexual relationships, perhaps even marry. These are not necessarily a complete sham: They will often involve genuine love and affection, and even a modicum of sexual attraction sufficient to get a couple kids produced. Nevertheless, the person has a nagging sense that something is missing, and eventually comes to terms with their own repressed feelings. Though they may, for a time, have sincerely convinced themselves they were straight, they finally acknowledge that, deep down, they’re actually gay.

If we think something along these lines has often occurred, and continues to, then why would we rule out the possibility that it occasionally happens in reverse? Not, of course, because of overwhelming social pressure to be gay, but perhaps (as we sometimes hear in “ex-gay” narratives) some childhood sexual trauma or abuse that leaves the victim with a physical aversion to members of the opposite sex, which they confusedly take to mean they must be gay. It’s true, most self-described “ex gays” sound like they’re engaged in a religiously-motivated form of denial, rather than responding to some genuine personal epiphany about their inner nature. But if people who are actually gay can go years or decades convincing themselves (or trying to convince themselves) that they’re straight, surely it’s at least possible that some small handful of actually-straight people sometimes convince themselves they’re gay.

One obvious pragmatic reason not to want to draw attention to this possibility is that it creates an opportunity for conservative families struggling to accept a gay child or sibling to lapse back into denial: “Aha, maybe you’re the one-in-a-million who only thinks you’re gay! I just know it! How about a couple years of therapy?” The flip side is that makes all this “ex-gay” stuff properly irrelevant to larger discussions about sexual orientation without necessarily calling into question anyone’s personal narrative. We need not insist that a self-described “ex gay” is simply confused: maybe their previous gay identity really was an artificial construct in response to trauma. But that personal story also ceases to have any wider implications. Just as we’d properly find it ridiculous to suggest that, because some people are closeted and later come out, all heterosexuality is a form of denial or mental disorder from which people need to be liberated, we can laugh off attempts to draw inferences from the psychological problems of a handful of people to general conclusions about the larger number of people who really are gay. Not because we claim to know for certain that their private narrative is false, but because people are different enough that not every truth is a universal truth.

Update: Andrew Sullivan is unpersuaded:

So much of the culture and the environment and social pressure is for heterosexuality. It’s the norm. Very, very few people who are the norm in a society where the norm is overwhelmingly celebrated, are going to be in denial that they’re really straight. Maybe a few fluid lesbians in college. But that’s it. I can’t imagine a straight guy feeling in any way pressured to live a gay life.

As several commenters here suggest, part of the problem is an artificially sharp compartmentalization of sexuality into (100%) straight, (100%) gay, and (presumably precisely equally attracted to both genders) bisexual. And we know that doesn’t actually describe people very well. Indeed, we know most people are fairly adaptive, so that in gender segregated environments (prisons, boarding schools) people who in the outside world would exhibit completely heterosexual behavior will, after enough time, take their sexual gratification where they can get it. We can imagine a boy otherwise disposed to be straight who, as a result of some childhood sexual trauma, has a powerful averse reaction to anything approaching sexual contact with women, effectively ruling that option out. You’d have the psychological equivalent of being stuck in a permanent boarding school: Even if you weren’t or wouldn’t naturally be most attracted to other men, they’re what’s (psychologically) available. Strong as social pressure is, it’s not as strong as the human sex drive.

Again, I suspect this describes an extraordinarily tiny number of people, if it’s true of anyone. I’m just suspicious of the instinct to dismiss out of hand reports of human sexual or psychological experience that fall outside some small set of prefab categories.

Ron Bailey writes about last weekend’s excellent Planet Money story “When Patents Attack,” which focuses on the enormous market in “defensive” patents, purchased as a kind of retaliatory hedge against lawsuits from other technology companies:

In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses. Google said it wanted the patents purely to defend against lawsuits and it was willing to spend over $3 billion to get them. That wasn’t enough, though.

The portfolio eventually sold to Apple and a consortium of other tech companies including Microsoft and Ericsson. The price tag: $4.5 billion dollars. Five times the opening bid. More than double what most people involved were expecting. The largest patent auction in history.

That’s $4.5 billion on patents that these companies almost certainly don’t want for their technical secrets. That $4.5 billion won’t build anything new, won’t bring new products to the shelves, won’t open up new factories that can hire people who need jobs. That’s $4.5 billion dollars that adds to the price of every product these companies sell you. That’s $4.5 billion dollars buying arms for an ongoing patent war.

Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it’s worth dragging it out explicitly: The very existence of such massive trade in “defensive patents” is, in itself, pretty strong evidence that there’s something systematically quite wrong with the American patent system—because a patent that’s useful for “defensive” purposes is very likely to be a bad patent.

As everyone acknowledges, there’s a large deadweight loss involved in the creation of any patent system (and intellectual property more generally), because it prevents people from making free use of an intrinsically non-rivalrous good: Information. The static loss is, in theory, supposed to be outweighed by a dynamic gain: The incentives created by the patent system lead to the creation of new inventions that would never have existed but for the inventor’s ability to fully internalize the value of that invention.

But now think about how defensive patents work. Companies aren’t buying them—or buying into the services of companies like Intellectual Ventures—because they provide otherwise unavailable technical insights. The point, rather, is to acquire (or have access to) a bundle of patents that any potential litigant who sues you is likely to be “infringing” in their own products. Like nuclear weapons, the point is not to actually use them—but only to be able to threaten to use them if anyone else should deploy theirs against you.

This only works, however, if other companies are almost certain to have independently come up with the same idea. A patent that is truly so original that somebody else wouldn’t arrive at the same solution by applying normal engineering skill is useless as a defensive patent. You can’t threaten someone with a countersuit if your idea is so brilliant that your opponents—because they didn’t think of it—haven’t incorporated it in their technology. The ideal defensive patent, by contrast, is the most obvious one you can get the U.S. Patent Office to sign off on—one that competitors are likely to unwittingly “infringe,” not realizing they’ve made themselves vulnerable to legal counterattack, because it’s simply the solution a good, smart engineer trying to solve a particular problem would naturally come up with.

Needless to say, every patent granted for an idea that any number of suitably skilled engineers could have (and would have, and did) come up with is a patent that probably shouldn’t be granted—a pure deadweight loss that’s actually compounded by the squandering of resources on the “arms race,” with no compensating dynamic gain. Actually, there’s probably a dynamic loss: You end up creating a huge incentive for smart and skilled people to spend their time and energy not coming up with a brilliant idea that nobody else would have, but instead trying to be the first to put on paper ideas that are obvious (to a properly trained and up-to-date person) but haven’t been locked down yet—the solution, again, that almost any professional would have come up with once they were actually trying to implement the relevant technology. A sector where investment in defensive patents is so massive, then, is a sector where—even if some of them do genuinely add value—patents are probably doing more harm than good on net.

Update: Conveniently, via Techdirt, some empirical support for this idea comes in a new paper by Stanford law prof Mark Lemley. Rather than being produced by a lone genius who must be granted a monopoly to encourage creation of a benefit we’d otherwise do without, major innovations are typically independently arrived at by many people or groups nearly simultaneously. They are, as the saying goes, ideas whose time had come.

Is it ever an advantage to be crazy? Or at least, to be perceived as crazy? Richard Nixon thought so: During the cold war, he notoriously developed his “madman theory,” a stratagem of having senior aides circulate their “concerns” that Nixon had gone unhinged, and might just hit that big red button if provoked, even though the consequences of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union would clearly be catastrophic for the United States even in “victory” (if that term is even intelligible in the context of nuclear war). Nixon faced the  problem of “credible commitment,” as game theorists call it: It’s hard to use a threat as leverage when it would clearly be irrational for you to actually make good on that threat. An opponent who thinks you’re rational, therefore, will discount the threat as an empty bluff. But if your opponent thinks you’re crazy—crazy enough to make good on a threat even when it means mutual ruin—they may just be inclined to give you what you want.

It may be a bit inconvenient to keep up unhinged appearances over time, however, when you’re sharing closer quarters than Nixon and Khrushchev, especially if you sometimes need to collaborate on less hostile terms now and again. But of course, the folks involved in the detailed negotiations didn’t want their counterparts to think that they were crazy either: It was that other guy, Nixon, who they had no choice but to obey. Ideally, you want to be seen as rational yourself but accountable to a madman, at least on the specific point the threat is about.

Fast forward to 2011. Informed conservatives generally seem to agree that the debt ceiling has to get raised one way or another. They may all agree that large cuts in both discretionary spending and entitlements are desirable and, in the long run, necessary. But they also, however grudgingly,  allow that implementing all those cuts immediately and abruptly, in the middle of a recession, risks economic implosion and unnecessary suffering. Hitting the ceiling is not automatically the same as a default, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea either. That makes it hard to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract concessions on those necessary spending cuts unless Democrats believe that Republicans are genuinely willing to court catastrophe. But under normal circumstances, it’s almost impossible to make any progress pushing back against the long-term economic problem created by promising ever more benefits financed with debt. So if you can’t lock in spending cuts in a situation like the current one, where the debt is politically salient, good luck getting them any other time.

But Republicans are in luck. Because the base doesn’t think a failure to raise the ceiling could have serious negative consequences as long as the right’s pundit ecosphere continue to insist it won’t (and those who get an attack of bad conscience can be written off as victims of leftist brainwashing). Assuming that messaging is sticky enough to be hard to reverse before the deadline, the threat suddenly gets a lot more credible. “Yes, we know it’s dangerous to walk away without reaching a deal—but the folks who determine whether we win our primaries and keep our seats don’t. So we’re going to have to walk away anyway unless we get everything on their wish list.” It’s a little risky, of course, because you can’t have them so out of touch that they don’t accept any deal you make, but if it works it suggests a method to the madness.

Some further assorted thoughts falling out of the first few weeks of Google Plus:

• 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.