A while back I complained that I couldn’t find Bonitz’s Index Aristotelicus anywhere on the internet, in spite of the fact that copyright on the work had long lapsed, the difficulty of taking a copy out of the library, and its real value to any student of Aristotle. I just noticed that a few months after my complaint, the wonderful Internet Archive obliged. Bless their generous hearts. They have done a very useful thing.

Commenting on an obscure point about connate pneuma in his 1912 translation of Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, A.S.L. Farquharson writes that a comment of Aristotle’s is, “a reference perhaps to holding the breath when a weight is lifted. A[ristotle], like gymnastic teachers to-day, supposed it gave power.”

Interesting that Aristotle’s assumption about breath still held in Farquharson’s day. My understanding is that this is not a good thing to do, and the laziest of googlings suggests that the current consensus is that the proper technique involves breathing out as you work the muscle through its range of motion and in as you relax it. So, also, I was recently told by a rather large man at my gym who noticed that I was holding my breath a bit without noticing it, and who shouted, “Gotta breathe, baby, gotta breathe!”

Well, a letter. In response to this hatchet job (subscription required):

Dear Editor:

Let’s put to one side the question of whether philosopher John Rawls’s normative theory of justice is true or false. Even focusing on just the non-normative facts, David Lewis Schaefer’s portrait of Rawls’s work is flatly mistaken where it is not simply incoherent (“Justice and Inequality,” July 23, p.A 14). For example, in one breath Schaefer says that Rawls’s work “legitimize[s] the view that the absolute well-being of most Americans matters less than their relative position.” Yet in the next he says, correctly, that Rawls’s principles permit inequalities that raise citizens’ absolute standard of living. Schaefer next says that “Rawls did not ground his account of justice in an empirical examination of human nature,” but then goes on to mention Rawls’s discussion of “excusable envy”, which occurs within a dense, 150-page expanse of text wherein Rawls engages in an empirically-informed discussion of developmental psychology. Finally, Schaefer says that Rawls’s later writings were “increasingly deferential to the Marxist critique of liberalism,” while in fact Rawls has been widely criticized by those attracted to his earlier arguments for dulling their radical bite with his later work. Those interested in what Rawls actually thought will be well-advised to look beyond Schaefer’s new book.

Love,

Paul

UPDATE: My letter was not published (sub req). Three others were. The good news is that these letters offered some good criticism of the original article. For instance:

I was asked to write a paper on the lifeboat scenario — a thought experiment involving an overcrowded lifeboat entering a storm, where it is clear that not all will survive. A dedicated Rawlsian at the time, I decided to apply his theories to the assigned situation. But no matter how I construed them, his theories kept leading me to the conclusion that the only “fair” result was that everyone in the lifeboat had to die.

And:

As Rawls’s dictums are alive and growing in the body politic, the instances of trashing our ideals are endless. They are eroding the very fount of our republic and have become a cancer on our civilization.

And:

It is no accident that Rawls’s “general ideas” result in Marxist policies. Thirty-five years ago, Ayn Rand accurately predicted the logical political consequences of Rawls’s ideas.

So there really was no work left for my letter to do.

The sensible worries about preserving equal political liberties and influence are why it has become fashionable for commentators on Rawls to point out that his relatively neglected (because many think it uncontroversial) first principle of justice–a principle guaranteeing equal civil and political liberties, as well as equal political influence–may require *more* equality than the more well known and more controversial “difference principle,” which permits economic inequalities so long as they serve (via incentive effects) to raise the absolute standing of the worst-off position.

And while we’re looking for aspects of one’s *relative* situation that may, as Tyler Cowen wants, affect one’s *absolute* position or level of well-being in a way that makes the inequality itself unjust, we should remember the recent discussions about how economic inequality *as such*–even after controlling for societal variations in median income–seems to be harmful to our physical health. These mechanisms are not yet well understood, certainly less well understood than the ones Plummer points to. But the correlations are compelling, and deserve mention in debates like this.

But setting aside these other potentially powerful arguments against inequality, there is a sensible, old-fashioned reason for being concerned with certain sorts of inequality itself. It is embodied in the following line of thought:

1. In a modern market economy people get ahead by working hard within various institutions that are coercively imposed by the state and which play a central role in assigning the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (See the great book by Dean Baker that Plummer cites for an account of some of these institutions and how they are severely biased in how they determine resulting economic shares.) It is in no one’s interests not to have such institutions, broadly construed. But they are coercively-imposed and life-shaping nonetheless, and these features matter greatly to the question of how any particular institutional arrangement can be justified.

2. In a market economy many of the benefits one gets or the burdens one’s forced to bear befall one through no fault or merit of one’s own: they are matters of supply and demand, both of which are densely social, that is, are determined by social factors one can’t possibly control or be responsible for. Yet these facts very often play a decisive role in determining one’s life prospects.

3. Although it is in no one’s interests to abandon a market economy for a non-market alternative, and although there are clearly certain salient respects in which one’s economic position can be influence by aspects for which one is responsible–hard work, say–the features pointed to in (1) and (2) above are important enough to lead us to question whether our *current* market arrangements do the best they can to recognize that our most fundamental civic relation is one of cooperation and compliance within the context of coercively imposed institutions, and that those institutions by their nature tend to distribute benefits and burdens in light of features that participants are not responsible for, and in light of features that some have purely because of the unchosen place they occupy within the coercively imposed institutional framework.

4. So if our fundamental relationship is one of cooperation, as it should be if we are seeking to control one another’s lives through dominant institutions; and if market institutions should do all they can to be responsive to what people have done to uphold these institutions and to contribute to their shared economic project through their compliance with its terms; and if market institutions make it harder for some than for others, through no fault of their own, to get ahead with the same talent and effort–since resources are typically needed to translate talent and effort into capitalist success–then we should be concerned to ensure, in the best way we can within a market system, that that citizens’ unchosen social position (i.e. the economic positions they are born into) do not lead to differential life prospects given equal talents and willingness to strive. When it does (and it in fact does), the problem with (some forms of) inequality is that it is unfair: although I contribute the same talented striving to our shared, cooperative economic project, I receive less social reward simply because you (say) were smart enough to choose the right parents, or because your parents were smart enough to support institutions that protect the already wealthy from bad market luck but which did not so protect my parents. (Again, See Baker’s book for more on this tactic.)

5. Therefore: when the fundamental relationship of citizenship is one of mutually respectful cooperation–as it again must be if that relationship permits my seeking to coerce you and determine your life-prospects through dominant social institutions–then the inequality of opportunity for success that is avoidably engendered by current economic arrangements is prime facie unfair. You get more through your talented and loyal striving than I get. And still Bruce Bartlett expects me actively to uphold these arrangements through my political loyalty, just because my income doesn’t fall? Typically I’m pissed at myself when my blogging gets in the way of my real work, when I throw up an eminently avoidable roadblock to the sort of success and progress that it is rational for me to want for myself. But apparently Bruce Bartlett and the “inequality doesn’t matter” crowd wants me to give my active and loyal support to arrangements that coercively impose roadblocks to my economic success, roadblocks that are jointly imposed by those to whom I must fundamentally stand as cooperator–not capitalist competitor–if those arrangements are to have any chance in hell of being morally justified. And it’s hard to see how I’m being treated with respect as an economic and political cooperator when the terms of “cooperation” lavish grossly more benefits on you than on me, despite our offering the same talented and loyal striving.

1. Maybe because
1.1 His first book, which you adduce in his favor
1.12 Was written like this.

(Of couse this is too facile. But there’s something to it, and I couldn’t resist.)

From Economists View:

The Kindest Cut, by Steve Mirsky, Scientific American: … A mathematician, a political scientist and an economist recently wrote a paper … in which they point out that, under special circumstances, two people can split something up and both feel like they got more than half. … The paper, which appeared in the December issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society, is entitled “Better Ways to Cut a Cake.”

The report … deal[s] with … the theory and method behind slicing up an object to maximize the satisfaction of those parties, … who will then receive the slices. “We use cake as a metaphor for dividing a heterogeneous divisible good, an item that people may have different preferences for,” explains the mathematician, Michael Jones of Montclair State University…

Traditionally, if two people are splitting a cake, the method is simple …: one slices, the other chooses. The slicer therefore wants to make the division equal, knowing he’ll get stuck with the littler piece if he botches the job.

But this system can break down with certain cakes. “For example,” Jones says, “if a cake is half chocolate and half vanilla, and one person likes chocolate a lot and the other person is indifferent, then there’s a way to have both people, in their opinions, receive more than half the cake.”

[Y]ou can see, in the chocolate-vanilla two-person example, that the chocolate lover will feel more than half-satisfied if he gets, say, 80 percent of the chocolate half, despite it being only 40 percent of the entire cake. Meanwhile his flavor-impartial buddy will be more than half-satisfied by getting the remaining 60 percent of the entire cake. And the cake maker will have an economic motivation to complicate his cakes and hike his prices…

Hmm, I dunno (as Chris is prone to say in response to many of my posts). I see why the one who ends up with 60 percent of the cake feels like he got more than half (–y’know, because he did get more than half). But why does the one who ended up with 40 percent feel this way?

The only thing that can be meant is that he feels like he got more than he would have had with a certain half, viz. the half mostly made up of non-chocolate cake. But if we’re looking for the “kindest” cut, why isn’t the right division the one that gives the chocolate lover the chocolate half, and the “indifferent” the rest? After all, any greater “satisfaction” that the indifferent gets with the extra portion would have surely been matched by the satisfaction that the chocolate-lover would have had with some more chocolate. So it’s not clear that the author’s solution uniquely “maximizes the satisfaction of those parties.”

Now, I can see why it would be “rational” for each to make the 40/60 cut if put in the cutter position. Assume the chocolate lover is the cutter. Then he should cut a smaller-than-half but all-chocolate piece to induce the indifferent to choose the larger piece (which the chocolate lover doesn’t want anyway). Now assume that the indifferent is the cutter. Then he should cut a smaller-than-half but all-chocolate piece, knowing that the chocolate lover will take that piece, leaving the rest (which the indifferent, being indifferent, prefers simply because it’s bigger).

In order to show that the 40/60 cut is the kindest or the fairest possible cut, we should be able to tell a story where the dynamics of the cut are not solely based upon the power relations between the two parties. Since it is assumed that the parties know one another’s preferences, it is clear that the indifferent is in a special position to induce the chocolate-lover to take the smaller piece. For in the case in which the indifferent is the cutter, the chocolate-lover feels like he got “more than half” solely because the indifferent had the power to determine the makeup of the relevant halves. And in the case in which the chocolate-lover is the cutter, the only reason why he would not make a 50-50 cut is because the indifferent might choose the chocolate half. But why would the indifferent do this, if he is in fact indifferent to makeup of his piece, knows that the other loves chocolate, and wishes to contribute to the “kindest” or fairest procedure? He wouldn’t; and so it’s clear that neither kindness nor fairness is the sole motivator here, and that the chocolate-lover makes the 40/60 cut in order to give the indifferent a reason to avoid being a dick.

The special feature of the old-school procedure is that it is suited to deliver perfect procedural justice, that is, it is a case in which there is both an independently establishable fair outcome, and a procedure that is sure to deliver that outcome. Economists love the fact that, in this case, the procedure makes use of parties’ narrowly rational desires formed in light of all risks and potential rewards. But this shouldn’t overshadow the fact that the independently right outcome is not determined by thinking about the issue in a narrowly economic way. Rather, the propriety of the procedure is wholly determined by the antecedent considerations of fairness. If those considerations change from situation from situation, so too should the procedure that’s designed to express them.

In contrast, the special feature of the new situation is that the independently fair outcome (i.e. 50/50 with a fully chocolate half going to the chocolate-lover) cannot be reliably reached through any procedure that seeks to harness the narrowly self-interested motivations of the parties. The authors’ mistake is to transfer the fairness of the rationale behind the old-fashion procedure to that sort of procedure itself. In the old-fashioned case, there were no differential power relations that could taint the fairness of the outcome (we assume the cutter won’t turn the knife on the chooser), and this is why the procedure that exploited self-interested motivations was recommended by the independent rationale. The new case differs from the old one in just this respect, and this is why the same procedure won’t deliver an outcome untainted by unfairness (or unkindness).

Now I shall await Chris’s own “Hmmm, I dunno”…

In early October, Edmund S. Phelps was awarded the Nobel prize for economics. The next day he published a piece in the Wall Street Journal on capitalism’s dynamism and justness. In the article, Phelps says that he

broadly subscribe[s] to the conception of economic justice in the work by John Rawls…An organization that leaves the bottom score lower than it would be under another feasible organization is unjust.”

Here Phelps is invoking Rawls’s so-called “difference principle,” which permits economic inequalities generated by society’s major institutions only if those inequalities serve to raise the life prospects of the least-advantaged higher than any other feasible alternative arrangement. So far, so good. But then Phelps ends the article with this:

Suppose the wage of the lowest- paid workers was foreseen to be reduced over the entire future by innovations conceived by entrepreneurs. Are those whose dream is to find personal development through a career as an entrepreneur not to be permitted to pursue their dream? To respond, we have to go outside Rawls’s classical model, in which work is all about money. In an economy in which entrepreneurs are forbidden to pursue their self-realization, they have the bottom scores in self-realization–no matter if they take paying jobs instead–and that counts whether or not they were born the “least advantaged.” So even if their activities did come at the expense of the lowest-paid workers, Rawlsian justice in this extended sense requires that entrepreneurs be accorded enough opportunity to raise their self-realization score up to the level of the lowest-paid workers–and higher, of course, if workers are not damaged by support for entrepreneurship. In this case, too, then, the introduction of entrepreneurial dynamism serves to raise Rawls’s bottom scores.

Where to begin? For one thing, Phelps misunderstands “Rawls’s classical” model in two key respects. First, the difference principle is not the sole principle of distributive justice. Rather, it’s one of three, and is the last in line in priority. Rawls’s Basic Liberties Principle and Fair Equality of Opportunity are given absolute priority over the difference principle by Rawls. So if maximizing the prospects of the least-advantaged is inconsistent with the protection of any of the basic liberties or a policy ensuring that equally talented and motivated persons have equal life-prospects, the difference principle gives way.

Second, it is false that in Rawls’s theory, “work is all about money” and has nothing to do with what Phelps calls “self-realization”. In fact, one of Rawls’s arguments in favor of Fair Equality of Opportunity is that its absence would legitimately lead those who do not have a fair chance to secure the most desirable jobs to feel unjustly treated, and this is precisely because they are “debarred from experiencing the realization of self which comes from a skillful and devoted exercise of social duties. They would be deprived of one of the main forms of human good” (A Theory of Justice (rev. ed., 1999), p. 73).

Of course, these exegetical points do not touch the substance of Phelps’s argument; it might be that, after the Liberty Principle and Equal Opportunity principle are satisfied, the difference principle requires increasing entrepreneurs’ prospects for self-realization at the expense of greater wages for workers. So let’s press on.

Phelps’s argument relies upon an unstated premise, something like “If it’s what I really really want, then it alone will contribute to my self-realization, and is therefore elevated to a legitimate interest within a Rawlsian theory of justice.”

This leads to absurd implications. For I could demand that justice cater to my desire to live a in society without entrepreneurs, just as I desire to live in a society without thieves. Or, if you think preferences about others’ preferences are a suspect form of double-counting, then we can tweak my desire: I really really want to receive a wage for playing basketball in my backyard all day, since that is what determines self-realization for me. The absurdity of both these suggestions shows that in order to be a legitimate concern of justice, the claim to self-realization has to pass certain moral tests. We cannot just assume that strong desires determine justice-relevant claims about what individuals need in order to be able to seek self-realization.

Rather, a sound theory must respect both interpersonal objectivity and suitable generality: if they are to be of practical use at all, principles of justice cannot be determined by personal whims or idiosyncratic wishes.

So now, instead of assuming that those wannabe entrepreneurs who are forced to live under a regime that curbs their entrepreneurial prospects are the “worst-off” since they do not have adequate opportunities for self-realization, that must be argued for. And the argument must explain why the entrepreneur’s complaints are legitimate but the complaint of the person who insists on a society that lets him play basketball all day are not. That is a hard argument to make. It would seem that the same strong response is available in both cases: “The fact that you want to play basketball all day is irrelevant to your standing from the point of view of justice. You have plenty of worthwhile opportunities, and it is wrong for you to demand that society makes a life of basketball (entrepreneurship) available to you, especially in light of what that would mean for and require of others. Given the opportunities available to you, given that your basic liberties are not infringed [which I am here assuming--Paul], and given that this arrangement maximizes the justice-relevant prospects of the justice-relevant least advantaged, you cannot complain that you have been treated unjustly.”

Of course, permitting entrepreneurial activities and advantages may well be required by the Basic Liberties principle and/or by the difference principle, even when illegitimate interests or claims about self-realization are ruled out. And this is indeed an argument that Phelps makes. But the supplementary argument about self-realization and the wannabe entrepreneur doesn’t fly.

From Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Chapter VI (Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves):

What derision and contempt, with both sexes, attend impotence; while the unhappy object is regarded as one deprived of so capital a pleasure in life, and at the same time, as disabled from communicating it to others. Barrenness in women, being also a species of inutility, is a reproach, but not in the same degree: Of which the reason is very obvious, according to the present theory.

That’s awfully raunchy by the standards of the 18th Century British moralists, isn’t it? At least, I don’t remember anything in, for example, Butler’s sermons on the importance being able to maintain an erection.

Google Books looks like it’ll be very useful, since a lot of books I use for research are a) not on my shelf; and b) have lapsed in copyright. Already, for example, I’ve noticed Cope’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric among Google’s many full-text offerings. This summer I used the Perseus Collection to consult Cope’s commentary on the Rhetoric and for easy bilingual reference to some of the texts he mentions in passing, but had missed having his Introduction. Have I mentioned that I love the internet?

One disappointment to report so far, however. Bonitz’s Index Aristotelicus is still not anywhere to be found on the internet. In a way, this is unsurprising: It’s long, with really small print, which probably makes it difficult to scan in clearly and a nightmare to manually enter. Also, many people nowadays, including me, are in the habit of using the TLG instead for word searches. All the same, I do find it odd that no one, anywhere, has done this yet. Bonitz still has his fans, and his index is often more useful than the TLG, at least for some purposes. Also, it’s really fucking expensive, and library copies of the book are few and usually not circulated.

So if anyone wants to scan about a 1000 pages of text and host it in an easy to access way on the internet, I would be much obliged. If I had time, I swear I would do it myself.

UPDATE: Bingo!

The latest edition of Topoi has a short piece by Jonathan Barnes called “Bagpipe Music.” It’s a bit of curmudgeonly grousing, as the abstract of the paper suggests:

Ancient philosophy is in a bad way. Like all other academic disciplines, it is crushed by the embrace of bureaucracy. Like other parts of philosophy, it is infected by faddishness. And in addition it suffers cruelly from the decline in classical philology. There is no cure for this disease.

As far as I can tell, there’s some truth in what Barnes says, though I would quibble, dispute, and reject here and there.  Unfortunately, he’s absolutely right about the decline in classical philology.  My own linguistic skills are part of that sad story.

I have almost finished working through Aristotle’s biological works, hunting for inspiration and clues. I have found much to admire: Aristotle was the head of one of the most ambitious scientific research projects ever undertaken, and the sheer mass of detail and theoretical sophistication found in the resulting works is often breathtaking. And then there are passages like this, breathtaking mainly because I’m laughing too hard to breathe properly:

All animals when castrated change over to the female state, and as their sinewy strength is slackened at its source they emit a voice similar to that of females. This slackening may be illustrated in the following way. It is as though you were to stretch a cord and make it taut by hanging some weight on to it, just as women do who weave at the loom; they stetch the warp by hanging stone weights on to it. This is the way in which the testes are attached to the seminal passages, which in their turn are attached to the blood-vessel which has its starting-point at the heart near the part which sets the voince in movement. And so, as the seminal passages undergo a change at the approach of the age when they can secrete semen, this part undergoes a simultaneous change. And as this changes, so too does the voice . . . If the testes are removed, the tautness of the passages is slackened, just as when the weight is removed from the cord or from the warp; and as this slackens, the source (or principle) which sets the voice in movement is correspondingly loosened. This then is the cause on account of which castrated animals change over to the female condition both as regards the voice and the rest of their form: it is because the principle from which the tautness of the body is derived is slackened. (Generation of Animals, V.vii, Loeb translation)

A theme I see pursued occasionally on academic blogs like Crooked Timber or Timothy Burke’s site is openness in research and teaching. I think this page, set up by Monte Johnson to detail his work with D.S. Hutchinson on Aristotle’s Protrepticus, is an model of open and generous scholarship. It assembles quite a lot of useful material on the subject, and includes some transcripts from a seminar they co-taught this summer. Since my dissertation touches on the subject of their research, this has been extremely helpful to me.

Anyway, I loved this bit from Papyrus Fragment POxy 3659, which they translate as follows:

And what about the philosophers themselves? If you confined them in the one house and an equal number of madmen in another house next door, you would get much, much greater howls from the philosophers than from the madmen!

(The fragment is of unknown provenance, and is included in their collection of texts because it might be relevant to Aristotle’s Protrepticus.)

From Aristotle’s Rhetoric, III.3:

As for what Gorgias said to the swallow which, flying over his head, let fall her droppings upon him, it was in the best tragic style. He exclaimed, “For shame, Philomela!” For there would have been nothing in this act disagraceful for a bird, whereas it would have been for a young lady. The reproach therefore was appropriate, addressing her as she was, not as she is.

O! If only I weren’t spending all my time disagreeing with Matt Yglesias on this in my dissertation, I could spend time disagreeing with it here. So sad. I guess I’ll just have to insist that Rawls’s position is much more attractive than Matt paints it in his three sentence discussion.

From a discussion in Book X of Aristotle’s History of Animals on the causes of infertility:

There are various signs by which you can tell that the man is not responsible [for a failure to conceive]; and it is very easy to tell this if he has intercourse with other women and produces children. And it is a sign that they do not keep pace with one another if, although all the conditions described are met, he does not produce children. For it is plain that this alone is the cause; for if the woman too contributes something to the semen and to the process of generation, it is plain that the partners must keep pace with one another. Thus if the man ejaculates quickly and the women with difficulty (for women are for the most part slower), that prevents conception; and that is why partners who do not produce children with one another do produce children when they meet with partners who keep pace with them during intercourse. For if the woman is excited and prepared and has the appropriate thoughts, and the man has previously been pained and has grown cold, they must necessarily then keep pace with one another.

I’m having trouble squaring that passage with Book II, chapter 4 of the Generation of Animals, where Aristotle says that conception is possible even if the female does not take the pleasure in sex that she typically takes.