Tem

10: OCT 1

Assigned

• Hibbing, Ch 6, Different Slates (26)
• Libertarianism in Six Minutes
• Libertarianism wiki See for historical detail.

In-class content

• Libertarianism as a moral and political theory

Some questions I'm considering for a student "engagement" survey

• Do you feel there is less participation in "hybrid" courses such as ours vs. similar traditional face-to-face courses?
• Do you like the option of turning your video off?
• If you like the option to turn off your video, why do you like it?
• Do you turn video on in break out rooms?
• How useful do you find Zoom breakout rooms compared to small group discussion? (less, about the same, more)
• Would it helpful to turn video on during times when questions or discussion are solicited from the whole class?
• Would you like me to make more use of Zoom options to express agreement and other reactions, such as yes-no-maybe and emoticons etc.?
• Are there other things I could do or we could do to improve the course experience in any way?

Hibbing, Ch 6, Different Slates

• Introductory stuff

• Story of Phineas Gage -- 1848 -- early example of biology and personality change.
• Oliver Sachs work.
• 149: lobotomies. Some Parkinson's drugs can trigger behavioral changes like addictions and gambling.

• I Feel it in my Gut -- psyhophysiology -- emotions as "action dispositions" 151: phsyiology of anger, stress (digress on cortisol), polygraph.

• 151: how emotional states are instantiated in neural and physiological activity.
• CNS - central nervous system (head and spine) ANS - Anotonomic Nervous system. Within ANS - SNS (sympathetic) and PNS (parasympathetic) --
• 153: from Hibbing's lab: patterns of activation are pretty stable. Some people are agitated by dark rooms and loud noises. Same years later.

• Politics on and in the Brain

• Kanai and Rees MRI study -- looking at ACC (anterior singulate cortext) and amygdala. ACC activated by tasks involving error detection and conflict resolution -- results on 156: found correlation between liberalism and size of ACC. Bigger. However, amygdala (which is involved in face recog and emotion regulation) Conservatives have bigger amygdalas (156: more active in face recognition and threat detection (also C5) .

• Note connection to BeanFest.

• 157: caution in reading these results. Still, you could predict pol orientation from brain differences.)

• Amodio 2007: looked to see if ACC activity is correlated to political ideology in "go/no go" task, specific brain wave identified that varied by pol. orientiation.

• Politics Makes Me Sweat

• EDA studies -- electrodermal activity -- skin conductivity, especially as it varies with sweat. Simple way of measuring SNS activity. Study from Hibbing in 2008: EDA activity correlated to policy positions. "People more physiologically responsive to threat stimuli were more likely to support policies aimed as reducing or addressing threats to the social status quo" 161. SNS also active when we are thinking hard about something. Largely unconscious (study).

• Also "disgust" reactions: greater for conservatives, but only around sex-issues, not taxes. Note sig: not a general skin response to policies you favor, only a cluster. (We will be covering this in Haidt soon.)

• EDA disgust studies line up with fartspray studies. Morality and smell are connected.
• Hibbing EDA study 163: disaggregate data and its the sex-issues driving the SNS response.
• EDA studies have shown increase activity around inter-racial interactions. Note: resisting preferential race policy needn't be racist.

Practical issue: studies showing unconscious response to group affiliation.

In Your Face Politics

• Studies assessing our ability to determine political orientation from faces (not including hair or dress!). Proxies for this judgement could include "emotional expressivity" (168), which Liberals score higher on.

Study involving the facial muscle corrugator supercilii" (the eybrow furrowing muscle). Conservative males were distinctive for lack of emotional expressivity.

Libertarianism as a moral and political theory

• Notes drawn from Sandel, Libertarianism:

• (US conservative) Libertarianism: fundamental concern with human freedom understood as avoidance of coercion; minimal state; no morals legislation; no redistribution of income or wealth. Strong concern with equality of liberty and avoidance of oppression, understood as forced labor.

• Basic intuition: taxation is a form of forced labor. Only legitimate for a narrow range of goals that we mutually benefit from, such as defense.

• Facts about concentration of wealth: 1% have 1/3 of wealth, more than bottom 90%. :*objections to redistribution: utilitarian and rights-based. Could there be forms of forced labor that come from inequality?

• Libertarianism in Six Minutes (notes)

• Historical look: 17th century resistance to oppressive conditions. “Rent seekers”. Payne. Similar to socialism and capitalism, a view about what is fair.

• US libertarianism closer to free market capitalism vs. European, which is more socialist. Assumption of natural harmony among productive people with liberty of contract. Laws limited to protection and protection of natural rights. (Non-aggressive principle). No regulation of market. Social spending. Taxes are presumed to be coercive and confiscatory. "Night watchman" state. (Not so close to anarchy, except consistent with strong sense of public order.)

• Problems:

• No libertarian candidates on the national stage in two party state.
• No successful libertarian states. No one's tried.
• Monopolies, poverty. Bleeding out in the street.
• Non-aggression principle unlikely in free market. Market can be quite aggressive. Putting people out of their homes. Eviction.
• Favoring economic freedom assumes it correlates with happiness. (Mention Easterlin and Happiness studies)
• Environmental regulation seems necessary.
• Ethics not realized in the market perfectly. Lack of information transparency.

• Some further reflections.

• Note that libertarianism can admit variations. Depending upon how concrete your conception of liberty and freedom is, you might decide that promoting liberty requires helping people acquire skills and competencies for life and taking care of the disabled. This isn't pure "US" libertarianism anymore (it mixes thinking from the capabilities approach), but someone could claim to love liberty concretely, but making sure people have the conditions for "actual" freedom. Maybe now you can see why liberal libertarians can be socialists. You can see government as an ally in promoting personal freedom, beyond protecting you from rights violations.

• Libertarians can argue that social needs should be met through voluntary donations of time and money. What if that doesn't happen? Bleeding out in front of the hospital. Can you still defend the theory?