The tyranny of the harm principle

So I and possibly half a dozen other people voted against the ban on airbrushing, which was not surprising given the one-sided nature of the debate, and the near-universal, it seems, misunderstanding of JS Mill's harm principle. With hindsight I should have tried to speak myself.

The harm principle is a prohibition on banning things that don't cause any harm to others. It is not a sufficient justification for banning anything. Some bans are worse than the harms they would prevent. And many bans are wrong because they are ineffective at preventing the harms they are intended to prevent.

The problem is that it can be difficult to be seen to agree completely that a cultural meme like body fascism is a big problem causing considerable harm to many people, while at the same time rejecting a particular social engineering solution to it. Speaker after speaker spoke of the harm done by unrealistic expectations of plastic beauty, as if this were the point of dispute.

Sure, there are those - the libertarians - who would interpret harm in the narrowest possible way - the initiation of force - in order to delegitimise almost every law. At the other extreme communists might argue that competition causes harm - which it does to those who lose - and reject economic liberalism. Both may claim, wrongly, to be good Millians.

The error both are making is in looking for a rules-based formula for when something ought to be banned or not, and then arguing over the interpretation of the rules. And if you misunderstand the harm principle as saying what must be banned, rather than what must not be banned, it is understandable that you might want to adopt a narrow concept of harm, to minimise the assault on liberty.

I suggest that the harm principle should be seen in the context of Mill's utilitarianism. Specifically, that goods or ills have to be weighed up against each other. Some precious liberty against some moderate harm? It's a judgement call, and the answer is often a boring compromise: 70mph; no parking between 9am and 6pm; hotels must have fire alarms...

And the most useful liberties - such as the freedom to compete in business - are thus justified in spite of the legions of bankrupted suicidal failures.

So the communist has a broad concept of harm and prohibits a great deal. The libertarian has a narrow concept of harm and prohibits little. I agree with the broad concept of harm, but I would still prohibit only a little, understanding that the harm principle does not demand a prohibition.

So back to the airbrush ban. I suggest that the correct and healthy attitude to have towards advertising, celebrity culture and so on is a skeptical one. What you are seeing is not real. The danger is that an airbrush ban might make you think it is real, compounding the negative impact of the image. I don't see a prohibition intended to increase the confidence you might have in the fidelity of body fascistic images in the media as worth any loss of liberty.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to the men's policy paper. I continually find my self-esteem undermined by the portrayal in the media of men who are richer and more powerful than I am. I worry about all the boys facing these impossible comparisons. Something must be done.

Libertarian tropes #1: self-ownership

This is going to be a thorough demolition of libertarianism in a handful of blog posts. Today self-ownership. What does it mean?

Devil's Kitchen, in a comment here, explains it to us.

a fundamental—actually, the fundamental—principle of libertarianism is that you own your body (and your life): it is your property (to claim otherwise is to claim that someone else has a higher claim on your life).

Any property which you have legitimately come by is as much yours as your body is—because it is by your body’s efforts (and your mind’s talents) that you have earned said property.

The idea of property, then, is being used to justify liberty. Nobody should interfere what is owned by another, and you own your body, therefore you are free.

It is a bit churlish to disagree because it is a good conclusion, as far as it goes. Although property - even the libertarian's absolutist view of property seems rather weaker than necessary. Self-something-much-stronger-than-ownership, would be closer to the mark. You can after all be sued for your property in settlement of a debt. The suggestion that "property which you have legitimately come by is as much yours as your body" therefore raises the spectre of slavery (for debtors) contrary to the first half of the argument.

More to the point, why argue that liberty is a kind of property at all? Why not argue, say, that property is a kind of liberty? Which it is: the liberty to stop somebody else using some stuff that is considered yours. So it is a liberty and a restraint on liberty at the same time.

Well to be fair, the appeal of the libertarian argument is precisely that property is a kind of liberty. If you are against slavery, you should be in favour of this notion of property of ours that is also against slavery. Other concepts of human rights aren't as much against slavery as ours is, so there. Ultimately we see this is circular thinking. But if you don't notice the circularity, everything seems very well established.

It is much better to argue for property and liberty on their merits, which are manifold. Why does it matter whether one is notionally based on the other? If A is good and we extend an analogy from A to get B, does this mean B is good? No.

The trouble is, that if you argue for liberty and property on their merits, then similar merits also support human rights and democracy, and other good liberal principles, which libertarians would like their concept of property to trump every time. The reason they bang on so much about something so obvious and uncontroversial as opposition to slavery (self-ownership) is that their particular formulation is opposed to a broader sense of human rights and democracy. It is tragically mistaken of course - democracy and broad human rights make slavery less not more likely.

And isn't there also something a little odd about deducing your beliefs about diverse questions of policy from a handful of very particular principles such as opposition to slavery? Would you deduce your position on free trade from your position on embryo research?

Time for an illustration from the comment thread I linked to earlier.

I said

DK, if your relationship to your body is merely ownership, and nothing stronger than that, does that mean if you owe me money, and have no other assets, I can sue you for your body. To feed my dogs or something.

DK replied

Well, in theory, yes;

(splutter) YES??!?!?! That's got tea all over my keyboard.

or, indeed, I could rent you my labour until the debt is repaid.

Well I'm glad its not the only alternative.

But, if there is a hierarchy in the principles, that of life is sacrosanct—thus, you may claim my labour to repay the debt, but you may not kill me.

IF??? So you're not sure whether I may kill you in redemption of a debt?

There is a philosophical principle at work here - a mistaken on in my view - called foundationalism. The idea is that knowledge is something that is deduced from obvious axioms. By this standard is it seen as principled rather than brutishly stubborn to stick to the conclusions you draw from your axioms, no matter how absurd or evil they seem. If anybody disagrees with those conclusions, then they are pro-slavery evil communists blah blah blah. More on this from James Graham.

It is better, I suggest, to reassess those axioms and that reasoning. Self-ownership is a poor relation of liberty.

Apologies are due to the other kinds of libertarians out there to whom this might not all apply: anarchists, geo-mutualists, etc. If there is a less ambiguous term available for the kind of libertarian I am talking about I would be happy to use it. "Right-wing libertarian" perhaps?

Further tropes are planned for non-initiation of force, and for the homestead principle. And I am open to requests.

The make-believe world of consultation

Last weekend I was invited, along with 70 odd other random members of the public, to a consultation event with the local PCT over the priorities for future healthcare in Sheffield. As usual I could not refuse an opportunity to put the world to rights. A free lunch and £50 "expenses" was only icing on the cake.

But what did the PCT get for its, er, your money?

After the introductory speeches and getting-to-know-you gubbins, session 1 was on the subject of improving the patient experience.

On my table, the three main issues raised were i) the difficulty of making appointments ii) access to the latest high-tech medicine and iii) cleanliness. Our discussion had to be distilled into a top three, then a top one bullet point, which would be fed to the factilitators to be further distilled, along with summaries from other tables, and then voted on with radio keypad things.

Our demand, to be able to make appointments at all/reasonably soon/without having to argue with receptionists even when the doctor has told us we will need to make an appointment for such and such a symptom - was thus "distilled" into a demand for Saturday surgeries - that none of us had asked for - but was clearly already on the PCT agenda.

Session 2 was about how to measure patient satisfaction. What sort of surveys should the PCT be sending out to everyone, or should they be listening to complaints instead? Or perhaps clinical follow-up is better. Again our main points - that not everything needs to be measured, and that clinical outcomes are more important than more subjective measures - did not get past distillation. Of course PCT officials know how to interpret a survey whereby a patient reports 'very satisified/satisfied/neither satisfied nor dissatisfied/...' on each aspect of a service. It is something they can do. They don't know how to judge clinical outcomes. They might know how to measure less, but what would that do to the feeling of being in charge of a process you don't understand?

Session 3, after lunch, was probably the worst of the lot with various unrelated issues lumped together under the heading of patient safety! Should we address patient safety with more staff training? (So they don't make mistakes.) Or should we beef up building security? Or put better labels on drugs? Most bizarrely, IT systems were listed as an issue here - because of a potential threat to the safety of patient data - but the IT issue mutated into a rival positive claim for safety dollars.

Positive suggestions from the group: help for people who can't remember whether they've taken their pills or not, and measures to keep infectious swine flu sufferers out of waiting rooms, didn't make it through distillation. Instead we had a pointless debate over whether staff training was more important than properly maintaining the lifts.

The last session was on the criteria for deciding spending priorities. Not, please, anything specific, like mental health, or hip replacements, but general criteria. So we had the usual suggestion that smokers and drug users should be penalised, and that sort of thing. I suggested that clinical effectiveness should be the main criterion, thus cutting funding for chaplains, homoeopathy, ritual circumcisions, etc. I could have but didn't include PCT bureaucracy this time. And I suggested that we probably have too much campaigning for healthy living - that people who haven't got the message by now, probably won't.

This was the most useless distillation of all - it resulted in the following six options, which we then had to vote on:

1. Quality of Life

2. Education/prevention

3. Based on need

4. Improving efficiency

5. The cost of long term care

6. Value for money

What do these mean? Even the facilitator introducing the vote didn't understand quite what a vote for each would mean, although he graciously explained that every £1 spent on education would save £10 later. And so education won 45% of the subsequent vote. Apocryphal as it is, the £1/£10 figure may be right, although it is clearly an average and not a marginal cost - which means that any cuts or increases in education at the edges would have far far less impact.

But frankly every option but education/prevention was so abstract that we had could have no idea quite what would be cut and what would be funded if we supported it. Given one option that seems good, and 5 that don't mean anything concrete, it is not surprising that it scores highly.

The voting on the outcomes of session 2 was also pretty shocking. The idea of measuring less hadn't made it through distillation, and the prime importance of clinical outcomes wasn't offered as a clear option, and instead we had a choice of seven ways of measuring soft outcomes. The faciliator gave a patronising little speech about how you might think this was obvious - if you are treated and get better that is a good outcome - but now you realise there is a lot more to it than that. Next time I will interrupt and demand a vote on hard v soft outcomes.

Not that I'm saying soft outcomes don't matter - they just shouldn't be used to justify much expense or paperwork.

So the session is wound up with speeches telling us how useful this has been. We even voted on whether it was it a good idea to hold this consultation (97% yes) and would you come again (100% yes). We were told by one PCT official that the next time he was in a meeting arguing some corner or other he could say that the people of Sheffield were in agreement with him. Just look at the figures. This is what the PCT gets for your money. Ammunition.

Buses v Dogma

We know that state provision of services is generally inefficient and unresponsive to customers' needs compared to the private sector. So if a service can reasonably be provided by the private sector, then it should be. This is why buses were deregulated in the 1980s and it was a disaster. Unlike, say, water or rail, there was no regulation of fares and these went through the roof, and are still rising year on year above inflation. Instead of profitable routes cross-subsidising unprofitable routes, extra public money had to be found to subsidise these routes. A very few routes enjoy competition, high frequencies and occasional discount fares. But the majority of profitable routes are not worth fighting over, and the customer is treated as a captive cash cow.

So why this discrepancy between theory and practise? Free markets are competitive, but attempts to introduce them so often seem to bring uncompetitive rip-off practises instead. We (rightly) aren't willing to stand the withdrawal of the only mobility option from millions of vulnerable people, so we try markets plus subsidies, which inevitably corrupts the markets. And for this, the publicly owned asset - the right to run buses on profitable routes - was given away for nothing.

Today government wants more people to take the bus instead of driving, and PTEs up and down the country will spend money on better bus stops and better bus lanes, and more subsidies. And up and down the country bus companies say "thanks very much, and by the way we're putting up the fares again, and cutting services", and there isn't a sausage that can be done about this but to offer even more subsidies.

Yes, my local service, the 86 is facing the axe. The government closed our post office earlier this year, many pensioners expected to walk miles uphill to another, or to catch the, er, bus. An angry local has postered the bus stop calling this cut barbaric, quite rightly. So we have a campaign of leaflets, petitions, complaints to the council, the PTE, the MP. The PTE write back offering an hourly daytime-only service, which is pretty miserable. When you can never entirely trust a bus to turn up at all, an hourly service is hardly worth using - with a 15 minute service such unreliability is not such a big deal.

The government has flirted a little with largely unusable powers for PTEs to take on regulation of fares and timetables, so there is some recognition of the problem, but clearly no determination to bring it to a resolution. It's another Labour failure and we know the Tories - the original culprits - will do nothing. And both will probably blame the Lib Dem council. This is a vital issue for millions of people, and for the environment, that we should be taking a strong lead on.

And all parties should learn the lesson that involving the private sector, and giving away public assets to the private sector, is not the same thing as introducting competition and markets; it doesn't bring any of the benefits, and if we're not careful we end up paying way over the odds for inferior services.

AV would be brilliant

Not so brilliant for the Lib Dems, but good for democracy. Not as good as STV of course, but let's face it, what is?

First Past the Post is the cornerstone of the brokenness of our politics. It has the power to subvert all your campaigning efforts for a good cause, making that cause weaker instead of stronger.

Support the environment? Vote Green where the Lib Dems could win and you do more harm than good.

Support Euro-nihilism? Vote UKIP where the Conservatives could win and you have the opposite effect.

Support socialism? Vote Socialist Labour, where Labour could win, and, well maybe the pattern breaks down there.

Want to stand as an independent? The problem is that whichever party it is you consider least bad, you will take more votes from them than from the others. So unless you can be very confident of winning, you will only make things worse.

AV fixes all this. It lets you stand and campaign for what you believe in without damaging the causes you support. It lets you vote for what you believe in without having to second guess what the result will be and support the lesser evil.

Sure, it's not proportional. That stinks. But proportionality is not the only important feature of an electoral system. If it were we would support list systems rather than STV. And this is the worst time of all to hold a referendum on a proportional system, when the BNP have just won seats.

If Brown and his few friends plump for AV, we will probably get it. We could even have it for the next general election - it is the only reform that won't require years of boundary commission work. And it may be a stepping stone to STV or AV+, but not towards party lists.

If they plump for PR, the whole thing will be quietly dropped, "after considered reflection", the next time Griffin gets some publicity. Or, even worse, we have a referendum on it after weeks of the Tory press giving publicity to the BNP at every opportunity in order to get a "no" vote. It would then be off the agenda for decades. This is the single worst time for a referendum on PR. Give it a few years when a couple more nazi MEPs won't have brought the world to an end.

See also: Anthony Hook, Mark Reckons, Himmelgarten Cafe, Jock Coats, Sunder Katwala, and Duncan Borrowman (already linked)