FEB 21

10: FEB 21

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

Libertarianism as a moral and political theory

• Libertarianism in Six Minutes (notes)

• Historical look: Libertarianism comes out of radical emancipatory politics.

• 17th century resistance to oppressive conditions. “Rent seekers”. Payne. "Those who pay taxes & those who live on taxes."
• Similar to socialism and capitalism, a view about what is fair.
• "Libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists,[6] especially social anarchists,[7] but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists." (from wiki).

• US libertarianism closer to free market capitalism vs. European meaning is more socialist. (Note: Political ideas can take multiple forms in relation to conservative/liberal.)

• Assumption of natural harmony among productive people with liberty of contract. Laws limited to protection and protection of natural rights. Anything more violates the "Non-aggressive principle". No regulation of market. Low social spending - people are responsible for themselves and their families. Taxes are presumed to be coercive and confiscatory.
• Conservative libertarian theorist, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia: "Night watchman" state. (Not so close to anarchy, except consistent with strong sense of public order.)

• Problems identified in Thought Monkey Youtube:

• No libertarian candidates on the national stage in two party state.
• No successful libertarian states. No one's tried.
• Monopolies, poverty. (We have extraordinarily high inequality right now.)
• Doesn’t solve conflicts bt “Rentier” and propertyless. (Consider current inflationary rental markets.)
• No guarantee that you won’t “bleed out in the street” for lack of healthcare.
• Non-aggression principle unlikely in free market. Markets can be quite aggressive. Putting people out of their homes. Eviction.
• Assumes increase in wealth produces increase in happiness (Easterlin paradox - comes up in Happiness class)
• Environmental concerns require collective action, libertarians have idealistic response: people will buy from sustainable companies with coercion.

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

• Basic intuition for conservative libertarianism: Taxation (beyond minimal state functions) is a form of forced labor. Only legitimate for a narrow range of goals that we mutually benefit from, such as defense.

• (US Liberal) Libertarianism: Also focused on freedom, especially regarding respect for identity differences and private behaviors (favors decriminalization/legalization of drugs), but retains some of the original left-wing concerns of socialism. ::*Liberal Libertarianism has a more material interpretation of rights.

• Liberty includes "bodily autonomy" - control of reproductive choices, choices about whom to be intimate with
• Are you really free if you are living on the street?
• Are you really free if you are discriminated against?
• Are you really free if you work full time and can't afford to take care of basic needs?

• To be fair, conservative libertarians have responses to these challenges: Charity, persuasion, voluntary methods.

• Basic intuition for liberal libertarianism: Government isn't the only source of coercion. Abstract negative liberty (freedom from coercion) doesn't full describe liberty. Positive liberty requires protection for specific behaviors and choices.

Small Group Discussion

• In your small group discussion, explore the difference between negative liberty (freedom from government coercion) and positive liberty (guarantees of basic liberties protecting bodily autonomy and privacy). Can you see both natural affinities between conservative and liberal libertarians and some theoretical tensions?

• Consider the following list of potential liberty violations. Use the list diagnositically to see how strong your libertarian intuitions are and where they tend to take you?

• Examples of liberty concerns:

• A law allowing discrimination against women for hiring to jobs deemed too hard for women.
• Pumping a person’s stomach for drugs as part of a criminal investigation.
• Forced sterilization, forced reproduction (compelling a woman to carry a baby to term).
• A law prohibiting vasectomies, or requiring men to reverse them.
• A law allowing anyone doubting a student athlete’s eligibility for a team sport to demand “genital inspection”
• A law prohibiting parents from receiving gender affirming care from a physician.
• A law requiring you to register your name with the state before viewing pornography.
• A law prohibiting tattoos.
• Allowing people to consume non-life threatening recreational drugs.
• Allowing people to consume hard or dangerous drugs. (Drugs that carry a risk of overdose.)
• A law requiring end of life medical care against a person’s wishes.
• A law requiring blood donations.
• A law prohibiting home schooling.

Hibbing, Ch 6, Different Slates

• Introductory stuff

• Story of Phineas Gage -- 1848 -- early example of biology and personality change.
• Oliver Sachs work.
• 149: lobotomies.
• 149: Lots of brain diffs are correlated to non-pathological conditions as well. (mention reading and face recognition)
• 150: Some Parkinson's drugs can trigger behavioral changes like addictions and gambling.
• Could some brain diffs correlate with political orientation? 150

• I Feel it in my Gut

• Psychophysiology - the idea that we experience the world partly through our physiology. -- emotions as "action dispositions" -- we also trigger each other
• 151: physiology of anger (it’s getting you ready to fight or flee), stress (digress on cortisol), polygraph - example of measuring autonomic functions. Mention "negative partisanship" here. “Emotional contagion” in kids (also adults).
• 151: how emotional states are instantiated in neural and physiological activity.
• CNS - central nervous system (head and spine) ANS - Autonomic Nervous system. Within ANS - SNS (sympathetic) "fight or flight" and PNS (parasympathetic) "rest and digest" activation reduces heart rate, sends blood to the gut.
• 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 (two studies)

• Kanai and Rees MRI study -- looking at ACC (anterior cingulate cortex) and amygdala of test subject in an MRI. ACC activated by tasks involving error detection and conflict resolution -- results on 156: found correlation between liberalism and size of ACC. Bigger. However, as for the 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) . (Mention history of mask wearing and conservatism.)
• Note these correlations increase by degree of partisanship.

• Note connection to BeanFest.

• 157: caution in reading these results. Still, you can predict political orientation from brain differences.

• Amodio 2007: Specific brain wave amplitude diff that varied by pol. orientation. Basically, liberals have strong ACC activity spikes in response to error detection in the go/no go task. 155.

• Back to Kain and Rees research: bigger amygdalas of conservatives help with (and are likely an effect of) heightened sensitivity to face recognition and threat detection. (Fits with the attentional studies of Chap 5). (Try to find some empathy for conservatives who don't like masks!)

• Politics Makes Me Sweat

• EDA studies -- electrodermal activity -- skin conductivity, especially as it varies with sweat. Simple way of measuring SNS activity. SNS activity also triggers focused attention. Largely unconscious. Within SNS, eccrine glands are particularly responsive to internal psychological states. Concentrated in the palms of our hands.
• SNS not only about “fight or flight” but also activated when we need to pay attention or think hard.

• Study from Hibbing in 2008 (161): EDA activity correlated to threatening images and conservative policy positions on "socially protective policies" (those involving a threat to individual or group). "People more physiologically responsive to threat stimuli (images) were more likely to support policies aimed at reducing or addressing threats to the social status quo" 161. The more conservative, the more sweat (and vice versa).

• 2nd Hibbing lab study: Known that conservatives have stronger triggers for disgust/impurity. Sexual issues in politics, for example, but also incest taboo and bad food. 162: more on disgust -- nature's way of helping us avoid bad things (but not perfect).
• EDA disgust studies line up with fart spray 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, could be based on strong value on equal treatment. But it could be racist. Very hard to tell the diff in surveys since open racism isn't cool.
• Practical issue: studies showing unconscious response to group affiliation. SNS activates in presence of politically relevant out-groups. It could be that conservative vs. liberal racists are having different physiological reactions to out groups.

• French study on response to out-groups. 165 Verbal reports non-racist, but EDA showed activation for non-white image. (Our bodies can betray us.) (Unconscious racism? At least unconscious activation of potential threat.)

• Emory study 165 - application bias study. Test subjects with higher SNS activation show greater preference for white applicants.

• 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 in "Berkeley Expressivity Questionaire". Older and more recent studies suggest we can sort faces by political orientation better than chance.

• Your face is communicating, pretty much all the time..... "the visual Twitter accounts of our nervous system"167 Not just communicating emotion, but group membership.

• Looking for physiological markers of facial signaling or pol. orientation. Drawing on Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (validated instrument correlating expressivity and liberalism). (Note that this fact pattern would explain ability to recognize group affiliation.)

• Hibbing study involving the facial muscle corrugator supercilii" (the eybrow furrowing muscle). Test subjects surveyed on political orientation and then shown pos/neg stimuli while corrugato supercilii is measured. Females of all pol. orientations more expressive than males. Liberal males about as expressive as females. (Apologies to macho liberal guys!) Conservative males were distinctive for lack of emotional expressivity. (Clint Eastwood v Alan Alda.)

Small Group Discussion on Physio-politics / Neuropolitics

• Practical Problem: How should physio-politics affect our conversation practices in moral and political discussion and experience? What are the lessons? What values should we adopt?

• If "physio-politics" is real, then we're all having somewhat different physiological reactions to news, issues, and each other.
• If the "social epistemology" hypothesis from Haidt is true, then we are "smarter together" and we need to make use of our differences.

Practical advice for better political and moral discussion in light of physio-politics

• We'll be thinking about the practical advice that follows from our research on political difference more later in the term. Here we just pause to make a few inferences from Hibbing et al's "physio-politics"

• Model exploratory thought. (How do you do that, specifically?)
• Avoid escalation of physiological responses. (How do you do that, specifically?)
• Acknowledge insight across the spectrum.
• Cultivate diverse relationships if possible.
• Avoid perjorative lables.
• Views can chage even if orientations don't.
• Accept difference that won't change, focus on pragmatics and cooperation on issues.
• Humor, if possible. Self-effacing first.
• Acknowledge physio-politics in the discussion.
• Don't "sugar coat" differences. (Be true to yourself.)