Communism and altruism

It has been alleged (and I use the passive voice on purpose) that communism entails a kind of "radical altruism," which is ineluctably contrary to human nature. In the most direct form, communism is criticized because it entails that every individual completely abandon his or her own well-being for the "good of society." I'm skeptical that very many canonical communist thinkers have actually made this case outside of a purely revolutionary context, e.g. "The fear of death is the beginning of slavery,"* but even if they did, the idea of absolute altruism can be discarded while still keeping the core elements of communism: worker ownership of the means of production and the ideal economic society of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The best justification for communism is not altruism but utilitarianism: communism produces the society that creates the greatest good for the greatest number. Thus, a moral or psychological critique of communism entails showing either that communism cannot be reasonably expected to create the greatest good, or that utilitarianism (instead of radical altruism) is philosophically or psychologically untenable. The first critique is beyond the scope of this post; I want to focus on the philosophical and psychological status of utilitarianism.

*variously attributed

The philosophical critique of utilitarianism falls into three categories*. First, utilitarianism requires a "felicific calculus," to use Bentham's phrase, which is overly simplistic or unnecessarily elaborate. This critique, while mostly accurate, does not address utilitarianism at a fundamental level. It's clearly possible to talk about utility in a consistent way: we can, for example, just ask people whether they are happy or unhappy. To say that it is difficult to measure utility does not say that we should not maximize utility if we could measure it perfectly, or maximize utility as best we can measure it. It might or might not be a valid critique that we cannot indirectly measure utility well enough to make utilitarianism useful, but it is simply invalid to say that because we cannot measure utility directly or perfectly that utilitarianism is fundamentally unsound.

*There are actually four, but the fourth consists of arguments based on one or more logical or rhetorical fallacies, such as defining utility narrowly or objectively (contradicting a fundamental premise of utilitarianism), arguing that utilitarianism is flawed just because it is different from something other than utilitarianism, or the ad hominem argument that utilitarianism fails because Bentham was an architect of capitalism and had some very stupid, horrible ideas.

The second critique is the "Omelas" critique: even if we could measure utility perfectly, there are (approximate) maxima of utility that profoundly violate our moral sensibilities. Ursula LeGuin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," is the canonical example. I have addressed this particular criticism earlier at greater length; one obvious counterargument is that we have no reason to believe — and many reasons to disbelieve — that there could possibly be any causal relationship between torturing a child and a happy society. It's possible that different laws of physics might render a society like Omelas meaningful, but our own moral intuitions, like our physical intuitions, were constructed by and are about this world.
Furthermore, utility is fundamentally subjective; a social structure that causes many people to have severe moral pain is by definition counter-utilitarian. If Omelas did not cause such severe moral pain, there would be none who walked away. Omelas therefore does not, even within the premises of utilitarianism, maximize utility.

The Omelas critique is fundamentally empirical, not logical. All variations of this argument make two premises. First, we have perfect information about what maximizes utility; second, based on that perfect information, the maximum of utility violates our moral intuitions. There are three counterarguments. First, we do not and cannot have perfect information; if things were different they would be different, and we are concerned with morality in this world, not some hypothetical possible world in which people have perfect information about utility. Second, there is no reason to believe that if we did have perfect information, the maximum of utility would actually violate our moral intuition; if such a case could could be proven in this actual world, we might reconsider utilitarianism, but, as best I can tell, such scenarios are entirely hypothetical, not real. Finally, even if we could determine conclusively that some maximum of utility actually did violate our moral intuition, perhaps it is our intuition that is defective, not utilitarianism. Again, we would have to thoroughly understand the trade-off between utility and our intuition in the real world to make a reasoned judgment.

The third critique is the psychological critique. According to utilitarianism, each individual should choose each of her individual actions based on what is best for all people, with her own personal utility a mostly insignificant residuum of that calculation. It seems readily apparent from introspection and common sense that not only do people not actually think this way, it is completely unreasonable to expect them to. A moral system has to be built on the psychology of people who live here now, and it would be presumptuous to discuss the morality of our descendants a thousand years hence, who might have a psychology compatible with our notions of utilitarianism. While utilitarianism does not demand that individuals completely ignore their own well-being, the diminution of their own utility to statistical insignificance comes pretty close. However, this is a fundamental misreading of Bentham's own work: although it is one legitimate way of understanding utilitarianism, it is not the only legitimate reading, and it is not how Bentham explicitly asks us to read the fundamental principle of utilitarianism.

Crucial to understanding utilitarianism is the fundamental impossibility of actually computing the greatest good for the greatest number. There are two problems with such a computation. First, it is computationally intractable. There are too many dimensions, one for each individual's desire; even if each individual had only 100 identifiable desires, we would have to solve 700 billion simultaneous equations to compute maximal utility. Furthermore, there are dynamic effects: changes in the world produce changes in our desires, in our subjective opinions about utility. Second, as noted above, we do not have very good measures of how our actions will affect other people's utility. Even if we could solve 700 billion simultaneous equations, we don't have the numbers to plug into the equations. If utilitarianism required that we perform a computationally intractable task without data, it would be an obvious failure. Fortunately, utilitarianism does not require such a task.

We cannot calculate for every decision which choice is best for everyone, but we can estimate which choices make the total utility better. We cannot maximize total utility, but we can increase total utility. And to do so, we need not, as individuals, ignore or minimize our own utility. We cannot consider our own individual utility to be a priori better than others', but each individual can consider himself an "expert" on what his own utility actually is. In the Introduction to A Manual of Political Economy, Bentham makes this point clear: "[W]ithout some special reason, the general rule is, that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government." Bentham argues that in the general case, total utility is best improved by each individual maximizing her own utility: "Generally speaking, there is no one who knows what is for your interest, so well as yourself—no one who is disposed with so much ardour and constancy to pursue it. . . . Each individual bestowing more time and attention upon the means of preserving and increasing his portion of wealth, than is or can be bestowed by government, is likely to take a more effectual course than what, in his instance and on his behalf, would be taken by government." Generally, Bentham asserts that we can just satisfy our own interests without worrying about computing the effects on total utility, and when we can make larger statistical calculations, those calculations are "special," not general. Bentham himself does not expect individuals to reduce their own interests to statistical insignificance, and indeed it is only in special cases that we need to consider statistical calculations at all.

Bentham is not contradicting himself. When I improve my own well-being without harming others, insofar as I can actually calculate, I am thereby increasing total utility. And, by and large, that is what civilized people actually do. If I want a hamburger, I just go get a hamburger. I am improving my own utility without, as best I can tell from our social agreements permitting the sale of hamburgers, harming others. And I do not harm others in satisfying my desire: if there is a line at Burger King, I don't bully my way to the front: it is unacceptable to improve my utility by getting my hamburger now by making others wait longer. I don't steal the hamburger; I work to earn the money and then pay for it. Some might assert that eating hamburgers in general harms total utility more than it satisfies our individuals' desire for hamburgers, but they have to prove "some special reason" why this is true, and in making their case, no individual's desires are a priori more important than any others. We have the goal of always improving total utility, and we move closer to that goal using the tools we actually have; there is no need to require tools we do not and (probably) cannot have.

A lot of people, myself included, think that this is precisely how a civilized, liberal society ought to work. Generally, we satisfy our own desires, not because our own desires are a priori more important than others, but because we are experts in our own desires, and generally, we can more effectively improve total utility by exercising our expertise than by any other means. We fulfill our own desires, as best we can tell, without harming others. When our desires come into fundamental conflict, we have to look to special reasons, which do not take any individual's or group's desires as a priori more important than any others. To the extent that we have "moral principles," we use these principles not as absolute truths, but empirical regularities that we believe improve total utility under conditions of uncertainty, risk, and hidden information, and we can change these principles when our understanding of reality, or reality itself, changes. Far from being psychologically radical, utilitarianism is completely ordinary social reasoning for many people.

Communism is in principle utilitarian. We may be mistaken, but communists believe that communism is the greatest good for the greatest number. We focus on workers because workers are the largest segment of society, because workers can improve both their own and others' utility without harming anyone, and because everyone can be a worker. The only utility communists seek to diminish is the utility of rentiers, and only to the extent that rentiers' utility is, by definition, gained at the diminution of workers' utility. I cannot think of a better utilitarian argument.

Objections to communism

One advantage of going to college (and establishing a reputation as a reasonably intelligent, hard-working student) is that I get to hear the objections to my ideas from intelligent and well-educated people of good will. Good will is especially important: it's tedious and unproductive to talk to people who are simply enraged that I hold ideas different from their own. (The latter, sadly, characterizes much of the "discourse" on the blog, which is why I don't encourage comments. I can't remember a single instance here of a well-reasoned and well-intention objection to my primary ideas. [eta: there are some, but few.] The exceptions are typically people who generally agree with me; it's nice to know that I'm not completely alone, but it's vastly easier to learn from disagreement than agreement.)

I have heard a number of objections to "communism" in the course of my career. First, there are objections I mostly agree with; a workable communist system should, I think, address these concerns:

1. Communism, as traditionally defined, requires almost all individuals to be radically altruistic.
2. Central planning cannot efficiently manage the complexity and interactivity of the large number of transactions necessary for managing a complex industrial economy.

Second, there are objections I mostly disagree with; made by people who are well-intentioned, these objections require thoughtful rebuttal.

1. Entrepreneurs will not innovate without the incentive of private ownership.
2. Individuals will not work hard without the potential obtaining enough wealth to become rentiers
3. Government is philosophically and institutionally incompetent to manage the economy, in a fundamentally different sense than the complexity objection above.
4. It is always more efficient to allocate capital at all levels by private decisions rather than public decisions.

And, finally, there is the standard objection to revolution: However egregiously flawed the republican capitalist system, it is the system we have, with an enormous investment in making it (more or less) work; replacing it with a fundamentally different, relatively untried, system poses the risk of a catastrophic failure far worse than republican capitalism. I've written on this last topic at length. To sum up, I agree that we should not replace a system that is not in catastrophic failure; I disagree in that I see capitalism on the road to catastrophic failure; I'm convinced that even if capitalism does not fail catastrophically, radicalism strengthens and empower reformers.

I'll talk about these objections at greater length in future posts.

Leadership and the fall of Kerista

In my recently published paper that I linked to yesterday, I attribute the fall of Kerista primarily to their adoption of value of purity. I want to clarify a few points that I perhaps did not fully explain in the paper.

Every community is a complicated mix of personalities, institutions, customs, habits, and is embedded in a complex social and physical environment. Kerista was no exception. The most glaringly obvious feature of Kerista was that by the 1980s, Jud, the founder of the commune, had become a significant destructive force. Every few months, Jud would confront a target, usually a man from the Purple Submarine BFIC (to which he and I both belonged), and just hammer them until he left, or everyone was exhausted from the confrontation. It's clear that Jud was, by nature, kind of a dick. All right, a pretty big dick. If Jud hadn't been a big dick, the commune would definitely have lasted longer.

On the other hand, most leaders are dicks. A leader, by definition, is someone who is able to get followers to do what they wouldn't have done had they not been following that leader, i.e. to do what they naturally wouldn't have done. Everyone likes to think that followers and leaders alike are motivated by the mutual interest in the success of the organization. In this view, the leader just serves as kind of a "focus" for that mutual interest. People are not so much obeying the leader as obeying their own self-interest, which is furthered by the interest of the organization. (I.e. if the company does well, we all get paid and have nice stuff.) The leader just makes mutually beneficial behavior possible, and suppresses only internal cheating and free riding, which undermine mutual benefit. (See my perseveration on the drisoner's dilemma.)

But I have spent enough time as a follower and manager to know that the most effective leaders are those who go beyond this model, who can effectively use negative incentives (e.g. the desire to not get yelled at) to get more performance from even those among their followers who are acting on their own accord for the mutual benefit of the organization. An effective manager will find ways to get a good employees to work more and more intensely than they would were they motivated only by the expectation of mutual benefit. This feature of leadership is what makes it enormously difficult to be a leader. It's not enough to just yell at your employees or followers all the time; relying almost exclusively on negative incentives is worse than never using negative incentives at all. Followers can't just fear the leader; they have to respect and admire them too. And not only is there a fine line between too much and too little negative incentive, there's a dialectical relationship between the leader and the followers: they both affect each other, and how incentives play out in the organization.

This "crack the whip" leadership is deeply problematic at the analytical level. On the one hand, the leader's use of negative incentives is morally indefensible: it consists of getting followers to do things that really do not sufficiently benefit the followers, at least not materially. On the other hand, because motivation by negative reinforcement is possible, it happens, and organizations and institutions with effective leaders. i.e. those who can effectively use negative incentives, will out-compete those with less effective leaders. Regardless of any moral qualms about negative incentives, we would have to make deep changes in human psychology to eliminate them, and attempting to make deep changes in personal and social psychology, however morally justified those changes might be, usually results in catastrophe.

In one sense, Kerista fell because of the entrepreneur's dilemma. The entrepreneur's dilemma is well known to anyone who has worked in a lot of small businesses that intend to grow into large businesses (and has probably been discussed at length in the academic and popular literature): the leadership qualities that make an effective leader of a small business are very different from those that make an effective leader of a large business. To grow from a small business to a large business requires either a leader who can encompass both leadership styles, a leader who can relinquish control when the business becomes large enough, or an environment that facilitates ousting the small business leader. If none of those things happen, the small business will inevitably collapse when it gets too large. (Some businesses just stay small; however, if the leader wants it to grow large, he or she will keep trying to grow it, and become frustrated and irrational when it fails to grow, which will cause its collapse.)

Jud was manifestly effective at building a 20-30 person commune and keeping it together for about 20 years. When the commune became large enough and sufficiently economically successful, the qualities that made Jud an effective leader at the small scale made him a counter-productive leader at the larger level. Since Jud had considerable legitimacy as a leader, the culture of the commune could not easily replace his leadership. There's also the economic issue: the commune started really disbanding, I think, just when the computer business started to decline. People will tolerate a lot when they're working hard and making money; take away that economic success, and they get more critical of their social environment.

There are also other factors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people in the commune did not actually like polyfidelity, and did not like communal living. This dislike is difficult for me to understand because I really did like those aspects of Kerista. I don't think I'm particularly special; I think, perhaps, that there are many people like me, who would find communal polyfidelity itself rewarding and satisfying. But all of the people in Kerista (myself included) ended up in economically individualistic monogamous relationships even after Jud was ousted. No organization, culture, or institution can last long if it is at odds with the fundamental desires of its members. Without Jud more or less making people practice communal polyfidelity, the conflict between the members' desire for economic individualism and preferential dyadic relationships doomed the ideal of communal polyfidelity, and the commune justly disbanded.

All of these factors definitely contributed to the fall of Kerista. They may even be more important factors than the one I focused on in my paper: the toxic value of purity. However, I think my analysis of this value in the commune is important, for a number of reasons I'll discuss later.

And to no more settle for less than purity

I have been published!

"And to no more settle for less than purity: Reflections on the Kerista Commune." Praxis, 1.1: 58-73.

Check out the whole issue, where you'll read many good articles by my fellow students.

On geek culture

On Geek Culture, by Ian Williams: "What is Superman in the twenty-first century but a corporate mascot, albeit one with a lavish backstory?"

The Simple Art of Murder

Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (1950):

But fundamentally [detective fiction] is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on. . . .

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently–one can never be quite sure–is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, and not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. . . .

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

More on self defense

'nuff said.

Self defense

In the comments to George Zimmerman and reasonable doubt Major Nav asks a hypothetical question: Assuming I were on a neighborhood watch, and I politely addressed someone whom I did not recognize,

What if the man you politely addressed in a non-threatening manner is pissed that you can now recognize him and may even have a picture. What if the man really was up to something.

Now he has tackles you to the ground and starts to thump you.

What would you do to make the beating stop? Would you shoot him? At this point, would it matter what color he was?

He goes on to accuses me of avoiding the question and asks,

Are you saying you would only defend yourself from a beating if you could have evidence it was self-defense?

Your almost there. No one has the right to kill anyone. But everyone has the right to defend themselves/family, even if that means using lethal force.

I did not answer this question because in the context of the Zimmerman case, this is a Bad Question. It attempts to analogize an hypothetical case with facts that are, at the very least, not in evidence in the Zimmerman case.

Major Nav seems to assume that the crux of the Zimmerman case is whether or not we have the right of self-defense. But that assumption is silly; no one argues the general validity of self-defense. The argument is under what conditions should juries and courts find self-defense, and how should courts determine whether or not those conditions have been met.

Before I examine the specific question, I want to mention a few things about legal theory in general.

There is an important distinction: 1) what actually happened in the real world, 2) what conclusions we can draw about what actually happened from the evidence available at s trial. (There's also the element of what kinds of evidence can and cannot be admitted for reasons other than probative value, but this element does not seem relevant to the Zimmerman case, and, as far as I'm aware, is not particularly important in considering self defense.)

If we are to have a civilized rule of law, we must make post hoc decisions based on the evidence available at the time of the decision, not what actually happened at the time of the conflict between the actions of an individual and the requirements of law. Thus, any person who wishes to act legally and also wishes to avoid legal consequences is prudent to not only act legally, but also act such that, if there is a trial, evidence supports (or does not undermine) his compliance with the law. It would be nice to have it, but we do not have perfect knowledge after the fact about what happened. In legal theory, we deal with imperfect knowledge in several ways. First, when determining if an individual actually committed acts proscribed by law, we place a burden of proof on the prosecution. When we do not know enough about what happened to determine beyond a reasonable doubt if an individual actually committed legally proscribed actions, then we do not subject that individual to legal sanction. We do not have to actually know with any confidence that an individual did not commit a proscribed action to find him or her not guilty; we find him or her not guilty if we do not know beyond a reasonable doubt that he or she committed a proscribed action.

By design, our laws are somewhat vague and imprecise. We will not punish someone even if they actually do commit, and we can know they committed, a proscribed action if they had a "good reason" to have done so. For example, the law forbids killing a human being; however, if someone has a good reason, such as self defense, for killing a human being, we will not punish him. However, having a good reason is an affirmative defense: the defendant has the burden of proof of establishing the good reason for committing what would otherwise constitute an illegal act. This is an important distinction: it is not enough to acquit someone that we do not know beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not have a good reason to commit an otherwise illegal act. (Sorry for all the negatives.) We must have positive reasons, which can be circumstantial, to believe they actually did have a good reason. Furthermore, the state can introduce evidence that the defendant's alleged good reason is specious or false.

For example, if I am in my home, and an person unknown to me climbs in through an open window and points a gun at me, and I shoot him, then I have circumstantial evidence that I acted in self-defense, even though there is no direct evidence that I did so: there is an dead unknown person in my house, there is a loaded gun in his hand, and the state cannot establish any credible motive for the killing other than self defense. Even without "Make My Day" laws (which I don't find particularly objectionable), it's usually relatively easy, if one is careful about one's story, to affirmatively establish self defense.

These specific questions are relevant to the Zimmerman case. First, we know beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. The state's burden has been met, and reasonable doubt on the part of the prosecution is trivially irrelevant to the Zimmerman case. Second, George Zimmerman alleges self-defense, which is an affirmative defense.

Note that Zimmerman's legal guilt or innocence is no longer particularly relevant; he has been acquitted, and unless the state charges him with a substantively new crime, even new facts about the original act cannot change the verdict. Similarly, the right of self-defense in general is not an issue; there is no controversy that in general, self defense is a good reason for killing another person.

Instead, what is at issue are more general questions: what actually constitutes self defense? What does a person need to do to establish, after the fact, that he or she killed a human being in self defense? What circumstances should we, as a society, consider when determining whether or not a killing was actually in self defense?

I want to repeat: that we cannot know beyond a reasonable doubt whether or not Zimmerman acted in self defense is absolutely not a legal defense. The burden is on Zimmerman (and anyone else acting in self defense) to prove by the preponderance of evidence (if Wikipedia is to be trusted in this matter) that he acted in self defense.

The real question in the Zimmerman case, and cases of "vigilante" killings in general, is how widely we consider the antecedent actions of the defendant in determining whether or not self defense is a good reason for a killing.

As best I can tell, the jury acquitted Zimmerman because they considered only the immediate circumstances surrounding Trayvon Martin's death. Because I am not a lawyer, and even if I were, I am not at all familiar with Florida law, I do not know whether or not the jury (or the judge's instructions) acted according to Florida law in considering only those circumstances. Instead, I want to consider the general legal theory of self defense.

It should be uncontroversial that everyone must, to some extent, forfeit otherwise legal rights to preserve human life. For example, few would object that, even though I have the legal right of way to proceed down a street at the speed limit, I must slow down if it is safe to do so to avoid hitting a jaywalking pedestrian. On the other hand, there are upper limits as well: I do not have to forfeit my right to life to avoid killing someone.

The question becomes: how far out of my way must I go, what legal rights must I forfeit, to avoid killing someone? There are, in general, three choices. First, a person must go "very far" to avoid killing. Second, a person need not go "very far" to avoid killing. Third, a person must go "very far" to avoid killing some kinds of people, but does not need to "very far" to avoid killing other kinds of people. (One common criticism of Zimmerman in particular and self defense acquittals in general is that the legal system seems to hold in practice that everyone much go significantly further to avoid killing white people than they must to avoid killing black people.)

I hold the first position: one must go "very far" to avoid killing anyone. Specifically, I hold that everyone has a positive duty to avoid provoking a violent reaction. If I do something that reasonably and foreseeably would provoke a violent reaction, and I can avoid doing so without forfeiting an important legal right, then because I provoked the violent reaction, I cannot claim self-defense. If I find myself in a situation where I can reasonably foresee someone might use unprovoked violence, then yes, I will make very sure that I do my best to ensure that direct and circumstantial evidence will exonerate me. Finally, in the extremely unlikely case that I were in circumstances such that I needed to act in self defense, but I could not establish self defense by the preponderance of direct or circumstantial evidence, well, I would rather be convicted of murder than establish the precedent that people can go around killing others without a provable good reason to do so.

Finally, as mentioned before, one common objection to the Zimmerman verdict and verdicts like is privilege: one standard applies to the killing of black people, and a higher standard applies to the killing of white people. Fundamentally, it seems, especially in the Zimmerman verdict, that when the victim is black (and especially if the killer is non-black), people consider the circumstances more narrowly, they apply the reasonable doubt standard rather than the preponderance of evidence standard, and they give more weight to allegations that the black victim was reasonably threatening.

Had Trayvon Martin avoided being shot and instead George Zimmerman been killed, I have little doubt that the jury would have considered the circumstances more broadly (why was Martin in that neighborhood in the first place?), they would have applied a stricter burden of proof (did Martin really need to kill Zimmerman, rather than simply have a subjective fear of death?) and they would have presumed that Zimmerman was non-threatening, and required Martin to do much more to overcome that presumption than Zimmerman needed to confirm the presumption that Martin, a black child, was inherently threatening.

Take it how you will, but fundamentally, I believe that anyone who defends Zimmerman, on any basis, covertly believes that black lives are inherently less valuable than non-black, especially white, lives, and that black people have fewer legitimate rights to safety and security than do non-black and white people. You may argue all you like that you are just supporting Zimmerman on the facts and racially neutral legal principles, but it is difficult to convince me that you are not simply lying about your racism. I have seen too much evidence of the worst kind of despicable racism in our society to be easily convinced otherwise.

George Zimmerman and reasonable doubt

Sigh. I'm hearing that Florida prosecutors did not prove their case against George Zimmerman beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, BBC News reports that "Alan Dershowitz told BBC News that there was "reasonable doubt" about the facts of what happened." Dershowitz should know better: reasonable doubt is not an issue in the case, and if it were, Zimmerman would have been convicted.

The part of the case which the state's burden to overcome reasonable doubt would apply is as to whether Zimmerman actually shot and killed Trayvon Martin. However, this part of the case is not in doubt; Zimmerman admits to killing Martin. That's all there is for the prosecution's reasonable doubt.

Zimmerman did not try to raise reasonable doubt; instead, he raised the affirmative defense of self-defense. (Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which establishes that a person can claim self-defense even if he or she refuses to retreat, does not apply, because Zimmerman claimed that Martin had restrained him and he was unable to retreat.) An affirmative defense requires the defense, not the prosecution, to bear the burden of proof. The defense's burden is typically lower than the prosecution; the defense has to establish an affirmative defense not beyond a reasonable doubt but by only by the preponderance of evidence. The defense successfully argued that Martin attacked Zimmerman, and Zimmerman shot Martin in self defense.

It is possible that Martin really did attack Zimmerman. However, whether or not he did so is completely irrelevant. The relevant facts, which are not in dispute, are that George Zimmerman armed himself with a pistol, and went out of his way to intentionally create a situation, stalking and harassing Martin, with a strong likelihood of a violent confrontation. George Zimmerman could have prevented Trayvon Martin's death: he knew that his actions could cause Martin's death, he knew that by not intentionally provoking him he could have prevented Martin's death, he knew that he had no good reason to intentionally and deliberately create a situation that might lead to Martin's death, and he did so anyway. That, in my mind, makes Zimmerman an evil bastard guilty of the murder of a child, and our society complicit in that evil by exonerating him.

Corey Robin on conservatism

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.

— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind