History is Calling

An Open Letter to Republican Senators and Representatives

Conscience compels me to write you on this day called Good Friday to humbly and earnestly implore you to consider certain matters in a different light. The eyes of the world, and the eyes of history are upon you. Make no mistake—history is not mere dead letters on the pages of old books but a living, unfolding process in which we all participate, and in which you, as representatives of the People of the United States of America, have the noble honor of playing a central role. With such an honor comes a great weight of moral responsibility, and the tide of events now calls upon you to exercise this responsibility.

The Trump administration has now repeatedly and flagrantly violated its constitutional authority, committed numerous heinous abuses against human rights, and flouted lawful orders of the constitutional courts, up to and including those of the Supreme Court of the United States. The actions it has taken with respect to immigrants represent a despicable slide into not only authoritarianism, but abject cruelty. People in its custody, many never charged with or convicted of any crime, are being sent—without due process—to a torturous foreign prison resembling a Soviet gulag or concentration camp, from which there is no access to legal recourse, no access to family, and no hope of escape beyond death. The administration claims that the treatment of these people—rendered into the hands of a foreign detention facility it funds at taxpayer expense—is beyond the jurisdiction of American law. The president has lately indicated, multiple times, that he wishes to do the same to American native-born and naturalized citizens. To say that these actions are violations of the oath of office is a pitiful understatement. They are a total repudiation of the core legal and moral principles of our republic. They are crimes against humanity.

In addition to these crimes, the administration has repeatedly alienated and insulted our free-world allies while aligning with dictators, has engaged in a trade war which has plunged the domestic and global economy into uncertainty and disarray, and has all but dismantled the long-standing alliances that have served to promote and protect democratic government worldwide, and to prevent great power wars in the post-WWII era. Beggaring belief, he has threatened to annex the territory of two allied democratic nations—Canada and Greenland, which would effectively be a declaration of a new world war—this time with America fighting against its erstwhile democratic allies. International faith and trust in the United States has been deeply eroded. Alarm bells are sounding in allied free countries around the world, who recognize that this government threatens to repeat the very darkest chapters in human history. This insanity cannot stand. For the sake of humanity, it must not stand any longer.

I humbly ask that you sincerely and thoughtfully consider the immense gravity of these matters and resolve to take up your responsibility to lead morally, not merely to follow. I ask that you resolve to take a vocal moral stand, not to equivocate. I further ask that you join those Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who already oppose this administration and that you consider all Congressional remedies—including impeachment, for the high crimes against the constitution and against humanity listed above as well as others. This matter is far too great for partisanship. It is a fundamental question of whether justice, decency, and the rule of law will survive in America.

The time is now, and the window is short, for Congress to act. The responsibility now falls upon you, who have been given the high honor of service, who have sworn an oath to protect and defend the constitution of this nation that we love, both to exercise wisdom and to summon the moral courage to do what must be done. In this light, I ask you not to consider your base constituency, nor your near-term re-election bids, but to consider quite a different constituency—your children, grandchildren, and posterity. What kind of world will you leave to them? What will they think when they learn of your actions during this pivotal time? Will they be proud or ashamed of you? Will your legacy, when the history of this period is written, be a profile in courage or a profile in infamy?  

I hope this letter reaches you—physically and metaphorically. My words may be forgotten, but your actions will echo through history. The choices you make now may determine whether the republic we love endures or falls, and whether the world pulls back from the brink, or plunges into an unfathomable depth of evil and self-destruction. I believe you know all of this as well as I. May you find the strength to do what is right, and may wisdom and virtue guide you along your path.

Your fellow citizen,

David Lane

Transgender Brains and Mad Scientists—A Question of Identity

Few topics within the contemporary culture wars have generated as much controversy, confusion, and even outright rage, than topics surrounding transgender individuals. From the proper characterization of their gender identities, to their workplace rights, to their place within sports, it seems virtually every facet of their social existence becomes fodder for debate and rife with discord. A perpetual characteristic of the debates surrounding these topics is just how confused everyone seems to be on all sides. Their foes tend to have a childishly simplistic view of sex and gender, which they wrongfully and arrogantly believe is plain fact supported by biological science, and think that anyone who thinks otherwise must be more concerned with feelings than facts. Their would-be friends often seem equally oblivious to the science behind transgender biology, instead preferring to be ecumenical to all perspectives of marginalized LGBT groups, with the result being a way of speaking surrounding these topics that is linguistically clunky, often confusing, and sometimes flatly incoherent.

Of particular importance and centrality, and drawing perhaps the most controversy, is the question of whether we should consider trans people to be the gender they say they are. Are trans women women and trans men men, and in need of medical gender affirming care, or are they hopelessly deluded and in need of some form of psychological treatment? It would do much good, I think, to get a solid handle on some of the relevant basic biological factors at play, then to bring some philosophical tools to the table, so that some light rather than the usual heat can be shed upon certain serious ethical questions involving transgender individuals.

We’ve all heard the cries from members of the anti-trans camp, to the effect of “Facts don’t care about your feelings! There are X and Y chromosomes, and only two biological sexes: XX, and XY. If you’re XX, you’re a woman. If you’re XY, you’re a man, period. It’s basic biology!” Now, the common reply from the pro-trans camp is typically something like “Biological sex is not the same thing as gender.” Now, this is true, but the latter term is confusing for reasons that will become apparent. It also requires some explanation to elucidate the relationship between the two terms and the centrality of the latter to the questions at issue. One important issue is that ‘biological sex’ is itself an ambiguous term. In employing this term, we could mean any of several distinct things that all fall under the umbrella of what one might call ‘biological sex.’ Equivocation amongst them invites confusion, and an understanding of these distinctions is important in understanding what it is to be transgender.

Firstly, there is what could be termed a person’s chromosomal sex, that is, what combination of sex chromosomes a person has. You might think that there are only two possible such arrangements, but you’d be mistaken. In fact, there are far more arrangements of sex chromosomes beyond just XX and XY that occur in humans. The variety of human karyotypes, or combinations of sex chromosomes, includes X (Turner Syndrome), XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX, XYY, XXYY, XXXY, XXXX, XXXXY, XXXXX, and others. These typically result in intersex or sexually ambiguous phenotypic characteristics.

Secondly, we might talk about reproductive sex, the sex type of the gametes—the haploid cells that combine to form the diploid zygote that becomes the embryo of a new individual in sexual reproduction, which a person produces. In this gametic sense, sex is binary, as there are precisely two types of gametes—sperm and egg. Some people have pointed to this feature of sexual reproduction as a supposed debate stopper, claiming that what makes one a man or woman is simply which type of gametes a person produces, and that’s all that need be said (Bracketing the intersex conditions that involve producing both gametes in a single body).

This, however, widely misses the mark about just what is controversial surrounding trans identity, intersex conditions, and other sex and gender related issues. No one involved in any of the debates surrounding trans issues on either side is primarily concerned with gametes or their role in the sexual reproductive process. They are rather almost exclusively concerned with people, their different sex-related phenotypic traits, and the social expectations surrounding those traits, making this concern with gametes a giant red herring that is irrelevant to most trans issues. It also elides several crucial biological facts that are themselves much more relevant to these issues.

Apropos of the preceding, and most importantly, there is phenotypic sex, or the sex-related bodily characteristics of a fully developed human being, which in almost all cases are what we use to categorize individuals sociosexually. It is important to note that phenotypic sex does not perfectly map to chromosomal sex. XX and XY genotypes usually develop into the typical phenotypes of female and male, respectively, and the atypical chromosomal variants mentioned above often develop into intersex phenotypes, but the typical XX and XY genotypes can also produce intersex phenotypes, due to either other genetic variations or embryological or environmental factors. One such set of conditions involve a person with XY genotype having a genetic insensitivity to androgenic (masculinizing) hormones, which results in the development in an outwardly female phenotype.

Phenotypic sex can itself be broken down into subcategories. There are the outward sexually dimorphic phenotypic characteristics that we typically use to distinguish between typical members of different sexes, e.g. breasts, body shape, fat deposition patterns, genitalia, facial characteristics, hair growth patterns, etc. Then, there are the sexually dimorphic brain phenotypes that lead to various differences in cognitive styles, sexual behaviors, mannerisms, sense of self-identity, etc. between typical human men and women. So we have a distinction between external phenotypic sex and phenotypic brain sex, and the resulting mental properties characteristic of each sex. We can simply refer to this as gender.

At this point, the latter term needs to be further clarified. What I do not mean by ‘gender’ here are certain ancillary things the term has also been used to represent, such as social norms, expectations, and roles associated with each sex. What I’m referring to is mental differences dependent upon sex-differentiated brains. The second sense of ‘gender’ might be in part socially constructed, but the first is simply a biological fact. Conflation of these two senses has made the debate landscape confused. It perhaps would’ve been better to use the term ‘mental sex’ for the biological sense, given the ambiguity of the term ‘gender,’ but the latter is so embedded in the lexicon that to get rid of it one would have to tear down the entire edifice and rebuild anew, and that would invite yet more confusion to an already fraught issue.

In light of the foregoing distinctions, we can understand the science of what it means for a person to be transgender. The biology of human sexual dimorphism has been extensively studied by neurologists, finding that the anatomical structures of certain brain regions differ between typical male and female brains, so that by analyzing these regions of a person’s brain, one can predict the sex of that person to a high degree of accuracy. In light of this knowledge, several studies have been performed looking at these sexually dimorphic regions of the brain in transgender individuals, finding that indeed these sexually dimorphic regions in their brains more closely match those typical of the sex associated with the gender they identify with than those typical of the chromosomal sex or outward phenotype they possess. One study examining a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), found that:

“The number of neurons in the BSTc of male-to-female transsexuals was similar to that of the females (P = 0.83). In contrast, the neuron number of a female-to-male transsexual was found to be in the male range. Hormone treatment or sex hormone level variations in adulthood did not seem to have influenced BSTc neuron numbers. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.”

Now, the sample size of this study is quite small, but several such studies, including a previous 1995 study of the same brain region have produced similar findings. Another study from 2011 examining the white matter microstructure in the brains of trans men against that of cisgender men and women as controls, found that:

“the white matter microstructure pattern in untreated FtM transsexuals is closer to the pattern of subjects who share their gender identity (males) than those who share their biological sex (females). Our results provide evidence for an inherent difference in the brain structure of FtM transsexuals.”

Yet another study examining a different sexually dimorphic region of the brain, the interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH), found that:

INAH3 volume and number of neurons of male-to-female transsexual people is similar to that of control females. The female-to-male transsexual subject had an INAH3 volume and number of neurons within the male control range…

Again, these and other similar studies have small sample sizes, but the conclusions all point in a single direction to the fact that the structures of sexually dimorphic regions in the brains of transgender individuals are shifted away from what would be expected based on their outwardly presenting phenotypic sex, and towards that of the opposite sex. This gives us a working definition of what it means for someone to be transgender: a person is transgender if their mental phenotypic sex/gender does not match their external phenotypic sex. That is to say, to be transgender is to have a brain closer to those typically found in people with the opposite phenotypic sex. In such individuals, this mismatch can result in a felt sense of gender dysphoria, which can profoundly affect well-being.

With this in mind, we are far better equipped to engage with some of the ethical and social questions often raised in relation to transgender people. Are transwomen women? Are transmen men? The answers would seem to depend upon what the determinant feature of a person’s identity is. Is it the person’s outward bodily features, or the person’s brain and mind that we should look to for the answers to these questions?

A variant of a philosophical thought experiment often brought up in questions of personal identity may help us shed some light on these questions. The setup goes as follows: Imagine two men, Bob and John, are captured by an unscrupulous brain scientist who wishes to perform a trial run of a brain-swap surgical procedure he has been developing. He puts them both under anesthesia, and removes each of their brains, then replaces each of them in the opposite body, so that John’s brain now resides in (what was) Bob’s body, and vice versa. When the two are eventually resuscitated, the scientist calls out Bob’s name, and the person who appears to be John says, “Yes?” the same applies to the converse. We are then invited to consider who is rightfully John and who is rightfully Bob. Overwhelmingly, the intuition most of us have is to take Bob to be the person with Bob’s brain, who of course has Bob’s mind, his memories, his preferences and dispreferences, his unique sense of psychological continuity and self-identity, etc.

Now let us imagine our mad scientist has kidnapped a third victim, a woman named Alice. He repeats the procedure a second time, this time swapping Bob and Alice’s brains with each other. Now when they awaken, each is surprised to find that they have the body of someone from the opposite sex. If we are consistent with our previous intuition, we will say that it is now Bob who has the female body previously belonging to Alice and Alice who has the male body that was Bob’s. Upon realizing what has occurred, Bob is horrified upon seeing his feminine form, protesting “But I am a man!” The same is true for Alice of course. What are we to make in this case? Are Bob and Alice deluded as to their claimed manhood and womanhood? If we are again to be consistent with our former intuitions about self-identity, and we take one’s manhood or womanhood to be a component of said self-identity, then we must say that Bob is indeed a man and Alice indeed a woman, though the former may now be walking around with female sex characteristics and genitals, and the latter with male sex characteristics and genitals.

Given our previous analysis, this is roughly the situation in which trans people find themselves—only it was not brought about by a mad scientist with his brain swap surgery, but by some confluence of genetics, epigenetics, embryology, and environment etc. It is in this sense that trans people really are the gender they say they are—they have brains that are in important ways characteristic of the gender they claim rather than that which would be predicted by looking at either their external phenotypic sex characteristics or their sex chromosome karyotype. Just as our Bob and Alice felt a profound dysphoria by the incongruity of their external body with their own mental sense of self, so too do trans people.

It of course doesn’t follow that trans women and trans men, respectively, are women and men in every possible sense of these terms. Chromosomally, they are not. Phenotypically, they cannot attain the status of a cisgendered person of their gender, though they can come closer to it through medical intervention. They are not reproductively identical to cisgendered people of their gender, either. These other senses are also relevant to certain ethical questions surrounding trans issues, such as how trans people should be included in sport, or how certain reproductive issues particular to their unique situations should be discussed and treated. Nonetheless, in the sense that matters most for personal identity, in their brains and minds, they are similar, and that is ethically relevant to how we ought to treat them as people, and how medicine should treat them for their gender dysphoria.

If one’s brain and peripheral body are mismatched in terms of sex differentiation, and this is a cause for profound psychological distress, there are two options in order to bring them into congruence—change the body or change the brain. At least two factors tell against the latter option. The first is that we simply lack the technology and knowledge to perform such a change in brain morphology, let alone to do so without causing great and irreparable harm. The second is that, as we saw before in our brain swap case, the brain is the seat of the self, not the peripheral body. Even if we could do so, it would seem backwards to change the self to fit the body rather than the converse. It would be as if, upon hearing Bob’s protest against being embodied in Alice’s female body that he is instead Bob, a man, our mad scientist came up with a brilliant new idea. Instead of returning Bob’s brain to his old body, he would instead perform a new nanosurgical procedure on Bob’s brain with the effect that Bob would forget that he was Bob and a man, and instead feel that he is Alice, a woman, and thereby solve the problem. It seems in this case, the mad scientist hasn’t cured Bob so much as he has simply erased Bob’s identity. Similarly, to try to change a trans person’s brain to match their body, rather than the converse, would be to engage in a sort of identity erasure. This leaves the option of changing the peripheral body to more closely match the brain’s sense of gender, which is precisely what gender affirming care does through hormonal and/or surgical treatments.

Aside from such questions of personal identity, there are of course many other questions that have been raised surrounding the social status and ethical treatment of trans people. These include the proper leagues for trans people in competitive sports, whether trans women in particular should be included in spaces hitherto reserved for cisgendered women, designed to shield them from violence perpetrated by male aggressors—places such as womens’ shelters or gender segregated bathrooms and locker rooms, whether having dating preferences for cisgendered people is an unethical prejudice, among other questions. There is also a set of topics that are often lumped into trans issues by people on both sides of the political spectrum which are actually separate issues. These include various political or social ideologies surrounding various theories of gender (often involving the other sense of ‘gender’ and notions of social constructivism), questions about various proposed gender categories, concerns about people claiming to be trans who are not, issues surrounding other gender-norm nonconforming people, etc. Each of these topics deserves in-depth discussion, which is beyond the scope of this article.

What I’ve sought to do here is to clarify certain notions of sex and gender and to shed light on how the neurobiological basis for what it is to be transgender bears upon the philosophical question of the validity of transgender identity claims, and what that says about how they ought to be understood and treated with regard to that identity. In short, because our brains are the primary determinants of our identity, and because brains are sexually dimorphic, i.e. gendered, and because trans brains are shifted toward the gender they claim to be, there is a relevant and important sense in which trans people are just who they say they are.

Trump, the King of Fools

Far too much has been said already. Too much ink spilled. Too much bandwidth used. Too much oxygen burned. Too much mental energy expended. Too much opportunity cost spent. Too much time wasted of the brief lives of mortals in arguing the painfully obvious, only to have such uranium-clad reasoning fail to move the slobbering mass of imbeciles who still support him, and who are still numerous enough within the electorate to threaten the world and the republic with a second disastrous term of Donald Trump. That so many people in what appears to be a persistent vegetative state are capable of walking upright to the polls is quite an astounding fact indeed, and one that must be reckoned with.

Trump is truly sui generis in the annals of American politics. Among political figures, historical and contemporary, he is uniquely stupid, inarticulate, and unlettered. He is malignant narcissism incarnate, with no sign that he possesses anything resembling common human empathy or decency. He is comically arrogant and oblivious to his own many shortcomings, both moral and physical. He often cruelly criticizes the looks of others, while himself looking something like a pear-shaped, orange, saggy sack of flesh in an ill-fitting, gauche suit and tie, topped with a combover that continues to mystify origami aficionados the world over. He has no scruples against projection, hypocrisy, and intellectual dishonesty of all kinds. He is constitutionally incapable of emotional equanimity or anything like stoic reserve. He is a sore loser. He is a sore winner.

He is the only president in history to have been criminally indicted, facing ninety-one felony charges. The only president to have been impeached twice. He has the ignominious honor of having had the highest staff turnover in presidential history and an unprecedented number of former cabinet members, including the usually apolitical military brass, speak out against him, both during and after the national clusterfuck (a technical term) that was his presidential term. This large list of detractors includes his attorney general, secretary of state, multiple chiefs of staff, multiple secretaries of defense, multiple national security advisors, numerous aides of all sorts, and his own vice president. The man has more disgruntled ex-lawyers than Wilt Chamberlain has ex-lovers. By a long shot, he is the most civilly litigated against, trailing a list of lawsuits numbering in the thousands. Twenty-six women have credibly accused him of rape or sexual assault, and a civil jury has found him liable for the sexual assault of one woman so far, making him preeminent among politicians for sexual misconduct—no easy feat.

He is the Old Faithful of liars, with deceptions both grand and petty regularly flowing from the fount of his oddly-shapen mouth like water from an ever-welling underground spring. He is paradoxically the world’s most obvious con man and perhaps its most successful one. A friend to dictators and enemies of the free world across the globe who browbeats and berates democratic allies. A draft dodger who disparages prisoners of war and fallen soldiers as “losers and suckers.” The only president who has ever whipped up a violent mob against both Congress and his own vice president. The only president to have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to deny citizens the right to vote and to have their votes counted. Need we go on? That this litany could be extended quite further is itself a crucially telling fact. Trump's unfitness for office is the most overdetermined conclusion in American political history. If it were any more overdetermined, it would be a tautology.

Despite all this, and despite the bleeding wounds of a scarcely countable and ever-growing number of both criminal and civil court cases, in both federal and state courts, involving election interference, fraud, mishandling of top-secret documents, hush-money payments to porn stars, defamation of his sexual assault victim, and others, he is still walking freely towards the GOP nomination. He is the real world analogue of the comically impervious horror-film villain who, despite sustaining stabs, blows, and shots that would have killed mortal men five times over, comes back again and again to rain havoc on the hapless protagonists. Behind this horror-villain stand the zombified droves of his supporters, as impervious to reason and common sense as he has hitherto been to justice. Continual efforts have been made to reason with them, but a steady plurality of the Republican base remains firmly inoculated against the ingress of manifest reality. Perhaps Thomas Paine, writing about a very different American crisis, said it best:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Where reason cannot penetrate, perhaps ridicule is warranted. If the foregoing fractional sample of all the oh-so-evident reasons Trump is not merely unqualified for office, but supremely anti-qualified, is not enough to sway the voters in his thrall, then let them be both scorned and pitied for being fool enough to fall for Trump’s obvious lies and transparent con artistry. For it is not those of us who see him for what he is who are the targets of his deceptions. It is the most gullible of the gullible—his followers. A person could withstand being considered deplorable, and perhaps even take some twisted sense of pride in it, a sort of negative virtue signaling. Absolutely no one, however, wants to be revealed as an easy mark, a pawn, a rube, an idiot. The thing is—that’s exactly what they are.

On Rationality, Correctness, and Expertise

The confusion between rational justification and truth or correctness is common enough in public discourse that it need be noted that beliefs that are rationally justified sometimes turn out untrue, and beliefs without rational justification occasionally turn out to be true. Similarly, the most rational decision is not guaranteed to be the correct decision, and not all decisions that turn out to have been correct were rational decisions. Where this confusion becomes most pernicious is when members of the public run afoul of it when determining what to believe and in whom to place their trust. Take a case wherein we have a preponderance of scientific opinion in favor of the truth of a certain claim X, but there are some outliers who take the heterodox view that X is false. In the fullness of time, X turns out false. In situations such as this, many people are apt, with the bias of hindsight, to imagine that this shows that the heterodox opinion was the most rational, and that those who held it the better judges of truth. In both respects, this line of argument is mistaken.

To truly determine the rationality of a claim, one must examine the quality and weight of the arguments and evidence for and against it in order to reach some idea of the probability of its being true. Likewise, to determine the quality of the judgement of those who make a given claim, one must also examine the evidence and arguments they proffer in support of the claim. Suppose that, according to sound reasoning on the basis of the best evidence available at the time, the probability of X being true was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80%. There’s still a roughly 20% chance that X will turn out false. One can hold the most probable belief on the basis of the most sound reasoning and highest quality evidence and still turn out to be wrong. On the other hand, one can hold the least probable belief on the basis of poor reasoning, based upon slim or no evidence, and nonetheless turn out to be right. That’s how probability works, contra certainty. Scientific work involves calculations of error and degrees of confidence, and are always subject to potential falsification in the future by more or better data. The rational belief to hold is the one that, at the time, is more probable given the best available evidence. The fact that people who bet on the improbable will sometimes turn out, in hindsight, to have been right is not a vindication of their rationality or judgement.

We have heard that a broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn’t mean one should trust a broken clock as a generally reliable source of time. The judgement of those whose beliefs or decisions turned out to be correct, even in salient cases where much was at stake, should not be held in esteem merely on the basis of the correctness of their belief or decision in a particular instance. Rather, their judgement should be evaluated based on the rationality of the decisions or beliefs in question. By this metric alone can we ultimately establish the likelihood of sound judgement going forward.

One problem we face, when it comes to claims of interest to the general public that reside within special sciences or otherwise highly technical or specialized fields, is that members of the general public, or even experts within unrelated fields, are often not equipped to evaluate such highly technical or specialized evidence and argumentation. Even if, given enough time and effort, a person could amass the proficiency and knowledge needed to evaluate claims in a particular specialized field, this process would be prohibitively time-consuming if attempted for all domains of importance in making decisions in personal and political life. Given this, where one cannot evaluate claims directly, one must ultimately rely upon trust in the testimony of others who are experts within the relevant specialty. But how does one rationally determine in whom to place this trust?

The various methods of evaluating in which expert opinions to place ones trust are somewhat less well defined than those for evaluating claims directly, but there are analogous features, and they ultimately result in a similar assessment of probability. One might start by noting that an opinion held by one expert in the relevant domain is generally more reliable than one held by a non-expert, an opinion held by multiple experts yet more reliable, and an opinion held by a majority of experts more reliable still. Other factors also bear upon reliability of the expert opinion. Is the opinion held by a body or organization of experts that has objective standards, methods, and procedures that serve as both a rational process of arriving at truth, and as checks and balances to keep the experts honest? These features would include such things as methodological standards of scientific inquiry, judicial standards of evidence, competition between different opinions or adversarial processes, peer review, codes of ethics, etc. These and other similar factors jointly contribute to bolster the reliability of expert opinion.

Despite this, just as the most probable claims can nonetheless turn out to be false, the most reliable expert opinions can sometimes turn out to be wrong. Additionally, the most reliable expert opinions sometimes turn out to be spectacularly wrong on issues which are of great importance and consequence. Does this mean that these experts should not be trusted, or that other experts who don’t have the hallmarks of reliability previously mentioned, but who happened to be right on some salient issue, should be trusted over those who do? No, for the same reason advanced above in the case of the probability of claims themselves. That the more reliable expert opinion sometimes turns out wrong and the less reliable opinion sometimes turns out to be right is not an argument for the rationality of choosing the less reliable expert opinion. The important question is not whether the best available expert opinion will never turn out to be wrong. The important question is whether it is the most generally reliable source of truth amongst all necessarily imperfect sources. In consistently accepting the most reliable expert opinions, one will not always turn out to be correct, but one will turn out to be correct more often than if one does not consistently accept them.

The search for truth and the process of critical decision making are both inherently imperfect tasks that involve imperfect reasoners working from imperfect and incomplete experimental and observational data. Given this, the best that can be done to navigate these sometimes dangerous waters is to hold to what is most probable given sound reasoning from the best available evidence, or in cases where specialized expertise is needed, hold to what is likely the most reliable expert opinion given the sorts of objective considerations previously mentioned. The more this is put into practice, the more rational our worldview will be, and the better our decisions, both individually and collectively.

Liberalism: What it is and Why it Matters

Note: The following has been adapted from an original post by the author on The American Liberal

Liberalism has often been considered the most successful political ideology in modern history, coinciding with vast and measurable improvements in human welfare, but recently new threats have arisen in the form of various anti-liberal populist and nationalist movements, which have gained some notable victories in liberal democracies in Europe and America. At the same time, some who self-apply the label ‘liberal’ have at times advocated decidedly illiberal ideas and policies, making the job of those who would defend liberalism from its critics that much more onerous. In the wake of these upheavals, we liberals must cogently recapitulate the core principles of our philosophy and contextualize its role in contemporary society in order to defend it both from the external and internal challenges it faces.

First, just what do we mean by ‘liberalism?’ It should be noted that what we mean here is not identical with the more narrow colloquial use of the term common in America, often referring to anything that happens to be advanced by the Democratic party, or a different but similarly constrained usage prevalent elsewhere in the world referring to a more conservative take on market economics. Liberalism is considered here as a broader, more comprehensive philosophy of government from which both of these more narrow traditions sometimes borrow.

Liberal philosophy has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, but has precedents reaching as far back as ancient Athens. As with many broad ideological categories, liberalism is not so much a single philosophy as it is a family of philosophies united by their possession of some number of shared principles. Liberal philosophers have given different accounts of these principles and come to divergent conclusions about their particular implications. It would hardly be possible to do justice to them all. As our aim is not historical study but defending the liberal tradition, I shall simply try to articulate a broad, non-rigorous bird’s-eye-view conception of liberalism worth defending today.

One of the most central and foundational principles of liberalism involves a general consideration from moral philosophy about what sorts of things matter ethically. Liberalism takes the individual to be the primary object of moral concern. This is not to be confused with egoism or opposition to community and collective action. What is meant here is that what ultimately matters is the good of individuals—those autonomous, sentient beings who have the capacity to experience happiness or suffering, rather than such alternative candidates for moral ends as “The good of the party,” “The will of the king,” “The faith,” “The race,” etc. Liberalism takes as a fundamental principle that the greatest moral good is the flourishing, well-being, or happiness of sentient individuals, and that just political systems are established to further this end.

Next, we come to the namesake of liberalism. Liberalism holds that liberty is necessary for, or at least strongly conducive to, the individual’s achievement of happiness. Just as happiness or well-being is the primary moral good, freedom is the primary political good. Any political system calculated to improve the flourishing of its citizens must secure the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness. This principle is immortally enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, in the phrase, “inalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

From this very general principle, many particular consequences follow, though exactly which liberties count as legitimate or important is a subject of dispute. Liberal societies have enshrined various freedoms into their constitutions and political cultures, but a few are largely agreed upon, such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to vote for one’s leaders, freedom to own property and to engage in commerce.

Of these, the freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It was considered of such great importance by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill that he wrote, “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Free expression holds the place it does in liberal philosophy precisely because it creates the framework wherein debate can occur from which truth can be uncovered and by which other freedoms may be argued for and gained. It was this particular feature that Martin Luther King extolled in his “Mountaintop” speech calling for America to live up to her promises when he said, “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.” Despite the brutal violations of this right by Bull Connor and others, its existence as a norm enshrined in the constitution and in the body politic allowed for King to make this argument, to organize, and to march on Washington in protest. Likewise, the success of numerous other reform movements has been predicated upon the right to freedom of expression.

Notions of equality are also central to the liberal project. Though individuals differ in myriad ways, in natural endowment of abilities, in wealth, ethnicity, or circumstances of birth, we are all alike in the way that matters most, our ability to experience happiness or flourishing on the one hand and suffering on the other. All have an equal stake in the achievement of happiness, thus all ought to possess equal rights under the law and equal access to public opportunities.

The principle of secularism, or separation of state and religion holds an important place in liberal government as well. Government should not impede the private practice of religion, nor should religious dogma impede the public practice of good governance. Reason and empirical science form the basis for good government policy capable of bettering the welfare of citizens.

Another important feature of liberalism is skepticism. Knowledge of the fallibility of human reason entails that previous errors must be able to be corrected by amendments to the constitution and the laws. Skepticism regarding the accumulation and concentration of power means that distribution of power is an important element of the liberal theory of government. Separation of governmental powers among different institutions, with each forming a check to the others, is one practical instantiation of this principle which serves as a safeguard to the freedom of the individual and a bulwark against government corruption. Democratic accountability in the form of representative, deliberative legislative bodies guards against the the tyranny of the few over the many. Constitutionally enumerated civil liberties, along with independent courts capable of striking down laws which violate them, guard against the tyranny of the many over the few.

Another notable feature of the liberal ethos is the open, pluralistic society. What binds a liberal society together is not base tribalism, or ethnic or religious nationalism, but a notion of civic virtue underpinned by a shared commitment to the principles previously enumerated. Liberal patriotism is a patriotism of ideals, capable of extending beyond the boundaries of race, religion, or national origin. Trade and immigration are not seen as threats to a nation’s greatness, but only serve to enhance the overall prosperity, knowledge, and cultural wealth of a nation.

One oft noted characteristic of liberalism is its generic or abstract character. Liberalism has been criticized on this basis as being sterile, cold, not respective of cultural distinctions and notions of group belonging, but I believe this generality in fact to be one of its greatest benefits. Liberalism at its root seeks to understand political freedom with respect to a notion of the individual, abstracted from all morally irrelevant particulars. This conceptualization is intentionally thin, meaning to capture the idea expressed above—that it is the sentient individual which is the seat of moral concern.

Liberalism intends to set out a framework for the freedoms of individuals purely in virtue of their moral status as sentient individuals such that, from these general conceptions, questions of freedom in more particular circumstances can be adjudicated. A woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, for example, can be said to be a special case of the individual right to bodily autonomy. Not all individuals are women, or are capable of pregnancy, but all individuals have the same stake in bodily autonomy. Similar situations obtain for other rights. Defining liberalism in generic terms, in virtue of something all individuals share, allows liberalism its ethical universality and provides a unifying message that cuts across race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and other such factors ancillary to one’s core nature as a sentient individual of moral value, and unrelated to one’s moral character.

This family of principles thus forms a certain framework through which particular policy questions can be answered, and a set of general premises upon which one can base public policy arguments. We can ask, does a proposed policy tend to enhance the freedoms and opportunities available to the individual citizen? Does a proposed structural government reform promote the sort of governance necessary to reliably and sustainably effect these ends?

Within this framework, the question of what sort of general freedoms apply to individuals as such is debated. One purported distinction which forms the basis of much of the debate is that between negative rights and positive rights. While there are various definitions available, negative rights can be understood as those rights which impose a negative duty on others, i.e. a duty to refrain from doing something, while positive rights are those which impose a positive duty on others, i.e. require something to be provided. Examples of the former are rights like the right to life or the freedom of expression, which require that others refrain from killing or censoring. Examples of the latter would be your right to an attorney or the right to healthcare, which require that the government provide counsel or healthcare for the indigent.

The distinction itself has been questioned both on theoretical and practical grounds, but it does help to illuminate a bifurcation within the liberal tradition between what could be termed its “right” and “left” wings. There are those who accept negative rights but who are skeptical of positive rights, often on the basis that the imposition of the taxes required for the state to provide these rights entails a weakening of the negative right to property. This group comprises various libertarian and fiscally-conservative-but-socially-liberal types. As one moves further leftward within the liberal tradition, more positive rights are included in the canon and property rights are not conceived as absolute, but amenable to exceptions in cases where other rights conflict. Most liberal democracies have in fact enshrined examples of both sorts into their constitutions or statutes, and the unconditional enforcement of many of the standard fare negative rights as a practical matter requires the provision of a system of courts, police, and lawyers—effectively a positive right.

There are as many positions as to the taxonomy of rights as there are liberal philosophers, none without objections. I do not intend here to provide such a comprehensive taxonomy, but to sketch a general framework, a manner of thinking that serves to approximate what I think to be a more promising understanding of individual rights. It begins not with an abstract notion of rights and duties, but with an understanding of freedom based on the first-person lived experience of individuals.

Freedom, from this perspective, is the real ability to choose those things which one values and to live the life one desires, not merely the absence of interference. In order for the freedom to do X to be of any tangible value in the lives of individuals, achieving X must be a real opportunity or power, or capability for that individual, otherwise one might well say that Tantalus is free to drink from the water whenever he likes, or that one is free to sprout wings and fly, provided no other individual or state power is preventing them from doing so. Interference from others can thwart an individual from achieving their desires, but so can structural or natural impediments. Little can be done about the latter, but structural socioeconomic impediments can in many cases ameliorated by political action. An attempt to understand freedoms as real capabilities has been undertaken by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who provides a non-exhaustive list of candidate capabilities in her Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, an interesting and worthwhile read for those interested in liberal theory. These understandings of freedom point us in a more leftward direction, seeking to liberate the individual not only from unfreedom imposed upon individuals by state power, but also from unfreedom imposed by private powers or by the consequences of poverty or other structural impediments to self-determination.

A system of political rights can be assessed on this basis by empirical means. Measuring things like freedom and well-being across nation-states is a necessarily imperfect science, but a nonetheless valuable one in which political scientists have made great progress. Various indices such as the Human Development Index, the Freedom in the World report, and others give us means of comparing political systems, and more targeted research into the individual conditions of well being give us better ideas as to what core human freedoms should be valued most highly as political ideals.

The process of refining our understanding of freedom and well-being is a deliberative human process, always imperfect and subject to error, which highlights the importance of the interacting liberal principles previously enumerated—the skepticism of power, deliberative, participatory legislative bodies, checks and balances and the rest. The process of liberal reform is sometimes gradual and imperfect, but tangible and durable over time.

This is precisely what we’ve seen through the history of liberal thought and reforms. To borrow an idea from Dr. King, the moral arc of liberal societies is long, but it bends toward freedom and justice. Once a society enshrines in its character and constitution liberal norms, it affords itself the levers by which generations of reformers to come will be able to effect change. America is a good case study in this phenomenon. Certain basic liberal ideals were enshrined in its constitution and founding philosophy: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “All men are created equal,” the freedoms of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petition, the right to privacy, trial by jury, and other protections. Though these principles were not all implemented at the time of their adoption, and are not perfectly realized even now, they have formed the basis for the great reform movements that have defined successive generations of American life. Similar trends have been seen in other countries adopting liberal constitutions, from Western Europe to Asia.

It is a testament to the power of these core liberal ideas that the greatest liberatory reforms in our history have come about not by overturning these fundamental principles, but by recapitulating them, calling out the hypocrisy in the failure of government to live up to them, and taking them to their logical conclusions, thus enlarging their reach. It was thus that Frederick Douglass argued against slavery, excoriating the hypocrisy of a nation who would proclaim liberal principles of equality and liberty while allowing bondage and subjection within its borders. King did the same in the next century, saying:

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.

Likewise Susan B. Anthony on women’s suffrage:

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.

In the great progressive leaps forward of both the distant and recent past, from abolition to civil rights to the rights of women and LGBT individuals, we find appeals to liberal principles at the very heart of the rhetoric of these reform movements.

Though we have come far from where we started, we have many mountains yet to climb. A thoroughgoing liberalism along the lines expressed above can make the case for continuing radical changes to the status quo, including sweeping criminal justice reform, drug legalization, universal basic income, universal healthcare, humane immigration reforms, sex workers’ rights, death with dignity, as well as structural government reforms such as electoral system reforms, an end to the practice of gerrymandering, and more. The core principles of liberalism thus provide us with a map of unrealized and partially realized reforms, and a flexible but powerful blueprint for continual progress toward a freer, more just, and happier world.