Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by James C. Scott, Yale University Press, 336 pages, $26
For more than 40 years, James Scott has written about those who resist being incorporated into political-economic systems. Initially focused on Southeast Asia, he later expanded his field of vision to large-scale bureaucratic institutions around the world. He has consistently emphasized the ways that such structures try to transform the populations they govern into well-behaved, easily supervisable units—laborers, taxpayers, soldiers—but also the ways those populations work around and subvert the aimed-for transformations.
In a provocative new book, Against the Grain, Scott now challenges us to rethink legends about the state and its origins. Populations ruled by states tell stories about their emergence into civilization, stories that cast the non-state peoples around them as primitives and barbarians. These stories are familiar from the era of European imperialism and from early modern philosophers like Locke and Rousseau, but they're common to state-governed populations around the world and throughout history. Scott calls them into deep doubt.
His early work focused on agriculture, including colonial regimes' forcible transformation of peasant communities into plantation workers. Where Marxists looked at the absence of revolution and charged farmworkers with false consciousness, Scott argued that they understood their interests fully well and fought back as best they could, using "the weapons of the weak" and "the arts of resistance," from foot dragging to sabotage to mockery.
In Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott shifted his attention to political institutions. States seek to make their populations "legible," he argued: countable, mappable, surveyable, and thus easily taxable and conscriptable. People seek to protect themselves from all that, sometimes by escaping into anarchic regions where the projection of state power is impractical.
In his emphasis on institutional surveillance, Scott overlapped with the French social theorist Michel Foucault. But in his insistence that states' efforts could never entirely succeed because too much social knowledge is local and tacit, he shared more with F.A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. And with his attention to the resistance of governed populations, he stood out from any of those. As he puts it in his newest book, "the first and most prudent assumption about historical actors is that, given their resources and what they know, they are acting reasonably to secure their immediate interests." While Foucault sometimes seems to see no human agency anywhere, Scott sees it everywhere.
Against the Grain applies all these ideas to the study of the origins of the state in the Mesopotamian "cradle of civilization." This is a shorter, more accessible text, not based on Scott's own original research. He is not an archeologist or ancient historian; indeed, he was inspired to write the book when he learned that he subscribed to a narrative about the era that specialists regarded as out of date. In that narrative, crop and animal domestication allowed our ancestors to abandon their difficult search for food, to settle down in one place, and to benefit from the productive bounty of fixed-field agriculture. As settlements grew into cities, political rule emerged and further facilitated farming, especially through public irrigation projects.
It turns out that settlement, statehood, and farming were separated by thousands of years in ancient Mesopotamia. Scott sets out to interpret this evidence, in ways that radically undermine traditional stories about the state's function.
He argues that even partly settled populations that were able to cultivate crops still generally avoided the fixed-field, full-time farming of a small number of grains and animals, preferring the range of foods and the very different rhythm of labor they had access to in the flood plains of the region. Those who did settle and farm paid a price not only in terms of calories, food variety, and labor, but also in terms of disease. Scott takes morbid delight in detailing the germs and epidemics bred in the stew of animal and crop domestication combined with densely settled towns.
But some populations resorted to farming and stuck with it, partly in response to a changing climate. They thereby made themselves vulnerable to a new social development, thousands of years later. Their way of life could be "'captured'—'parasitized' might not be too strong a word"—and "made into a powerful node of political power."
The early state rested on and encouraged grain farming, because it required "wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized." And this state power allowed the conquest of more populations, forcibly turned into more grain farmers.
In The Art of Not Being Governed Scott noted the vulnerabilities of different kinds of food production to surveying and taxation. Those seeking to escape state authority in Southeast Asia, for example, favored root and tuber crops: easily hidden, able to be left in the ground until it was safe to get to them, and requiring neither visible fields nor conspicuous labor. This book combines that insight with Seeing Like a State's account of social "legibility." Grain must be harvested at a fixed time, is storable after harvest, and is easy to divide and measure, so it is easily taxed. As peasants understand, "the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. So when a government surveyor arrives with a plane table, or census takers come with their clipboards and questionnaires to register households…trouble in the form of conscription, forced labor, land seizures, head taxes, or new taxes on crop land cannot be far behind."
Scott is no libertarian, as he has sometimes been at pains to emphasize. But libertarians should find a great deal to appreciate here, including Scott's understanding of non-state "barbarians" as engaged in long-distance trade, but also, more fundamentally, his sense of where freedom lies.
Consider his account of the periodic downfall of states. "The well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center," he writes. People often deserted early states if they could, "to evade taxes, conscription, epidemics, and oppression. From one perspective they may be seen to have regressed.…But from another, and I believe broader perspective, they may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation." This despite the disadvantages—including other sorts of violence—of the lives into which they dispersed. He proposes that we think in terms of "cycles of aggregation and dispersal" of population, rather than civilization and collapse.
Some critics will charge this book with romanticizing non-state "barbarian" peoples. Scott attempts to disarm this in advance, not least by emphasizing that states bought slaves from such groups, which seized their rivals. Here, as in The Art of Not Being Governed, I'm struck by crucial differences from the "noble savage" narrative popularly associated with Rousseau. That myth always placed barbarian life firmly before the state. Scott is interested in the co-evolution of state and non-state life—in the ways that non-state spaces are shaped in response to and as refuges from neighboring states.
Anarchic life isn't primitive, primordial, natural; it is adaptive and deliberate. Non-state peoples throughout history have both raided and traded with settled agricultural states. With tongue in cheek, Scott discusses the long "golden age of the barbarians" during which they benefitted from the existence of neighboring states without being subjected to them.
It is hard to be certain what we learn from this about the present. Urban populations had worse health than rural populations for a long time; through the 19th century, cities couldn't reproduce themselves but had to draw populations in from the countryside. But that changed. It is increasingly accepted that the turn to agriculture was a net loss in health for millennia, but the gains from agricultural productivity eventually outstripped the losses to disease and diminished food variety. Scott has shown us that states, like the settlements and farming that give rise to them, were worse for us, for longer, than we are prone to think, but the same pattern might hold. How much this history can tell us about the state under liberal democratic capitalist modernity isn't so clear.
But Scott's willingness to throw cold water on state-centric intellectual habits is always admirable. "People gave themselves chiefs to defend their freedom, and not to enslave them," Rousseau said; "if we have a prince, it is to save ourselves from having a master." The American Declaration of Independence similarly held that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." Scott suggests that these are little more than soothing fables—the just-so stories that those already living under chiefs, princes, and governments like to tell themselves.
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]]>Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, Alfred A. Knopf, 640 pages, $17.95
It's boom time for left-leaning histories of capitalism. After a long lull for the genre, 2014 saw the English translation of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a surprise bestseller, and the publication of the Harvard historian Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton. While the latter hasn't matched Piketty's commercial success, Empire made a splash in academia and is widely recognized as a significant work, winning the Bancroft Prize, being named finalist for both the Pulitzer and Cundill prizes, and getting tabbed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of that year.
While Piketty is ultimately an economist trying to wring mathematically comparable data from widely disparate historical sources, Beckert offers a vividly reshaped sense of the past. F.A. Hayek once wrote, with particular emphasis on histories of capitalism, that "political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected," and that the "historian is in this respect at least one step nearer to direct power over public opinion than is the theorist." Now out in paperback, Empire of Cotton is likely to influence public opinion, both directly and indirectly, for years to come.
The core of the book covers the crucial decades from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the 19th century. It offers a powerful retelling of the economic history of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern capitalism, one centered around cotton and the textile production that it made possible. Beckert argues that cotton textiles were the key manufactured product in an integrated capitalist economy, one that reshaped not only northern England but much of the world.
This alone is fascinating, and may change a great deal of how we think about the economic past. In the American historical memory of the late 18th century, the triangle trade of "molasses to rum to slaves" figures so large that the musical 1776 features a song by that title, meant to show New England's complicity with slavery but leaving the cotton and textiles trades out of the picture. For the 19th century, heavy industry tends to loom larger in depictions of industrialization than does the production of clothing. Beckert's corrective shows very persuasively not only that "the growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of the British economy," but that it became "the driving commodity behind the Industrial Revolution…there was of course inventiveness and innovation in other industries, but cotton was the only one with a global scope."
That reshaping was no mere result of supply and demand, Beckert argues. It depended on, and created the incentive for, an extraordinary level of brutal intervention, from the imperialist conquest of India's hinterland to the expansionist wars of the American frontier to, especially, the slave economy of the American South. The huge growth in productive potential created an industry that was desperately hungry for inputs, including factory labor, enslaved labor, and expropriated land, as well as for consumer markets, gained if necessary by conquest and suppression of the conquered countries' domestic industries and economies. Empire of Cotton is not just another study of human history retold through one or another mundane product; it is a conscious attempt to explode what Beckert considers the ideological myths of capitalism.
A range of ideological interests have been well-served by obscuring how central the cotton-producing slave economy of the South was to the emergence of the modern economic world. Even before the war, southern apologists for slavery liked to paint the plantation as a kind of extended household, hierarchical but in a more familial way than northern factories. They denied that the cotton economy was ruled by economic logic in the way that northern and British industrial capitalism was, and they tried to align themselves with an imagined older aristocratic order that capitalism was displacing. The propagandists for the Lost Cause continued to spread this myth for more than a century after the Civil War.
But both the liberal and the Marxist historical imagination were also very comfortable with a sharp dichotomy between slavery and industrial capitalism. Marxist historiography understood capitalism to be a discrete historical era with a mode of production distinctive to it, one that overcame and destroyed the feudal mode; this was the conflict that Marx himself thought was playing out in the Civil War. Northern American liberals and believers in wage-based free labor were happy to deny any real contamination of liberal capitalism by the vanquished slave system.
Some of the latter impulse persisted with the 20th-century notion that slavery's inefficiency meant that it would have been doomed with or without war and abolition (a claim Adam Smith anticipated and denied in The Wealth of Nations). Beckert counters this by documenting how important the capital stock value of slave owners' claims on four million persons was to a vast financial economy. These slaves were not only workers whose productivity might be compared (unfavorably) with that of wage-laborers in the north. They were collateral, a store of wealth, as well as a source of income on a tremendous scale. The slaves' capital value was greater than the value of the north's whole industrial capital stock.
And despite the romantic stories that plantation owners' grandchildren told themselves, the plantation owners were savvy financial operators who used this store of value to its utmost. The debt-fueled expansion of cotton cultivation depended on mortgaged human bodies, and its beneficiaries understood that very well. Whatever plausible futures might have existed at the time of the American Revolution, by the 1850s and '60s slaves made up far too much of American wealth for there to have been a glide path to freedom.
But Beckert's history is global in scope, and the American South is not its only concern. He aims to show the entanglement of industrial capitalism not just with the power of slave owners and slave traders, but with state power at home in the industrializing countries, and with imperial power abroad.
Here I want to pause to discourage classical liberal and libertarian readers from dismissing the claim by semantics, denying that conquest, protectionism, slavery, subsidies, or forced integration into supply chains could ever count as "capitalism." Such forms of coercion may not fit a libertarian vision of what capitalism could and should be; but that is quite distinct from whether they were central features of the historical, actually existing phenomenon that was eventually called by that name.
I do not think Beckert is always careful about the relationship between the thing that he names "capitalism" and other phenomena, such as industrialization; in his brief treatment of the late 20th century, he identifies Indian socialist and Chinese and Soviet communist industrialization as mere variants of "capitalism." But in the European and especially British core of his narrative in the 18th and 19th centuries, the distinction does not much matter. That is where and when the Industrial Revolution happened; that's the economic development whose benefits liberals are happy to claim for capitalism. Beckert's history of the political economy of that world can't be held at arm's length simply by denying that the ugly parts of it count; his argument is precisely that they are part of the integrated whole. Perhaps further research will weaken that claim, but it's a claim to be empirically grappled with, not semantically waved away.
Moreover, this book is a critical history of capitalism that understands the power of markets—not only the explosion of productive power, but the information-transmitting function of prices, the drive toward quality control and standardization, the smoothing effects of futures markets that become possible once commodities of predictable and interchangeable quality become available, and more. While Beckert draws a great deal of attention to the planned and coercive structure of manufacturing and factory production, when it comes to commercial trade he is clear that "the global system, in effect, was built not from a central, imperial directive, but rather by myriad actors with local and diverse connections often solving very local problems." His discussion of cotton prices in the vital Liverpool exchange, and how they affected and were affected by ripples from around the world, shows his appreciation for the system's complexity. To defend capitalism against Beckert's critiques will require much more than restatements of commonplace definitions about markets, however true they may be.
The beginning and end of Beckert's book are much less persuasive than the story told at the core of the narrative. The concluding section offers banal and somewhat confused reflections on postwar globalized textile markets and the shift in both cotton-growing and textile production to the global south, along with some pious hopes that we might gain "the wisdom, the power, and the strength to create a society that serves the needs of all the world's people—an empire of cotton that is not only productive, but also just." These final thoughts might be freely ignored as lying outside the historian's expertise.
The beginning poses greater difficulties, as Beckert thinks it crucial to his story. It builds up a distinct vision of the pre-industrial European economic system, under the label of "war capitalism." This is in part what Marxists call the "primitive accumulation" at the foundation of capitalism: the openly violent expropriation of land, capital, and human labor in early modernity, in which early capitalists simply stole the wealth of the world rather than, as later, squeezing profit through the exploitation of wage-paid workers. Beckert never uses the "primitive" phrase, not even to say why not. This might be simply because he wished to escape the long shadow of Marxist history in telling a critical history of capitalism, or to avoid being drawn into interminable intra-Marxist disputes about the meaning and importance of the accumulation. But I think it is more than that.
Beckert means for "war capitalism" to encompass mercantilist imperialism in the 16th through 18th centuries as well as the slave systems of the 19th. He wants "war capitalism" to be the name of a kind of continuity between systems that long preceded industrialization or liberal economics and systems that survived well into the era that we normally consider capitalism's heyday. It was not, in other words, some discontinuous early stage.
But the case for this continuity is, at best, underdeveloped. His history of a multipolar early modern world with distinct regional cotton economies, one in which Europe barely figured, is fascinating. But connections from that era to later rest on hints: "some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers [in the 1500s] failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten." Such passive-voice pronouncements lack the extensive documentation that we find in the book's strongest sections; indeed, they lack any documentation of any actor who might remember a lesson from 1560 Germany in 1780 Britain. The attempt to draw preindustrial contact between Europeans and Turkey, India, West Africa, and Egypt tightly into the history of the industrial era falls flat.
Even the book's valuable central chapters are hardly flawless. All too often, Beckert's focus on cotton leads him to ignore other industrial sectors that might compete with it for land, labor, capital, and political power. The last, at least, is given some attention in the context of the run-up to the Civil War. And he is clear enough that subsistence agriculture and traditional cotton farming and weaving competed, often successfully, with the cotton monoculture and with industrial spinning and weaving. But once industrialism takes hold, other sectors become invisible.
This might not be a serious problem in telling the history of the first, cotton- and textile-led, industrial revolution. But it gets progressively worse as time goes on, and is a source of serious confusion by the time Beckert discusses rich countries' 20th-century shift out of textile manufacturing. The idea that land, labor, and capital could increasingly find higher returns elsewhere in growing economies simply plays no part in his explanation for this transformation, even though by now it is a familiar thought that developing countries tend to grow out of an early emphasis on textiles as they move up the value chain.
This neglect of other sectors also means that protectionist tariffs and other trade barriers occupy a very strange place in the book, which presents them as apparently costless boons to each country's cotton manufacturing. This was, of course, how the cotton industrialists themselves described the protections they sought, and Beckert has immersed himself in their documentary history. But that is no excuse for treating their word as the last word, for not looking at where the costs fell. In his eagerness to explode myths and show that capitalism emerged out of state planning, Beckert almost certainly overemphasizes the importance of protectionist industrial policy. His own account of the jaw-dropping advances in productivity brought on by early technological improvements—a 370-fold increase in spinning productivity in 30 years in Britain, for example—is easily enough to explain revolutionary economic transformation.
While he exhaustively documents interventions by European states to subsidize and protect their domestic cotton industries in order to show that capitalism was centrally dependent on the emerging modern state, Beckert does very little to establish the actual importance of such interventions compared with the scale of the underlying economic and technological changes. Indeed, he writes that of all the "market making" activities that states engaged in, the "most important of all" were "the road building, canal digging, and railway construction that characterized assertive states in the first half of the nineteenth century." But these "most important" interventions occupy two sentences, a tiny fraction of the space given to protectionism and various forms of industrial policy. And the costs of protectionist policies to other sectors of each country's economy—including its industrial economy—go unmentioned, as if cotton were not only the most important part of capitalism but the whole thing.
But at its best this is an extraordinary book that sets a new standard for history across long periods of time and worldwide space. If Hayek is right about the influence of the historians, Beckert's text may well re-set the terms for how the history of capitalism is understood for a generation to come. Defenders of modern market economies have been issued a powerful challenge, and one worth meeting.
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]]>The column doesn't seem to have made a great impression. The published letters to the editor have been mostly negative, and they aren't even of the "I disagree, but you really made me think" variety that a column about ethics ought to attract. Cohen just seems to rub these readers the wrong way.
His responses to questions about family life and social life are usually inoffensive, though they're not very different from the answers Ann Landers might give. Not, mind you, that there's anything wrong with coming up with the same answers as Landers. It's just that when The New York Times Magazine created an ethics feature rather than a generic advice column, the editors presumably wanted more sophistication and rigor than most advice columnists provide. Unless they just wanted their readers to feel more highbrow than they would reading Dear Abby.
But there is something chronically strange about Cohen's items on the ethics of the workplace and commercial life. He has told readers that giving to or raising funds for charity isn't worthwhile, because the more charitable activity there is, the more easily the state abandons public projects. He has told a supervisor that it's unethical to fire or report a temp worker whose shoddy performance makes everyone look bad.
He has even gone out of his way to take swipes at the country's political economy when by his own admission it is irrelevant to the advice he gives, as in this reply to a question about not reporting income to the Internal Revenue Service: "When New York City offers corporations multi-million-dollar tax breaks to do nothing and the Federal tax code is the least progressive it has been in decades (making it ever more possible for a housekeeper and Bill Gates to pay the same rate), it would be churlish to chide someone so hard-working and modestly paid. However, while working off the books might be justified ethically, working on the books is actually a better policy financially, thanks to the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit."
Sometimes the advice he offers is merely wrong, as when he defends providing a deceptively favorable recommendation for a fired apartment building superintendent: "Were he applying to pilot a plane while performing heart surgery for the United Nations, you'd have to be more scrupulous, but in this job, as in most, the consequences of your hyperbole are easily borne. If Freddy is inept, the worst that happens is someone's shower breaks–a minor problem easily remedied by whoever replaces Freddy when he gets fired." Actually, sometimes when a shower is broken the bather suffers burns. (This was the situation in the trial for which New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani recently served as jury foreman.) The consequences of a heating system breaking down in the middle of winter, or of the power going out in the heat of the summer, can also be much more serious than Cohen allows.
But as I said, in that case Cohen was merely wrong. More often, what he has to say defeats the purpose of having an ethics column at all.
A code of ethics does not propose a foundation for morality; nor does it offer a comprehensive theory of social justice. Ethics is the moral philosophy of practice, of decisions faced in quotidian and–especially–professional life.
So it made sense to include an ethics column in "The Way We Live Now." One of the things people do in their day-to-day lives is make morally important decisions, and often it's hard to identify the right choice. It's difficult even in those professions, such as law, that have specialized and explicitly codified rules of ethics. And for people who aren't in such professions, guidance is often hard to come by.
The word "unethical" refers to only some of the acts that are "immoral" or "wrong," and ethics is not always the most important part of morality. Indeed, in situations of deep injustice, ethics can become morally insignificant. To debate the fine points of legal ethics in a Soviet show trial, or whether employees can swipe office supplies from SS headquarters, is to engage in triviality–and, arguably, incoherent triviality, since the limited domain of ethics is justified in terms of larger moral purposes.
Cohen alluded to this when he told a convict in Florida who insisted on his own innocence that "if you are caught in a system that is not just slightly dishonest but egregiously unjust, your obligation changes. You need not have testified truthfully at the Salem witch trials or before the Spanish Inquisition, for example; those tribunals were not pursuing truth. To lie in such situations is to commit, at worst, a small wrong to counter a great wrong."
The Salem case is not apposite, since there it was the lies of the accusing witnesses that were the problem: A witness did not usually have to fear that telling the truth would aid the wrong side. But he's right about the Inquisition, and the point applies to the legal systems of modern totalitarian and terror-wielding states as well. The radically unjust is more important than the merely unethical.
This does not make ethics irrelevant or useless. For one thing, some agreement about ethical behavior is usually necessary to let us peaceably disagree about larger questions of morality and justice. Consider a legal proceeding of great moral importance–say, a constitutional case raising significant questions of justice. The two parties will no doubt disagree on those questions. But they have agreed to a process of adjudication that has ethical and procedural rules. They do not, or should not, consider themselves at liberty to (for example) commit perjury or bribe judges just because ethics seems somehow smaller and less important than justice. If they did, and if everyone in a similar situation did likewise, there couldn't be any legal resolution of such moral disputes. The existence of such a system has importance in its own right, even though it may sometimes reach what we consider the wrong outcome.
On a more mundane level, we typically need to know that the people with whom we do business will behave ethically even though we do not know their deeper views about morality. Sacrificing ethics to morality and justice entirely would mean that we would have to know someone's entire set of moral commitments before deciding whether he was likely to cheat us. A common sense of ethics is part of what allows us to share a society with those with whom we don't share a complete moral vision.
Of course, in situations of really radical injustice, all bets are off and ethics does become irrelevant. At that point an ethicist is a silly thing to be. What's really strange about Cohen is that–at least as far as commerce is concerned–he seems to think that we're in a situation of radical injustice, yet he still holds himself out as providing help for people who face difficult ethical decisions.
For example: In response to the question about how to handle a poorly performing temp, Cohen declared, "if anyone's acting unethically here, it's your boss; it is ignoble to force people into soul-deadening, pointless, poorly paid jobs….Organizing work into tedious, repetitive tasks, while profitable for the few, makes life miserable for the many; some political economists have called it a crime against humanity." In other words, as long as we have a division of labor, ethics is inapplicable to decisions we face about who does what job. In the face of "a crime against humanity," how could there be anything wrong with submitting fraudulent resumés, evaluations, or timecards?
So Cohen frequently fails to provide the advice that his correspondents are looking for. He shrugs his shoulders and says that, until we live in a more egalitarian society, our individual decisions just aren't that morally significant. In his August 1 column, he wrote that "the goals determined by individual moral choice can sometimes be achieved only by acting in concert with others; the dictates of ethics are sometimes best expressed as politics." This is a recurring theme: His correspondents are damned if they do and damned if they don't, so the only serious ethical demand on them is to get out there and vote for politicians who will raise taxes and increase social spending.
That isn't expressing ethics through politics. That's saying that ethics is irrelevant and only politics matters.
In a truly remarkable broadside against charity, Cohen wrote, "When a thief, having stolen your wallet, hands you back carfare, it's tough to mutter much of a thank-you. Similarly, nice as it is that Bill Gates gives money to libraries, a decent country would tax Microsoft at a rate that lets cities buy their own books."
Lots of people–even readers of The New York Times Magazine–could believe that corporate income taxes should be raised without thinking that those two cases are remotely similar. The mugger at the time of mugging is your enemy; he's placed himself outside most ethical constraints on how he can be treated. To place Microsoft in the same category is radically wrongheaded. If it weren't, reading and writing about workplace ethics would be a waste of time.
If Cohen were right about the radical injustice of American society, there would be no point in being an ethicist–and no point in publishing a column about the moral decisions of "day-to-day living." By his own lights, he should quit bothering with the irrelevant decisions individuals make and start writing op-eds about collective political decisions.
But many of his readers think that they live in a reasonably just, reasonably decent society. Even though they disagree among themselves about what justice ultimately demands, they don't think that they face such radical injustice as to make ethics irrelevant.
If they're right, then the moral decisions they make in their working lives do matter, and they are to be commended for taking those decisions seriously. The New York Times Magazine has promised to offer them some helpful insight in making those choices.
If it really wants to do that, it should hire an ethicist who thinks we live in a society where ethics have a role to play.
Jacob T. Levy (jt-levy@uchicago.edu) is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
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