On the sub-optimality of bus seating

I realise that it’s pretty far down the long list of Things That Are Wrong With The World, but I am increasingly vexed by the potential inefficiency of seat allocation on buses. It is almost certainly the economist in me bridling at the casual violation of the Pareto Criterion – itching to realise the economist’s dream of making an arrangement better, and leaving nobody any worse.

Essentially, for our purposes here, there are two types of people who take the bus. There are those with companions, who want to sit with those companions. And there are those who are alone, who would rather have the space of two seats to themselves than be pressed up against a stranger.[1] I set aside the question of why people seem to be so socially retarded and jealous of their privacy that they find the idea of approaching a stranger terrifying rather than the prelude to a new friendship. If people were more open, the problem would soon disappear. Suffice to say, this cultural foible has been discussed at length elsewhere.

If the bus is not too crowded, there is ample opportunity for both types to get their wish. People can choose to sit next to the people they want to or to opt for isolation. The trouble begins when the number of free seats dips below twice the number of people who want to sit alone. That is, when there are no longer any free pairs of seats.

Suppose there are no free pairs of seats available then, and a couple – Alice and Bob – get onto the bus. They cannot sit together, and so have to sit next to other people. Alice sits next to Craig, and Bob next to Davina. Thus not only must Alice and Bob do without the pleasure of each other’s company, but Craig and Davina have to sit next to strangers. Yet if Craig and Davina must sit next to people they don’t know anyway, wouldn’t it make sense for them to sit next to one another, and so allow Alice and Bob to sit together? Alice and Bob would be better off, Craig and Davina no worse off, and Pareto can settle down in his grave. But this doesn’t happen, and all the real-life Alice and Bobs must suffer in silence.

What can be done about it all? With my neo-Stalinist tendencies, I’m inclined towards a bureaucratic statist solution. Everybody must register for their bus trip 24 hours in advance, and inform the Central Bureau of Seat Allocation who they want to sit next to. But even I have to concede that this is a bit of an overreaction. It probably isn’t cost-effective to open a whole government department to deal with the problem. One of the great virtues of buses is their relative flexibility – how many people know 24 hours in advance exactly which bus they want to take and when? Liberty, as ever, upsets patterns.

If the state fails, the obvious response is to turn to the market for a solution. Maybe Alice and Bob can pay Craig and Davina for their seats. This idea has the merit of identifying the pair who are least bothered about relinquishing their space – if Craig and Davina put too high a premium on it, they can be undercut by others who will sell for less because they care less about being alone.

However, the seat market appears to be prone to a major market failure: its transaction costs are too high. People are unlikely to go through the effort of setting up the mechanism of the market for so little reward. In any case, by the time the deals are struck, the chances are that it will be time for one of the parties to disembark, making bargaining somewhat impractical.

The best and most obvious option is what might be called the ‘ethical libertarian’ approach[2] Here, we just rely on people to use their initiative to escape these sub-optimal arrangements. We expect Craig or Davina to offer their seats, and hope Alice and Bob are not too bashful to ask for them.

The trouble with ethical libertarianism, both here and in general, is that it expects a lot of people in terms of good sense and altruism. Perhaps I’m too much of an economist to share their faith.

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[1] I assume here that seating is arranged in pairs, as on Aberdeen buses, but the idea is easily applied to other arrangements.

[2] I’ve just made up the name ‘ethical libertarianism’. I’m not sure if it’s any good. In any case, I take it to mean the position that we have extensive moral duties to other human beings, but that the government ought to execute relatively few of them

Should we abandon moralism?

One of the most interesting aspects of philosophy is its ability to provoke a variety of responses, and to be utilised for a wide variety of functions. It can be diverting and entertaining – hence the success of hit movies based more or less explicitly on thought experiments. It can be a practical tool to help us decide what to do – this is the aim of those who do practical ethics (clue’s in the name, guys). It can be pressed into little motivational or comforting soundbites (c.f. anything by Alain de Botton)

But often (and I think this is less commonly recognised or discussed), philosophy can be terrifying. It can challenge the very foundations of our existence, undermining the values and commitments we have based our lives around. Discussing Descartes’ scepticism, Mark Steel advises his viewers not to allow the thought to linger for more than 20 seconds because otherwise “it will start to drive you mental”. The same is probably true of the claims of pessimists, nihilists and determinists.

What’s always most troubled me, though, the philosophical Pandora’s box I have been desperate to keep shut, are the challenges of meta-ethics. What is morality? What do the concepts of right and wrong even mean? Why should we care about it? In most of my moral thinking, I have been content to assume that there is an answer to this question, and to get on with the substantive questions of how we should act – firmer ground where I felt more comfortable. I don’t think this is an unusual policy – in my first graduate class in Ethics, we were advised not to worry too much about meta-ethics, and assured that it is entirely separable from practical ethics.

This attitude infuriates Joel Marks, who urged moral philosophers to out themselves as amoralists in a pair of New York Times articles last month. Appealing to luminaries such as Hume, Nietzsche, Ayer, Sartre, Mackie and Rorty, Marks argues that morality does not exist. Moreover:

“This, odd as it may sound to say so, is relatively uncontroversial in modern ethical philosophy; for what I mean by morality here is its metaphysical conception as a truth or command that comes to us from “on high.” Very few well-known philosophical moralists have believed in such a thing since a century and more.

But precisely my gripe is that you wouldn’t know it from the way they speak! And even if they can communicate clearly with one another, the lay person is left to think otherwise.”

Most philosophers, according to Marks, have been doing what I have done: treating meta-ethics as though it has no bearing on practical ethics. However, Marks thinks that this common meta-ethical position has radical implications for how we think about moral problems – he calls for the abolition of moral language altogether. His point is so obvious, it seems bizarre that it should even need stating: if most philosophers do not believe that such a thing as morality exists, why should they still keep talking as though it does?

I think the meta-ethical position that Marks sets out is more or less similar to my own. Moral ‘beliefs’ are nothing more than statements of preference. So when I say that it is morally wrong that anybody should live in poverty, all I am saying is that I would really like it if poverty were eradicated. This is fundamentally no different in kind from my desire that the sun stays out, or my desire to eat cake.

Though I agree that moral claims are nothing more than preferences, I am wary of making this explicit for a couple of reasons. The first is pragmatic – to abandon moralistic argument is to lose one of the most powerful means of persuasion. Suppose it is my desire that poverty be eradicated. I am far more likely to convince people to do their bit to reduce poverty if I can couch my arguments in objective moral terms – if I can portray it as being your duty, rather than just in line with my whims. Of course, if everybody were what Marks calls a ‘desirist’, then what we once called ‘moral’ argument could be carried out in amoral terms. But for as long as moral realists exist, it is worth giving our arguments moral dressing so that they appeal to as many people as possible.

Undeniably, there is something underhanded about reasoning in this way. Should we really be using moral argument in such a manipulative way? But this thought itself shows the dangers and difficulties of trying to purge our reasoning of moral content. The idea that we shouldn’t manipulate others so that they act in accordance with our desires is itself a moral notion – it is just another preference. If we try to cleanse our language of explicitly moral terms, there is a danger that moral ideas may still sneak in through the back door.

We are so used to thinking in moral terms that we need to remind ourselves that our values are just preferences – we are liable to forget our meta-ethical commitments. Keeping our moral premises explicit ensures we compare like-for-like, and don’t mistake a preference for something more forceful, like an objective moral command. For example, a natural response to the idea that there are no objective moral values is to conclude that all moral commitments are equally valid, and so we ought to unquestioningly tolerate the views of others. Yet this, of course, ignores the fact that tolerance is a moral value itself – and so we should only care about it insofar as we have a preference for tolerance.

Peculiarly, given that he believes it to be the only novel aspect of his argument, Marks offers only a solitary paragraph towards the end of his second article to making a positive case against moralistic language. Essentially his objection is that “The most horrific acts of humanity have been done not in spite of morality but because of it”. Even putting aside the moralistic assumptions that underpin this statement, this isn’t much of an argument. The question of whether morality has been a force for good is as tiresome and irresolvable as whether religion has been beneficial or not. Some people have been motivated to do good things by morality, others have been led to commit terrible acts. And just as atheists have their fair share of atrocities on their hands, it is hardly as if no evil has come from people pursuing their own desires.

When Marks says that most philosophers do not believe in morality, what he really means is that they do not believe in an objective, transcendental set of moral truths. But this is not enough reason to abandon the language of morality altogether. Ultimately, Marks fails to make a convincing case against conceiving of morality as a special type of subjective desire.

In defence of an episodic History education

Here is a list of topics I studied in history over the course of my primary and secondary school education, more or less in the order I studied them: Celts & Romans, Tudors & Stuarts, The Stone Age, Scottish Wars of Independence, The Industrial Revolution, the female suffrage campaign, the formation of the Welfare State, the prelude to World War I and the Weimar Republic/ Nazism/ World War II (on about three or four separate occasions).

I don’t think my experience was that unusual among British history students of my generation: a more or less random assortment of topics, linked by little more than an underlying eurocentrism, and a peculiar obsession with the Nazis. It is this pick ‘n’ mix approach, I think, which is increasingly coming under attack. Simon Jenkins decries ‘optionalism’, insisting that history must have a ‘narrative’, “starting at the beginning and running to the end”. In doing so, he allies himself with Education Secretary Michael Gove, and his history tsar, Niall Ferguson, prominent opponents of ‘tapas’ or ‘smorgasbord’ history.

But I think the loud objections to Ferguson’s view of history (most entertainingly from children’s history god Terry Deary) illustrate the problems of this approach. The story that Ferguson wants to tell is the story of how and why Europe came to dominate the world. There’s two problems with this. Firstly, there is the question of the truth or otherwise of this narrative. For example, Ferguson is a revisionist historian who tends to emphasise the positive effects of European colonialism. But it would be deeply irresponsible of him to present these views as accepted historical fact, and to fail to acknowledge the number of historians who would have profoundly object to this picture.

Even if Ferguson’s answers are valid, he may still be asking the wrong questions. Ferguson’s proposed emphasis has raised eyebrows because of its unabashed eurocentrism. But it also looks like it will be strongly focused on ’history from above’ – the big picture political, economic and military story, as opposed to the details of everyday life.

The trouble with teaching history as a narrative, therefore, is that it sacrifices two different types of neutrality. In the first place, It involves favouring one narrative over another. This is particularly problematic, given the strongly ideological flavour of many of these competing accounts. Favouring one narrative over another means making a choice between using history to develop a national myth to foster patriotism, or to seek cross-cultural understanding and to mould global citizens. Methodological neutrality is sacrificed, too. To insist on teaching history as a grand narrative is to presume that history should be about big picture questions, and therefore implies that excessive focus on details is a less valid approach.

Why should we care about neutrality? Why should the people designing a history curriculum try to avoid making a stand on controversial questions? There is a ethical argument and a practical argument. The moral objection is that history should not be used as an ideological tool – children should be left to make up their own minds, and is it is illegitimate to try to ‘mould’ them in any way.

The practical point is more often missed. Children are rarely passive receptacles of education. Just because you design a course for them does not mean that they will absorb it in the way you want them to. Consequently, it is not just what children should know, but also what will engage and interest them, that must be considered when designing a curriculum.

The episodic approach to history escapes both these problems. Rather than having to choose one big, sweeping narrative, it allows students to focus on different topics in depth. An essential part of properly addressing a topic in history is to understand how it is viewed from different ideological and historical perspectives. If one topic lends itself to a given approach, the next can be used to illustrate a completely different way to do history. That way, there is a hope of finding something to suit every taste. The thing that educationalists often seem forget is that even if you spoon feed children a certain message, you cannot be sure that they will swallow it. An equally crucial task of a history education is to try and get them to develop a taste for the subject.

The objection to an episodic history education is that it leaves the student with big gaps in their knowledge, and little sense of how events fit together. But history is so vast that nobody can hope, in the limited time a child has in the history classroom, to cover even the ‘basics’. There will always be omissions, and those omissions will always be controversial.

A more plausible aim is to give the curiosity to ask their own questions, the tools to follow these interests, and the critical faculties to form their own narratives. I think the depth and pluralism of the episodic approach best serves this goal.

False Consciousness in Food and Film

According to Mark Kermode, an important part of a film critic’s job is “explaining to people why they haven't actually enjoyed a movie even if they think they have”. In his article in The Guardian on Sunday, he suggests that people who liked Pirates of the Caribbean 3 only did so because they have been weaned on mindless blockbusters, and have forgotten or are unaware that film can be any better. In his words, they are “simply suffering from the cinematic equivalent of long-term deprivation of the basics of a civilised existence”.

Kermode’s sentiments make an interesting contrast with those of Peter Preston, writing in the same newspaper the following day. Whereas Kermode’s essay is a polemic against the state of modern Hollywood cinema, Preston offers a nostalgic reminiscence of Britain’s culinary past. Stumbling upon one of his mother’s old cookbooks, he contrasts its parochialism to the ambition (or pretentiousness) of modern food. There is a suspicion of anything too exotic, and the majority of ingredients seem to come out of cans. It’s all corned beef, baked beans, tinned soup and (for some reason) pineapple rings, assorted in ingenuity-stretching combinations.

This was not good food as we would recognise it today. Peter Preston knows that. Reading his article made me feel queasy rather than appetised (though that might have something to do with the psychological aversion to corned beef I developed working in a deli). It was just the food eaten by people living under post-war austerity who knew nothing better.

Notice the similarities between these descriptions of food in 1950s Britain, and contemporary film. In both cases, we have a group of people whose aesthetic taste has been dulled by a lack of exposure to ‘quality’ produce. Yet while Kermode sees this as a problem in need of remedy, Preston appears to think it is a cause for regret that this innocence has been lost. Just as film critics are perpetually accused of having lost the ability to see movies through the eyes of ordinary cinemagoers, so modern caterers are “a little too knowing, too sophisticated” to recreate the food of the past.

So if there is such a loss involved in ‘enlightening’ people, why bother? If people enjoyed POTC, why should Kermode be so churlish as to rob them of this pleasure? One possibility is that he sees his task as combatting something like ‘false consciousness’. On this view, to enjoy bad films is to be under a misapprehension which harms your deep interests. It is to hold a false belief which makes your life worse.

This sort of account is most plausible where there is an uncontroversial human interest at stake, for example health. So Anthony Bourdain’s culinary elitism is more defensible because its target is defensible because its target – excessively fatty, fried Southern food – is genuinely injurious to those who develop a taste for it.

But what is it that Kermode is trying to protect us from? How is he making our lives better by making certain films less enjoyable?

Does John Redwood care about inequality?

A peculiar article in The Guardian yesterday. Funny in the first instance because of the mental image it suggests – John Redwood choking on his cornflakes as it dawns on him that the left might not see him as a tireless campaigner for social justice, devoting his life to protecting the vulnerable. Peculiar because halfway through, Redwood seems to lose the thread of his argument, and begin to make the exact opposite case to the one he intended to.

The article itself is a furious reply to a throwaway remark from John Harris’ column the day before. Bemoaning David Cameron’s abandonment of his initial progressive credentials, Harris contrasts him with Redwood: “There is no point in people like me having a pop at, say, John Redwood for his failure to recognise the importance of inequality. But Cameron was meant to be slightly different.”

What’s clear from this quote is that Redwood is seen as an old-style Tory, antagonistic to the left, while Cameron is a new progressive Tory, sympathetic to many lefty causes. So there’s obviously supposed to be something that Cameron and Harris believe, but that Redwood does not. Call this ‘common ground X’.

Redwood takes common ground X to be concern for the poor, which is why he is so cross at the implication that he does not share it. Consequently, his whole article is devoted to demonstrating that the right simply have a different idea of what sort of policies most benefit the poor.

But that’s not what Harris says. Harris is quite explicit that what distinguishes Cameron and Redwood is their attitudes to inequality. Not their attitudes to the poor – their attitudes to inequality. Hence his reference to Cameron’s appreciation for the The Spirit Level, a book that argues that inequality is bad for society, regardless of how materially well-off the poor are.

Redwood’s sub-editor seems to have appreciated this, given that the title of his article is ‘It's ludicrous to say that rightwingers don't care about inequality’.

But Redwood, intent on demonstrating that rightwingers care about the poor, seems to forget that he was supposed to be arguing about inequality. In fact, his argument shows that for those on the right, caring about the poor involves embracing inequality. An excessive focus on reducing inequality, Redwood argues, risks cutting off the source of wealth that would eventually trickle down to the poor. Moreover, it involves engaging in ‘jealousy’, and undermines aspiration.

So John Redwood doesn’t care about inequality, even if he does care about the poor.

Three Questions about the riots

There seem to be broadly five different types of explanation for the rioting and looting that began in London,and swept across England last week (neatly summarised, although classified differently, by the BBC). There is what we might call the ‘hard right’ account, exemplified by Daily Mail columnist Max Hastings, which see the violence and disorder as the inevitable consequence of unchecked cultural decline. Liberalism’s erosion of the institution of the family and of discipline in schools has produced this amoral, feral youth. The ‘hard left’ narrative also sees the roots of the riots as cultural, but emphasises consumerism as the malign influence on society. Because British society links possessions so closely to status, it should be no surprise that people are willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain the things that confer high status.

By contrast, what I have dubbed the ‘soft right’ and ‘soft left’ focus on politics. The less subtle leftist accounts link the riots directly to current government policies, such as raising university fees and cutting EMA (c.f. Harriet Harman and Ken Livingstone). More nuanced versions of this argument point to the sense of hopelessness and lack of opportunity felt by those on the margins of society. The soft right story is the mirror image of this argument: the government has not been too harsh, but too generous, creating an unwarranted sense of entitlement, which has led to violence now it has inevitably been frustrated.

Finally, there is apparently apolitical ‘no-nonsense’ version of events: plenty of people are opportunistic and enjoy creating disorder and getting something for nothing. The riots gave them a chance to indulge these impulses without fear of retribution, and so many took it. We should not seek any deeper explanation for these events beyond the observation that ‘rioting is fun’.

All of these accounts are plausible enough, but they must not be mistaken for anything more certain than speculation. Far too often they draw on (at best) anecdotes or (at worst) brute prejudice. This is understandable, given the obvious difficulties of discerning the facts on the ground. But over the next few weeks and months as the picture becomes clearer, there are three main questions that need answering if we are to adjudicate between these competing claims.

Who were the rioters?
A number of these arguments depend crucially upon claims about the identity of the rioters – claims which are rarely backed up by evidence. For example, Max Hastings claimed of the rioters that “Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.” He just assumes that the only people capable of carrying out such acts must be from his self-designated ‘underclass’. He gets away with it because there is no way to verify whether or not a majority of rioters and looters were in fact unemployed or from single parent families.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that those involved were far more diverse than Hastings imagines: people of different ages, races and backgrounds. But without harder statistics we cannot tell whether the middle class rioters like the ballerina and the organic chef are exceptional.

What were their targets?
Sean Carey insists, in support of his anti-consumerism theory that “by and large the focus has been on breaking into major electrical retailers like Currys and Dixons, mobile phone chains like Carphone Warehouse, supermarkets including Tesco, jewellers, and top-of-the- range "casual" and sports clothing stores”. Carey is cannier than Hastings, acknowledging exceptions, such as the looting of an independent children’s party store, and suggesting only that this is a ‘by and large’ tendency.

But how can we be sure that this is not just coincidence? Perhaps those are the sorts of shops that happened to be close at hand in city centres. Again, how can we distinguish exception from rule?

At the very least, this analysis is limited. While it can explain why items like phones and trainers were looted, it cannot account for petty thefts and vandalism. Unless we have an idea of what proportion of thefts were of status symbol goods, we can’t appreciate how significant this limitation is.

What were their motivations?
The fundamental question that everybody is trying to get the bottom of is why this happened. The most straightforward way is to ask those involved. Many people have already decided that it cannot have been a deliberate political action, but just selfish wanton criminality. How can they know this without asking people whether they intended this as a political gesture? If these acts are a protest against government cuts, surely people will claim credit for them as such.

The trouble is that we cannot take these motivations at face value. On the one hand, people may lie or misrepresent their motivations to try and excuse or justify their actions. Political protest is a lot more heroic than random violence or greed, and most people prefer to think of themselves as heroes. Moreover, people may not understand the deep lying roots of their motivations. They might tell us that rioting seemed fun or that this was a good way of exorcising frustration, but they might not understand what it is they are so angry about.

All of the proposed explanations of the causes of the riots depend on particular perceptions of the facts of the case. Many of these facts are far from clear. Until somebody systematically collects and examines the evidence, nobody will be qualified to reach any definitive conclusions. It seems to me that a public inquiry is the necessary first step of this process. Hopefully it will go part way to answering the questions I’ve posed here.

The Ian Bell incident and the 'spirit of cricket'

I’ve already written a little bit about the position of ethics in sport. About a year ago, I contrasted the football and cycling communities’ reactions to moral dilemmas faced by sportsmen in their field. While nobody raised an eyebrow at German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s refusal to admit he had seen the ball cross his goal line in the World Cup match against England, cycling was shocked by Alberto Contador’s willingness to profit from a rival’s slipped bike chain in the Tour de France.

Both incidents were similar in that they tested the limits of what kind of behaviour is acceptable in pursuit of victory. However, reflecting on the controversy at Trent Bridge yesterday, I now see that there is a significant difference between them.

Neuer’s action was worse than Contador’s because he was complicit in the misapplication of the rules of football. From a formal, legalistic perspective, England were wronged by his actions, since they were denied a legitimate goal. By contrast, in the Contador incident, no rules were broken, and nobody was disadvantaged according to the letter of the law. Rather, it was the more vague ‘spirit of the game’ that had been violated.

In this sense, Contador’s dilemma was rather like M.S. Dhoni’s yesterday. The Indian cricket captain was at the centre of a bizarre episode when his team ran out the English batsman Ian Bell as he walked off, thinking play had ended for tea. India, like Contador, had received what was perceived to be an unfair advantage within the rules of the game. However, Dhoni, unlike Contador, was willing to forfeit this advantage, withdrawing his appeal.

Most people seem to agree that there would have been something wrong about exploiting the Ian Bell incident, and I share the intuition that Dhoni was right to make the decision he made. But what exactly would have been unfair about it?

One possibility is that it is about luck. Bell suffered a freakish stroke of misfortune, and it would have been wrong to profit from it. The ‘spirit of the game’ of cricket demands that teams seek to win in ‘the right way’. That is, by virtue of their superior skill and not as a result of brute luck. Perhaps what troubles us about the Ian Bell incident is that the Indian team failed to dismiss him as a result of their own efforts, and so to get him out as the result of a fluke would have been a hollow victory.

The idea that there is something problematic about gaining a lucky advantage is common to a number of sports. Convention dictates that snooker players should apologise for flukes, and tennis players should say sorry when they benefit from deflections off the net. But of course, in neither sport would the points actually be forfeited, meaning that the apologies often look like meaningless formalities.

In any case, the eradication of luck from sport is both impossibled and undesirable. A huge part of the unpredictability of sport which makes it worth watching sport in the first place is down to the randomness of the ‘run of the ball(s)’. There are so many variables that determine the result of a sporting contest that they could never all be neutralised. Why is capitalising on the Bell incident any worse than taking advantage of winning the coin toss, or helpful weather conditions, which India also did over the course of same the match?

In any case, it is a mistake to chalk the Ian Bell incident up purely to luck. Whether or not it was right to exploit it, Bell - as he himself acknowledges - made a mistake. Young sportsmen are regularly told to ‘play to the whistle’: to maintain full intensity until there is a confirmed break in play. Bell should not have assumed that play was over until it was confirmed by the umpire: he suffered from a culpable lapse in concentration.

Perhaps the problem with the Bell dismissal was the element of deception involved. India got Bell out because they acted as though the ball was dead, and so convinced Bell that it was not in play. However, it seems unlikely that India were actually trying to mislead Bell, rather than just failing to alert him to his error. It is surely demanding too much to expect cricketers to warn their opponents before they make a mistake like Bell’s.

Then again, there is a precedent for such a system of warning in cricket. It is generally agreed that it is against the spirit of the game to ‘Mankad’ a batsman – to run them out if they back up too far – without prior warning. However, there is ample opportunity to warn someone you are about to ‘Mankad’ someone, as this occurs in the middle of a natural break in the game. The Bell incident occurred while the game was in full flow, so it is far from clear how or when it would have been appropriate to tip Bell off.

Moreover, deception is often an essential part of sporting tactics. If misleading your opponent is cheating, this renders a large number of strategies unfair. Maybe it’s that deception about tactics and mental states are legitimate, but about the state of the game are unfair?

I still have the sense that Dhoni was right to call Bell back to the crease. But the difficulty I’m having in pinning down why suggests that it is far from clear what exactly the ‘spirit of cricket’ requires and why.