A.S.E.A.N The Long Game: ASEAN, China’s Charm Offensive and the South China Sea Dispute Hisyam Takiudin Brown University Author David Golden Orwa Mohammad Sean Sullivan Editors Spring 2018 Identifying why multilateralism is weakening in Southeast Asia in the wake of the South China Sea Maritime Dispute. The South China Sea (SCS) is a 3.5 million-square-meters body of water within the rims of Southeast Asia. It contains islands, reefs, and low-tide elevations that are mainly grouped into the Spratly and the Paracel Islands. The SCS is of strategic importance as it is a trade route carrying $3.4 trillion worth of goods every year – an equivalent to 21% of global maritime trade – and boasts strategic sea lanes whose blockade could disrupt entire economies (O’Rourke, 2015). Recent studies estimated the SCS to contain 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (Fisher, 2016). It also accounts for over 10% of the global fishing trade. While its value is undisputed, determining who owns what in the SCS gets very complicated. There are overlapping claims between China, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian states which has led to military standoffs, international court arbitrations, as well as disruptions to revenue-generating activities in the waters (O’Rourke, 2015). To understand the root causes and find potential solutions to the SCS dispute, this paper argues a focus on two key players: China and the Southeast Asian states. Beyond China’s lofty ambitions to become the de facto power center in the region, there needs to be a consideration of China’s modus operandi. In July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) rejected China’s ‘nine-dash claim’ in the SCS. China responded by discrediting the ruling and continuing to assert its claims by adding sediments to low-tide elevations to build artificial islands, chasing out non-Chinese vessels, and engaging in military exercises (Fisher, 2016). This is a precedent-setting behavior, and the potential for additional players to follow the same law-defying strategy should sound an alarm for increased checks on Chinese influence in the region. More explicitly, other SCS claimants should create a more united front with the collective goal of upholding international law. Secondly, Southeast Asian states technically operate within a regional bloc called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN is primarily an economic bloc, but that is precisely why it is crucial to solving the dispute. A study of the economic relationship between the claimants in the dispute reveals a two-faced nature. There is a clear pick-and-choose strategy by more developed claimants (e.g. China, Japan) towards Southeast Asian states which are largely emerging markets. Capital flows can thus be an influencing instrument by more developed claimants to steer negotiations in their favor. The Southeast Asian claimants then could benefit from a more integrated economic strategy via ASEAN to ensure a level playing field. The question that remains then, why has the status quo persisted? Why is it that seemingly logical strategies such as the above not followed? Perhaps more constructively, what incremental steps are realistic and feasible for stakeholders to take in line with these big picture strategies? The rest of this paper will expand on the contexts of these observations, use data to justify the need to change the status quo, and outline potential strategies that can maximize the long-term outcome for stakeholders. The core argument will be this: a combination of ASEAN’s flawed structure, inefficient nature of international law, and the economic-incentive dependent nature of ASEAN claimants all lead to a political scenario where free-riding on other parties’ confrontations with China while reaping China’s economic incentives will bring about the best individual outcome. This is what is called a collective action problem, a Marcus Olsen (1965) notion that stresses the inability for individual actors to achieve a goal in providing a public good – in this case, a buffer against Chinese bullying (Oatley, 2016). There is then a recognition of a larger Chinese strategy to dismantle ASEAN and to shift Member States into China’s sphere of influence. Solving the SCS conflict is then not quite the priority ASEAN Member States should be giving. ASEAN as an organization is an important medium to balance against China’s creeping influence, and its Member States will need to see past the short-term benefits of China’s handouts and consider the long-term consequences of the current free-riding strategies. This paper will reveal how following a long-term strategy focusing on building ASEAN’s internal capabilities can be instrumental to maximize individual interests while ensuring China’s actions are checked. I. ASEAN and the SCS Dispute ASEAN is a regional bloc consisting of 10 Southeast Asian states and aims to promote economic, political, and security cooperation amongst its Member States. Its biggest achievement is first and foremost its ability to rally an economically, politically, and culturally diverse group of nations. By promoting regional dialogue, ASEAN, in turn, promotes regional peace and stability, a no easy feat for a group of post-colonial states (except for Thailand). However, it is important to note that in practice, ASEAN focuses on economic cooperation more so than others. This is because ASEAN decision-making is on the basis of consensus, meaning the controversial nature of political and security cooperation is by default constrained. While ASEAN managed to eliminate significant amounts of trade tariffs, no military agreements have been signed beyond joint exercises or on matters of illegal migration between its Member States. In context of the SCS dispute, the most important fact is how ASEAN as an organization has never been mandated to resolve the dispute; this responsibility falls under the claimants themselves “through legal arbitrations or political negotiations, bilaterally or multilaterally,” (Storey, 2017). In a rare exception, however, ASEAN and China did sign the non-legally binding Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) in 2002, which entails the promotion of “confidence-building measures”, engagement in “practical maritime cooperation”, and “the discussion and conclusion of a formal and binding Code of Conduct (COC).” The COC is intended to be a formal, legally binding document that would facilitate maritime engagements in the SCS. The signing of the DOC is a remarkable achievement because it also acts as a litmus test for ASEAN’s ability to act as a political unit. The decision to partake in the COC negotiations is in line with China’s current charm offensive strategy in the region –explained further in Section IV, but negotiations have been significantly delayed, so much so that even the basic provisions of non-violence and non-disruptive clauses in the DOC have not been implemented (ASEAN, 2012). The DOC also created the opposite of its intended effect: creating distrust and discouraging further cooperation. This is because the DOC lacks an enforcement mechanism, leading to rampant and unchecked interpretations, where claimants have accused each other of violating the document (Storey, 2017). China sees the Philippines’s decision to take up the case to the PCA violates Article 4 which stipulates conflict resolution “through friendly consultations and negotiations by the sovereign states directly concerned”, while other claimants see China’s sand dredging to build islands fit for military use do not exemplify an act of “self-restraint” (Storey, 2017). It was not until September 2013 – a full eleven years since the DOC was signed – when the first China-ASEAN Senior Officials’ Meeting on the COC was held (Storey, 2017). Talks remained slow until after the 2016 PCA ruling, in a move believed to be China’s way of deflecting criticisms it received from rejecting the Tribunal’s result. More strikingly, the draft contents of the COC, as of November 2017, is devoid of the term “legally binding”, raising doubts whether countries should be invested in the COC at all (Storey, 2017). Even if the final version of the COC does come with a binding clause, a few things are still worth noting. First, the insistence to take time to negotiate could mean the region remains at risk of violent escalations – there is an immediacy to have the COC passed soon considering the ongoing military installations by China and Vietnam. Secondly, the COC will not mean an end to the dispute since it will not include mechanisms aimed to do so –it will not be equipped to resolve existing conflicts. Most importantly, the DOC experience and China’s precedent-setting decision to ignore the PCA ruling calls for caution whether signatories would even honor it. Internally, cracks in ASEAN solidarity towards the SCS dispute are becoming clearer. In 2011 the ASEAN Summit failed to issue a joint statement on how to approach the dispute and in 2017, it failed to mention the dispute altogether (Hutt, 2016). President Duterte of the Philippines made the surprise move to set aside the PCA ruling – in which the Philippines was overwhelmingly favored – and strengthened ties with China through trade deals worth $13.5 billion (BBC, 2016). Malaysia held joint military exercises and signed big budget infrastructure projects with China (Permal, 2017). Vietnam, on the other hand, is in a ‘cold war’-like state with China, with both parties actively participating in reclamation efforts in the region. Vietnam has also increased strategic cooperation with the United States and Japan who both condemn China’s activities in the region, further increasing tensions (Ives, 2017). The final twist: apart from Singapore, other Southeast Asian states remained quiet on the matter altogether. The key observation here is how increasingly divergent individual ASEAN states are towards the SCS dispute. As per above, the spectrum ranges from outright confrontation to normalization and all the way to blatant disregard of the issue altogether. All things considered, it seems a balancing-against-China strategy is no longer a possibility – a clear indication of the collective action problem discussed earlier. Why then, should any stakeholder in the dispute care about ASEAN? Would it not be more productive to shift the conversation towards the maximizing the interest of an individual claimant? The following sections will peel away these questions to arrive at a two-fold argument: 1) disregarding the importance of a regional Southeast Asian strategy undermines the relevance of ASEAN as a regional bloc, and 2) ASEAN is an instrumental medium in limiting China’s questionable and precedent-setting actions in the region. II. Why Bilateralism (and Limited Multilateralism) Is Preferred To understand why and how ASEAN’s relevance could be compromised, we need to look at both internal and external factors guiding ASEAN’s current principles, and then tie these to how they play to China’s best interests instead of the ASEAN region. Internally, the baffling puzzle is why has Southeast Asian multilateralism in solving the SCS dispute been limited to the flawed DOC and COC. A good way to study this is to deep dive into why bilateralism is heavily preferred. On a surface level, the obvious explanation is because not all ASEAN states are involved in the conflict. Only five Southeast States are technically involved in the dispute – the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. Others are either more involved in territorial disputes with each other or are geographically irrelevant to the dispute. As Section IV will argue, it may well be the case that there are strong incentives for individual states to maintain an amicable relationship with China. Still, what this argument does not explain, is why individual ASEAN states refuse to forgo these incentives for the greater good of the regional bloc, especially in light of China’s devious actions in the SCS. One explanation could be how bilateralism has worked to solve past disputes in the region. When oil and gas reserves were found in the 70s, the Philippines moved in first in 1976, establishing a commercial field in the Reed Bank near its Palawan Island. This received strong opposition from China, Taiwan, and the newly reunited Vietnam, who all claimed the Reed Bank to be within their territories (Muscolino, 2013). Bilateralism took center stage, with each claimant stressing the importance of a peaceful resolution. Negotiations with each claimant avoided escalations for the rest of the decade (Muscolino, 2013). More recently in 2008, Malaysia and Brunei agreed to resolve their dispute by demarcating the land and maritime boundaries, while also collaborating in the exploration of hydrocarbon resources. These became resounding evidence amongst ASEAN leaders that bilateralism could prevent escalations while still maximizing the interests of all parties involved (Roach, 2014). The preference for bilateralism is perhaps better explained by the oddest feature for a regional bloc: a non-interference policy where member states could not interfere with the affairs of another. In context of the SCS dispute, it effectively means that there are no binding mechanisms for the more confrontational Vietnam to coerce the more pro-China Malaysia into shifting its policy stances, for example. The non-interference policy is a result of a shared trauma from colonialism (9 out of 10 ASEAN states are former colonies), with the idea of self-governance becoming a centerpiece when state leaders signed the ASEAN Bangkok Declaration in 1967 (Molthof, 2012). It means there is a heavy reliance on political goodwill for any regional level cooperation to work. It is not surprising then, that the multilateral-centric strategies outlined earlier in this paper remain unrealistic under current conditions. A united front between ASEAN states on the SCS dispute will first require internal disagreements to be solved, which will require a regional supranational body that could fairly rule over the overlapping claims. Amassing enough political goodwill to do this considering the already contentious internal maritime politics is nearly impossible. The practical short-term solution then, as per evidenced by current strategies, is to rely on micro-level, government-to-government negotiations. III. The Role of International Law The second dimension that explains the Southeast Asian states’ current strategy is the complications brought about by international law. The earlier discussion on the DOC and COC was only one part of the legal dimension in the SCS dispute. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), intended to mitigate disputes over maritime claims such as in the SCS, exacerbated the situation in the region. This is a two-part issue: 1) vagueness in UNCLOS language allows for different interpretations, and 2) opt-outs from arbitration processes defeat the mechanisms that could have overcome the vagueness. For there to be a universally recognized dispute settlement mechanism, there also needs to be a universally recognized set of definitions for what is being disputed. UNCLOS stipulates legal definitions for the rights of states over waters beyond their shore, most controversially the provision of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). It legally gives states the right to exploit resources 200 nautical miles off their shores (The Economist, 2012). There was no practical need for this beyond an incentive for states to sign onto UNCLOS, and that short-term incentive backfires. There is a two-part implication: 1) the importance of owning physical features in the SCS becomes of a strategic importance since EEZs establish a sizable control over a revenue-generating region, and 2) signatories regardless of size and military strength are now able to join in the conversation, which is good, but convolutes the already messy conflict by adding more players to the mix. Note also that Southeast Asian states are primarily emerging markets, and the opportunity to reap benefits from riches of SCS can be vital growth drivers. There is also a more patriotic perspective to this; states could also be pursuing purely nationalistic campaigns to enforce historical claims. The Singapore-Malaysia dispute over Pedra Branca and China-Japan dispute over the Senkaku Islands are prime examples. Irrespective of what motivates the states to enter the dispute, the demarcation process would be delicate as the SCS outlines the shores of at least nine states. Even so, a fair and peaceful delimitation of boundaries would be possible if the arbitration process is thorough all the way to the enforcement stage. This is unfortunately not the case with UNCLOS. Article 298 in UNCLOS gives signatories the option to be excluded from arbitrations of “sea boundary delimitations”, “military activities”, and those within the allowable functions of the Security Council (United Nations, 1982). This clause is effectively an ‘opt-out’ from the very legal proceedings UNCLOS was built for. It allows UNCLOS signatories to circumvent the accountabilities that come with violating the document. China, as expected, opted out of Article 298, giving it the legal backing to not have to act on the 2016 PCA ruling. Consider Section II’s discussion on ASEAN states’ preference towards bilateralism. Government-to-government negotiations can be effective if and only if both sides agree to make themselves accountable to the outcome of those negotiations. Once this accountability becomes optional, it begs the question whether it is still wise for ASEAN to rely heavily on bilateral talks. Another way to put it, what are the consequences of ignoring the apparent systemic flaws in the way ASEAN operates? IV. China’s Golden Paradise A good way to understand the full consequences of the systemic flaw referred in the previous section is to study how that flaw has been used against ASEAN. Again, China is a key player here. With ASEAN preferring bilateralism over multilateralism, there is an opportunity for China to tailor its strategy to individual ASEAN countries. Furthermore, with non-interference policy in full effect, any bilateral relationship an ASEAN country builds with China cannot be questioned even if that relationship adversely affects ASEAN as an organization. While this may not necessarily be the case, it will be argued that China’ current strategy suggests it may be pursuing a Southeast Asian political realignment to Beijing. On ASEAN’s part, with its Member States focusing on building a closer relationship with China, there exist trade-offs in capacity building an already fragile ASEAN, whose social, economic, and political linkages remain underdeveloped. In context of the SCS dispute, this could mean a chipping away of the very foundation of ASEAN as a potential balancing power. A grimmer picture could be that, in the long term, the very existence of ASEAN may be endangered, should its weak organizing power falter under a Chinese realignment. To capture how this can play out, one needs to first understand how China specifically has come to hold the bargaining chip it currently has. The obvious is China’s economic strength; with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $11.2 trillion (2016), China dwarfs even the that of a combined ASEAN at $2.6 trillion (2016) (Asian Development Bank, 2017). As primarily developing markets, Southeast Asian countries are right to leverage on larger economies such as China or the United States, where injections of investments can help speed up their development process. Nonetheless, China’s economic strength does not explain why Southeast Asian governments are leaning heavily towards China more so than the region’s traditional hegemon, the United States (US). A traumatic colonial experience for most ASEAN Member States towards the West, in general, could partially explain this (Wilson, 2017). More recently in 1997, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s unpopular austerity policies in Thailand and Indonesia lead to disastrous results. This tattooed skepticism among Southeast Asians on long-term relationship building with the West, chiefly the US which holds the IMF’s largest voting power. An even more recent development is unrelated to ASEAN public sentiment at all; the United States is seeing a wave of populism that is pressuring both ends of the political spectrum to be more inward-looking. The election of conservative populist Donald Trump as president further solidified that the US may no longer focus on Southeast Asia. The final confirmation was in Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), history’s largest regional trade accord (Granville, 2016). The vacuum created by a receding US adds to the already favorable conditions for Chinese dominance in Southeast Asia. All that is left is an execution plan that avoids painting China as another superpower taking advantage of weaker nations. In a 2004 speech, China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made a compelling remark, stating that China’s rise “will not come at the cost of any other country, will not stand in the way of any other country, nor pose a threat to any other country” (Kurlantzick, 2007). This was in the wake of China’s Peaceful Rise strategy, when it realized that its aggressive, military-centric and coercive tactics backfired badly (Kurlantzick, 2007). This is what is called a charm offensive. The strategy draws from a concept political scientist Joseph Nye calls ‘soft power’, “the ability to shape the preferences of others...It is leading by example and attracting others to do what you want,” (Kurlantzick, 2007). To exercise its soft power, China needs to first change the rhetoric surrounding China’s position in Southeast Asia. The turning point was the 1997 Asian financial crisis, where China made the smart move to lessen the devaluations of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupiah by refusing to devalue its own currency. The decision was publicized as an Asian solidarity measure, which reframed the conversation on China in the region. China’s charm offensive was then timely; it quickly moved to establish relationships with each Southeast Asian country through cooperation in cultural, educational, and business spheres. China invested heavily to improve its diplomatic outreach, visiting its Southeast Asian neighbors twice as many times as its US counterparts (Kurlantzick, 2007). China has also integrated Southeast Asia into its larger plan to create “the world’s largest platform for economic cooperation”, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI is an ambitious modern iteration of the Silk Road trade route, and it aims to promote physical, economic, and social connectivity (Jinchen, 2017). China’s $113 billion pledge in infrastructure building along the proposed trade route is a catnip for ASEAN states who, according to The McKinsey Global Institute, need over $2 trillion investments between 2016-2030 “in road, rail, port, airport, power, water, and telecommunications infrastructure across ASEAN to maintain economic growth,” (McKinsey Global Institute, 2016). This is the key dilemma created by China’s charm offensive: there is a clear need to address its questionable actions in the SCS dispute, yet the allure of Chinese economic incentives is at the same time too good to ignore. While China continued to deny any geopolitical agenda behind BRI, two observations seem to imply otherwise: 1) the timing of BRI coincides with China’s increasingly aggressive position in the SCS, and 2) selective awarding of valuable economic packages to pro-China ASEAN Member States, most evidently the Philippines $13.5 billion pledge upon President Duterte's U-turn from the PCA ruling. The latter observation is further supported by a tripling of Chinese investment value in Malaysia between 2014 and 2015, curiously coinciding with Malaysia’s refusal to answer calls by the Philippines’ then-President Benigno Aquino III to stand up to China. This sparks speculation that the fluctuating Chinese investment value in Vietnam is a means of Chinese retaliation towards Vietnamese reclamation efforts in the SCS (Cheok, 2017). Therefore, ASEAN states tiptoe the line between maintaining their sovereignty in the SCS and appearing favorable to China to exploit its generous handouts. On the one hand, maintaining control over geographical features in the Spratlys and Paracels could come with additional revenues through EEZs, but cost-benefit analyses could prove economic ties with China to potentially bring in much higher revenues. At the core of this argument is the fact that the commodities at stake in the SCS are primarily in oil and fishing stocks. Consider the difficulty of extracting oil, its price volatilities, and its grim long-term prospects: in 2016 BP estimated that the global oil reserves will last only for the next 53.3 years. A recent study by the OceanAsia project estimates depletions of up to 59% in key fishery stocks by 2045, putting the value of controlling fishery areas at stake (Sumalia and Cheung, 2015). Even in the potential unsustainability of income streams in the SCS, nationalism is such a big part of ASEAN – evidenced by an earlier discussed non-interference policy– that it begs a closer study on whether economic incentives are all it takes for China to assume a winning position in the SCS dispute. Earlier, it was argued that ASEAN’s non-interference policy creates a collective action problem where strong forms of multilateralism are hindered. This argument is also applicable to ASEAN’s inability to achieve the level of market integration required for a seamless intra-ASEAN trade and capital flows. ASEAN’s single market initiative, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), has made way for tariff reductions of 99.2% in ASEAN-6 (Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) and 97.52% of tariff have been reduced to 0-5% in others (ASEAN Economic Community, 2015). Albeit slow, this is a remarkable achievement and signals a strong ASEAN solidarity in spite of its shortcomings. However, a closer look reveals a different story: there is almost a four-fold increase in non-tariff barriers and measures (NTB/NTM) from 1,634 measures to 5,975 leading up to AEC’s launch in 2015 (Zulfakar, 2017). Essentially, while ASEAN Member States markets their tariff reductions as proof of their commitment to ASEAN, the apparent shifting of potential loss of income to NTB/NTM suggests a collection of countries focused on individual economic gains more than Southeast Asia’s collective wellbeing. And by virtue of non-interference policy, ASEAN Member States cannot pressure each other to change their policies, at least not within the ASEAN framework. The inference is that yes, China may have struck gold through its charm offensive strategy. V. A Chinese Takeover – Blessing or Curse? As each ASEAN Member States form a closer bilateral relationship with China, it effectively means China will compete with ASEAN to become the common denominator in the Southeast Asian region. Should it succeed, it theoretically would put the entire region under its sphere of influence. The key puzzle this section will answer is whether a pivot to China would be detrimental to the development of ASEAN. Measuring this will first require a modeling of what a Chinese ‘takeover’ of the region would look like. One way to do that is to look at Member States who are now already highly dependent on China; a good example is Cambodia whose Chinese FDI amounts to 61% of its total FDI inflows. The fascinating aspect of the Cambodian example is that its Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has not always been friendly to China, once calling the country “the root of everything that is evil”. Within twelve years, Hun Sen altered the description to “Cambodia’s most trustworthy friend”. China covered Cambodia’s shortages in aid during a 1997 coup. This has led to an over-reliance on Chinese aid, which in turn prevents Cambodia from doing anything that may irk China. One expert describes Cambodia “as an extension of China’s foreign policy,” (Hutt, 2016). This is proven by the country’s constant blocking of official ASEAN statements on the SCS dispute, all while using the term ‘neutrality’ to justify its position. Drawing a parallel to ASEAN, the Cambodia model could very well be China’s vision for the whole Southeast Asian region. Unlike the European Union (EU), ASEAN’s highest decision-making power remains at the state level, hence the logic should follow that individual Member States’ interests precede regional goals. Therefore, consider the endgame following a Chinese takeover as the region’s de facto common denominator. China’s ability and willingness to fill in investment gaps, the considerations towards ASEAN’s inherent flaws, and the realization that resources in the SCS are unsustainable all points to the perspective that China may be an ASEAN alternative Southeast Asia needs. Beyond the push and pull of power play between China and its Western counterparts, what then, is wrong with Southeast Asia embracing China? For one, several red flags exist in the Chinese brand of regionalism. Firstly, China’s ignorance of the PCA ruling – a rejection of its ‘nine-dash’ claim in the SCS – sets a precedent of disrespect towards the international law. Secondly, there are contradictions in China’s narrative to create a harmonious cooperative environment while at the same time aggressively building up military capacity in the SCS, creating an environment of skepticism and distrust. Last and perhaps most dangerously, China’s support of authoritarian regimes such as in Cambodia and Laos does not bode well for human rights improvements. A Chinese sphere of influence appears to promote norms contrasting to that of ASEAN Member States at large. Should the consensus model remain a feature of Chinese-led regionalism – which it realistically will – the aforementioned norms would not promote healthy intergovernmental relationships. To prove this point, it is appropriate to use game theory to compare Southeast Asian cooperation between ASEAN’s framework and a Chinese-led regionalism. This is because Southeast Asian regional cooperation much resembles cartels seeking oligopolistic profits; the consensus model mirrors a similar decision-making process in a cartel where each firm’s decision could not be questioned by another. Collusion returns a higher producer surplus than a market competition would. In Southeast Asia’s case, economic benefits from free trade agreements (FTA) outweigh trade without barriers eliminated. However, cartels are generally unstable due to strong incentives to deviate. Without going too much into the underlying mathematics, the price or quantities set in a cartel, while bringing overall higher profits to the market, do not follow the best response possible for each firm. This is already happening in Southeast Asia: the AEC’s effort to eliminate trade barriers. Section IV outlined that while ASEAN Member States made significant inroads to eliminate tariff barriers, it was found that non-tariff measures and barriers (NTB/NTM) had in fact increased, signaling a mere shift income stream rather than a thorough elimination. This increase in NTB/NTM is a form of deviation, following obvious calculations that Member States stand to enjoy above average benefits through NTB/NTM while still reaping from the advantages of an FTA. Game theory states that for collusion to be sustainable, it requires for there to be: 1) only a few actors in the cartel, 2) a multi-market competition, 3) a transparent market for detection of deviations, and 4) symmetry between the firms (Policonomics). ASEAN Member States violate three of these conditions. With ten players, an often-opaque regulatory framework that makes detection of NTB/NTM difficult, and diverse economic strengths, from a game theory perspective it makes perfect sense that multilateralism is weak within ASEAN. However, at least within the ASEAN framework, there is a conscious effort – a strong political goodwill – to address the issue of NTB/NTM, so much so that the AEC Blueprint 2025, a 10-year action plan for the area, includes a focused and detailed effort to tackle this very issue (ASEAN, 2015). Consider this case in a Chinese-led regionalism, with the norms of disrespect towards international law and untrustworthy narratives coming into play. In a framework that relies so much on political goodwill, an air of distrust not only discourages cooperation to solve the underlying issue, but it further incentivizes deviations in a cartel-like arrangement. There is the true danger of a Chinese realignment in Southeast Asia. While the short-term economic incentives may be attractive and essential to fill in Southeast Asia’s infrastructure gap, there may be significant losses in economic benefits of an integrated Southeast Asian region compared to a bilateral-focused, Chinese-led model. VI. Moving Forward The previous section provides a strong case for there to be check and balances in China’s charm offensive in Southeast Asia. Analyzing the root causes of the SCS dispute’s prolongation revealed China’s apparent strategy to engulf the Southeast Asian sphere of influence into its own. Any strategy moving forward then must go beyond the SCS dispute; it also needs to address China’s long-term strategy in the region. In a way, China’s charm offensive has been a blessing because it also revealed what needs to be done to counter China’s rise. The crux of the strategy should be to look for economic-incentive driven strategies to encourage multilateralism in ASEAN, thus balancing against China. There are three ways to do this: 1) diversifying FDIs, 2) creating an ASEAN investment distribution mechanism, and 3) capitalizing on state strength to engage in less lucrative, intra-ASEAN investments. For starters, there needs to be a paradigm shift from the hunt of immediate gains that appeals to voters. This refers to China’s hefty financial investments, which, as shown, in states like Cambodia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, had apparent geopolitical agenda behind them. Cambodia especially, perhaps because it has no conflicting interests in the SCS as a landlocked country, is now practically a proxy for China in the region. It was the reason behind the failure for ASEAN to issue joint statements in recent years. With the Cambodian case in mind, the logical step would be for individual ASEAN Member States to be careful not to let China be in a dominant position in any form of monetary assistance. The guiding strategy here is then to diversify the pool of incoming capital, be it in terms of FDI, aid, or trade. There are two ways ASEAN Member States can diversity, by increasing their extra-ASEAN and/or intra-ASEAN sources. In the extra-ASEAN strategy, the impending puzzle would be to find other partners as able and as willing as China in handing out economic incentives. The best alternative is perhaps Japan, another Asian economic power which, despite stagnating FDI contribution to ASEAN, remains the Chinese amount in net terms ($17.6 billion compared to China’s $8.2 billion in net inflows at 2015 levels). What needs to change in Japan’s strategy is the distribution of its investments in the region. Japan’s investments are focused on manufacturing, the largest in the region by far, which does imply that it is playing a role in filling in the infrastructure gap required by the industry. However, Japan’s factories are highly concentrated in Thailand and Indonesia, and are highly insignificant in the CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam) countries, with FDI shares in the single digits (ASEAN, 2017). The CLMV countries are key because their low-income status creates an easier path for China to supplant its influence. Apart for Vietnam’s historical adversity towards China, the country holds a giant’s share of FDI inflow into Cambodia and Laos – 22% and 66% respectively – and is currently Myanmar’s largest trade partner at a third of its total (ASEAN, 2017). The key difference between China and Japan is their motivation behind investing heavily in Southeast Asia. While both seek to balance each other out with regards to the SCS dispute, Japan does not have an apparent geopolitical agenda comparable to that of China. At least from an investment perspective, it appears Japanese companies are flocking for its economic incentives, and not for any Japanese-government mandated charm offensive. CLMV states will need to provide better economic incentives to Japan than the ASEAN-6 (Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines). At the moment, this is unrealistic because even with their high growth rates –averaging at 6.1% compared to 4.1% in ASEAN-6 in 2016, GDP per capita in CLMV remains 2.7 times lower than the ASEAN-6. Should ASEAN Member States fail to find a suitable substitute for China’s inflowing capital, an alternative proposal could instead be to create a regional-level capital distributing mechanism. The idea is to have all capital inflows to ASEAN to first go through a central collecting agency, which will then distribute them to areas of the highest need. An advantage of this strategy is in eliminating the ‘carrots and sticks’ strategy China currently employs in the region. China can then no longer reward obedience and punish confrontations. The strategy also encourages a more equitable development within the region, which, as stated previously, remains disparate between CLMV and the ASEAN-6. As compelling as this idea may be, it faces several challenges. First, it will face an uphill battle from ASEAN Member States because a centralized collection agency essentially implies a violation of the non-interference policy. Given ASEAN’s diverse economies with varying returns to investments, a central collecting agency may deter potential investors since they will not be able to control where their investments go. The final caveat is that the political feasibility of this strategy, given China’s charm offensive, nears impossibility. China will likely use its leverage in Cambodia and Laos to veto any binding decisions on the strategy. Taking such roadblocks into consideration, perhaps a modification of this idea can work. Instead of a centralized collection agency that becomes the middleman for foreign investments, ASEAN Member States can opt to create their own version of the ASEAN Infrastructure Fund (AIF), an initiative under the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that gives financial assistance for infrastructure building. AIF on its own is insufficient because it remains capped at $300 million a year, far below the what is needed by the region. Indonesia, for example, needs $358 billion worth of investments in infrastructure spending by 2019 to keep pace with its targets (ASEAN, 2017). More tellingly, AIF funds are tied to projects endorsed by the ADB, in which China holds the largest voting share amongst Asia-Pacific shareholders. The proposed ASEAN Regional Fund (ARF) ought to be within the full jurisdiction of ASEAN, where it can dispense funds without having to answer to China or other superpowers. It will become obvious that ASEAN governments will not be able to gather the funds necessary on their own. One possible model to follow is to engage in a public-private partnership (PPP), only instead of a single company doing a joint venture with a particular ASEAN Member State, the proposed ARF will be responsible to pool money by their relevant sectors. Any infrastructure building projects will then be on a shared value basis. That way, state-owned companies cannot exert any geopolitical agenda behind proposed projects. In 2016, intra-ASEAN investments accounted for a quarter of FDI flows in the region ($24 billion), a 500% increase from 2003 levels where an upward trend has been observed since. What is more compelling is how intra-ASEAN investments in CLMV are also getting the lion’s share of total investments (ASEAN, 2017). These figures show an increasing regionality of ASEAN businesses, and that an ASEAN-led ARF may not be far from reality. In terms of feasibility, it is to be expected that ARF’s implementation will take a long time since there remains the issue that ASEAN Member States possess varying regulatory frameworks. It would require some minimal level of harmonization to avoid issues such as double taxations. As far as short-term strategies go, ASEAN Member States are fairly limited by the constraints echoed throughout this paper. A viable short-term strategy has to navigate through the inability to legally coerce other ASEAN Member States, an international law framework that does not have a real enforcement power, and high reliance on economic incentives. Therefore, it can be argued that a state-level solution remains the most viable option. The explicit suggestion here is for Member States to individually forgo trade deals with China, and signing less lucrative deals with other external partners or other ASEAN Member States. What the strategy aims to do is to capitalize on ASEAN Member States’ incentive-driven nature to promote multilateralism. How is this politically viable on a local level? Intuitively speaking, foregoing valuable financial assistance may paint incompetence to local voters, thus potentially costing elections. ASEAN Member States, however, are ‘strong states’, where “policymakers are highly insulated from [domestic interest-group pressures]” (Oatley, 2016). It suggests that ASEAN governments have significant room to follow policies that the public may not agree with, which includes the proposed strategy above. The core logic of the strategy is the following: increasing intra-ASEAN trade and capital flow to facilitate capacity building in ASEAN. These intra-ASEAN investments will help to create formal and informal linkages that intertwine Member States’ interests beyond their own geographical border. These newfound linkages may pressure Member States to also think about their regional investments on top of China’s investments, especially as China becomes more fearless in exercising its ‘carrots and sticks’. In the long run, this could mean a greater need to align policies, hence promoting more multilateral dialogues. In context of the SCS dispute, this could also encourage the option of joint explorations in the waters, solving the dispute at least between ASEAN Member States. The three strategies outlined above focus heavily on trying to balance against China’s creeping charm offensive, but it requires a closer look to determine whether they would automatically solve the SCS dispute. On the one hand, each of these strategies seeks to cripple China’s ability to use money to pressure its ASEAN dependents to respect its interests. On the other, a decaying Chinese influence is not an easy solve; it merely equates to a leveling of the playing field. Another dimension remains unsolvable: the failure of current legal frameworks to fairly arbitrate the dispute. Unless China submits itself to the binding mechanisms under UNCLOS, or voluntarily respects the original PCA ruling, the SCS will remain a contentious issue. A further argument could be made on the possibility that the SCS is not a fight worth fighting. This is in consideration of an earlier cost-benefit analysis of maintaining EEZs in the SCS. The natural resources, namely oil and fish, are unsustainable and are expected to deplete in the near future. Beyond the pretense of sovereignty, it seems clear cut for ASEAN Member States to abandon an unwinnable battle to focus on more actionable strategies. VII. Conclusion A study of the South China Sea maritime dispute requires focus on two key players: China and ASEAN. A surface level observation sees China engaging in questionable behavior in the SCS through its aggressive militarization, island building, and blocking of fishing activities. As for ASEAN, it is striking why there is not a strong multilateral opposition against China, given the high-stakes nature of the disputed areas. A preliminary analysis of how China and ASEAN have approached this dispute so far reveals an insufficient Code of Conduct, where recent negotiations indicated China’s unwillingness to succumb to rule of law at its own expense. There is also the observation that an increasingly diverging ASEAN Member States position also weakens multilateral approaches to solve the dispute. On reasons why the boundary delimitation process has been slow, the argument is two-fold. First, the preference for bilateral process stems from a historical success of such dialogues in the past. Digging deeper, ASEAN’s own structure appears to be at fault. By having a consensus model, and a non-interference policy towards Member States, ASEAN lacks a punishment or coercion mechanism. It means that any regional-level initiatives will require the political goodwill of all Member States. A second dimension that explains the SCS dispute’s prolongation is in the role of international law. UNCLOS, designed to mitigate disputes such as in the SCS, is found to be inherently flawed in two ways. First, UNCLOS’s legal definitions for what states can claim complicates the SCS dispute; the unnecessary inclusion of EEZs contributed towards increasing competition to take control of features in the SCS. Secondly, the use of opt-out clauses from certain parts of the arbitration process defeats the whole purpose of the arbitration process altogether. Another catalyst for Chinese domination in the region is in a receding US trend, at least in terms of its soft power. China recognizes the weakness of its hard power; hence, it exercises its soft power through a charm offensive strategy. This entails changing China’s rhetoric among ASEAN Member States as well as handing out generous economic incentives. The observation that China channels capital to Member States that protect its interests, and pulls out of those who do not, showcases the country’s ‘carrots and sticks’ gameplay to become the region’s new common denominator. Between the fight for sovereignty and economic incentives, it was shown that fighting for sovereignty in the SCS may not be the best strategy after all. Depleting fisheries and oil reserves does not amount to the same long term economic benefits of a Chinese infrastructure splurge. Also, the increase in non-tariff measures and barriers (NTM/NTB) upon the launch of the AEC in 2015 shows that ASEAN Member States are inherently incentive driven. Therefore, a Chinese-led regionalism is clearly the profit-maximizing outcome. In exploring the downsides of a Chinese-led regionalism, comparing the operation of ASEAN to a cartel, leads to the equilibria where Member States are strongly incentivized to deviate from a cartel-like arrangement. The difference from an ASEAN-led regionalism is in the norms China practices. China’s rejection of the PCA, for example, shows brazen disrespect for international law. Norms practiced by China does not promote healthy intergovernmental relationships moving forward. There is now a recognition that the SCS maritime dispute is only a small part of a larger, more existential threat towards ASEAN. Strategies moving forward should not then be short-sighted to any single aspect such as the SCS dispute alone. The first recommendation would be to diversify the sources of foreign investments in the region. Japan was given a suitable alternative, but a balancing against China can only happen here if Japan invests in the same sectors and locations, which is unfortunately not the case in such a segmented region. The second strategy is to create a capital distribution mechanism to promote equitable development hence reducing the ability of external powers such as China to influence the foreign policies of any Member State. A central collecting agency may prove to be too intrusive, hence a modified version centered on pooling money through public-private partnerships (PPP) may be a good way to do this. The only downside of this strategy is that it requires significant advances in ASEAN’s regional regulatory framework. One potential short-term solution to the existential threat posed by China would be to capitalize on ASEAN Member States’ ability to pursue sometimes unpopular policies in their respective countries to encourage intra-ASEAN investments. The whole point of this strategy is to further intertwine Member States’ interests within the region, but beyond their own national borders. These will create formal and informal linkages which will pressure governments to protect their now far-reaching investments. This is a form of an economic incentive-led way of encouraging multilateralism. All in all, as the strategies proposed show, ASEAN remains an essential medium in managing internal and external threats to Southeast Asian nations. ASEAN’s flaws are being used against it, but it also exposes where it can improve on moving forward. That is good progress. Endnotes 9To meet its energy demands, China imports 54 percent of its oil from the Middle East, 80 percent of which passes through the southern SCS passage. 10 Southeast Asia technically consists of 11 countries, with Timor-Leste remaining as an observer of the bloc 11 Cambodia, widely considered as China’s “most faithful client state”, has been behind the blockade of at least two post-summit statements; their position could be because China remains Cambodia’s largest aid provider, an incentive the low-income state sorely needs to catch-up with other ASEAN Member States. 12 Malaysia’s military exercise is part of a growing bilateral military cooperation between the two countries. It has grown from cooperation in disaster relief towards sea lane protections in Straits of Malacca. China also signed a ~$13.5 billion contract to build a rail link that will cut cargo shipping by 30 hours. 13 Vietnam began dredging its military-controlled Ladd Reef in 2016, and signed a gas-drilling venture with ExxonMobil due to be in full operation by 2023. 14 Singapore is in an ongoing dispute with Malaysia over Pedra Branca and South Ledge; Thailand and Cambodia both dispute overlapping claims over Koh Kut; Myanmar does not have shore in the SCS; and Laos is a landlocked country. 15 “In the mid-1990s, China had tried to use military strength to intimidate other countries in Asia, by aggressive moves like sending ships to unoccupied, disputed reefs in the South China Sea. At the same time, Beijing called on other nations in the region to abandon their alliances, mostly with the United States, arguing that these had been made obsolete by the Cold War. This strategy backfired. Countries across the region condemned Beijing’s aggressive behavior and solidified their military links with the United States, drawing the US armed forces closer into the region, and closer to China—exactly what Beijing did not want.” 16 The FDI is on a net basis, and computed as follows: Net FDI = Equity + Net Inter-company Loans + Reinvested Earnings. The net basis concept implies that the followings should be deducted from the FDI gross flows: (1) reverse investment (made by a foreign affiliate in a host country to its parent company/direct investor; (2) loans given by a foreign affiliate to its parent company; and (3) repayments of intra-company loan (paid by a foreign affiliate to its parent company). As such, FDI net inflows can be negative. 17 Japan’s FDI share in 2016 are as follows: Vietnam, 10%; Myanmar, insignificant (collapse into Others; Lao PDR, 4%; Cambodia, 9%. 18 In 2016, intra-ASEAN investments account for: Cambodia, 28%; Laos, 18%; Myanmar, 58%; Vietnam, 18%. 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A More Perfect Union Inclusive Norms and the Future of Liberal Unity Benjamin Seymour Brown University Author Ginevra Bulgari Vance Kelley Julia Rock Jakob Wells Editors Spring 2018 This essay analyzes the most dire threats to political unity today b y critiquing historical approaches to this subject. Given the sprawling apparatus of the modern state, it’s easy to wonder how such an entity—one that requires the complex and cumbersome coordination of complete strangers every day—exists and persists at all. Indeed, endless tomes of regulations guide this bureaucratic behemoth’s daily affairs; and yet, these volumes seem inadequate to address the philosophical question of what motivates humanity to come together despite differences and form a project directed toward mutual advantage and a common good. An answer to this question would need to identify a more essential aspect of our constitution as persons, a continuity that underlies the diverse interests and identities that coexist in a state. Generations of political theorists have grappled with the problem of national unity and, through their attempts to theorize this fundamental impulse, realized that unity is the sine qua non condition of possibility for the state; therefore, upholding this unity is of vital importance for national stability and longevity. The German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who was an active member of the Nazi party, virulent anti-Semite, and chief architect of the Third Reich’s justificatory underpinnings, was chiefly concerned with national unity. He uses his principle of national unity as homogeneity and exclusion to challenge the inclusive liberal notion of unity through shared values, by arguing that the liberal approach poses an existential threat to the survival of the state. Despite the clarity and thoroughness of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, liberal political thinkers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas remain unconvinced by Schmitt’s account and instead defend the liberal conception of unity, which avoids the drastic conclusions and totalitarian implications of Schmitt’s thought. While Rawls’ responses to Schmitt’s normative arguments prove compelling, Habermas, by recognizing the central importance of identity in Schmitt’s critique, lays the groundwork for a new defense of liberal unity that retains a substantive interest in questions of national identity. To reformulate and reaffirm the liberal notion of unity, this paper will: (I) explore Schmitt’s notion of national unity through enmity as a critique of liberal inclusivity; (II) examine Rawls’ account of overlapping consensus as a foundation for social unity that resists Schmitt’s most problematic commitments; (III) clarify how Habermas’ preoccupation with identity further strengthens the Rawlsian notion of liberal unity against Schmittian ethno-nationalism; and finally (IV) realize Habermas’ conception of inclusive unity by, counter-intuitively, embracing the very fragmentation of social identities that appears to be the greatest threat to national unity today. Rooted in radical exclusion and the constant threat of violence, Schmitt’s conception of the political situates unity in a homogenous populace’s allegiance against a common enemy. As an inheritor of German existentialist thought, Schmitt analyzes political life with a systematic approach that emphasizes an ontological and philosophical hierarchy, wherein certain concepts are metaphysically prior to higher-order notions. The absolute foundation of this hierarchy, from which all political entities ultimately derive, is Schmitt’s conception of the political. Indeed, the first sentence of his treatise, The Concept of the Political, confirms this hierarchical approach: “The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political” (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19). For Schmitt, a concept only derives its meaning by referring to a concrete reality in the world. While the referent of the more intuitive concept of the state is the state’s sprawling apparatus and daily operations, Schmitt believes that his more fundamental notion of the political denotes an equally tangible reality. Schmitt’s famous friend-enemy distinction instantiates the concept of the political within his system. As a theorist whose philosophy is defined by its political principle of radical negation and exclusivity, Schmitt believes that every discourse is defined by an insoluble antithesis or distinction. Like the contrasts between good and evil in ethics, beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and profitable and unprofitable in economics, Schmitt contends that the political is defined by the antithesis between friend and enemy. Such a reductionist analysis establishes the political as independent from moral questions and postulates the friend-enemy distinction as ontologically irreducible: The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27). The dehumanizing and fascistic possibilities of a conception of politics based on a distinction that treats another person as existentially alien marks Schmitt’s philosophy as a clear antipode to liberal notions of equality and intuitive morality. But Schmitt’s existentialist conception of meaning imbues his notion of the political with a dangerous urgency, as the concrete referent of the friend-enemy distinction, and thus the very concept of the political itself, is the constant and real possibility of physical violence with the enemy. By establishing a principle of difference, negation, and enmity as the foundation of his conception of politics, Schmitt makes his principle of unity the ontological epicenter of his philosophical project. Fully aware of the power of the fear and hostility on which his notion of the political is founded, Schmitt contends that only the sheer force of the friend-enemy distinction is sufficient to fuse a collection of individuals into a genuine social unit. Schmitt’s emphasis on collectivity is likewise essential to his understanding of the political. The friend and enemy of Schmitt’s antithesis necessarily refer to collectives, transforming these enemies into public enemies and these friends into the other members of one’s political group. Thus, the concept of the political only becomes efficacious by virtue of the shared quality of the friend-enemy distinction. But when a group of individuals is united, through a common and homogenous sense of who the friends and the enemies are, it partakes in the sublime force of the political, which transfigures this collective into an entirely new kind of entity—a people. In Schmitt’s ontological hierarchy of politics, a people are second only to the political antithesis that defines and unites them. Yet a new property emerges at the higher metaphysical order of a people that both allows for the possibility of an organized state and proves significant to another dimension of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism: “If such an entity [of a people] exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside there” (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 38). By virtue of its sovereignty, which Schmitt equates with an ability to make certain decisions, a homogenous people becomes capable of forming the institutions and norms of a state. Like his conception of political unity through radical exclusion, Schmitt’s formulation of sovereignty similarly challenges another fundamental liberal tenet: the commitment to norms exemplified by the rule of law. As set forth in his collection of essays, Political Theology, Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty receives a succinct expression in the book’s famous first sentence: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 5). Related to the idea of a state of emergency, the exception refers to an abnormal situation in which the Schmittian sovereign decides that the general rules do not apply. In this exceptional situation, the sovereign then suspends the general norms and acts by virtue of its own authority. Thus, for Schmitt, a law or norm is only legitimate when it is recognized by the ontologically prior sovereign power, yet this recognition consists precisely in the sovereign acknowledging its own authority to suspend or violate this rule in exceptional cases. By arguing that norms are only defined by their exceptions and limits, Schmitt undermines the liberal commitment to the rule of law, which insists that sovereign powers are not exempt from their own laws and norms. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism thereby rejects a normative approach to politics that extends back to the Magna Carta and inscribes authority within definite bounds. An even more disturbing feature of Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, however, is that the ambiguous phrase “on the exception,” means not only that the sovereign decides in exceptional cases, but also that the sovereign decides which cases are to be treated as exceptional. As Schmitt writes: “He [the sovereign] decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 7). The sublime and even transcendent authority that Schmitt attributes to the sovereign is problematic beyond merely challenging the rule of law, which forms the very foundation of the liberal constitutional state—since sovereign authority ontologically derives from the political, Schmitt argues that the unchecked power of the sovereign must therefore serve to maintain and strengthen this antagonistic principle of unity. Thus, according to Schmitt, the state must act in such a way that most promotes the homogenous unity of the political, upon which the very possibility of a state depends. Schmitt’s ontological hierarchy, by exalting his notion of the political as the unity of a sovereign people, imbues political entities with a telos. The political, as the foundation of all public associations and institutions, also becomes their vital principle and their ultimate purpose. In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt’s most influential legal text, the sinister principle of national unity assumes a more concrete and recognizable form. Fundamental liberties, as established in this text, are usually non-political in the sense that they attach to individuals in their private lives or in a non-social manner. For example, freedom of worship is a basic liberty that, according to Schmitt, should be respected by the state as long as one’s religious views or practices merely affect one’s private behavior. This right could be suspended if members of a certain religion used their faith as a vehicle for political change, as in the case of the Civil Rights Movement or the Indian Independence Movement. While Schmitt recognizes that there are often de facto limits to the political in a state, there is no limiting principle to stop the intrusive expansion of the political. Thus, the reach of the political can and even should expand if it serves to strengthen national unity. To pursue our example, the sovereign could decide to suspend even the right to privately believe in a certain religious doctrine if the sovereign decides that this doctrine is affiliated with its Schmittian enemy. This expansion of the realm of the political, if continued, culminates in what Schmitt celebrates as the ideal of the “total state,” in which all aspects of life are re-politicized and thereby subsumed into an all encompassing friend-enemy distinction: “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy” Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 37). The total state in which everything reflects and strengthens the friend-enemy distinction would, for Schmitt, possess the highest possible degree of political unity, as its people would have a completely homogeneous sense of friend and enemy. It requires no small leap of the imagination to see how Schmitt’s ideal of the total state coincided with Nazism, which attempted to build an empire based on an ethnic friend-enemy distinction that indeed encompassed all aspects of life. Yet despite this repulsive extremism, Schmitt’s model is a considerable challenge to liberalism—one that requires a liberal response that can defend an inclusive account of national unity and a norm-based approach to politics that leaves the rule of law intact. Rawls provides a liberal antidote to Schmitt by formulating an inclusive conception of national unity based on shared norms. John Rawls proved to be a preeminent liberal philosopher by offering analyses of the principles underlying modern constitutional democracies, distinguished by Rawls’ interest in promoting the just and fair treatment of all members of these societies. Indeed, Rawls’ background in Kantian moral philosophy is evident in his persistent belief in the equal dignity of persons—a liberal tenet that Schmitt rejects through the ontological inequality imbedded in his friend-enemy distinction. In place of the exclusion and homogeneity that suffuse Schmitt’s conception of the political, Rawls affirms an inclusive principle of unity that is woven into the very fabric of his philosophical system as a crucial background assumption. In Political Liberalism, Rawls describes how he assumes a plurality of different worldviews to be a fundamental feature of liberal democracies: “the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy” John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36). Rawls defines comprehensive doctrines as complete and fully realized normative worldviews. In his assumption, Rawls flatly rejects the homogeneity that Schmitt argues is the essence of political unity. Though this assumption appears to be a factual claim about the nature of liberal democratic societies, Rawls gives this claim normative weight by distinguishing between the notion of mere pluralism—wherein members of a society subscribe to different comprehensive doctrines—and that of reasonable pluralism. For Rawls, reasonable pluralism refers to the idea that free institutions actually promote a diversity of comprehensive doctrines that a reasonable person could subscribe to. As a radically pluralistic and inclusive notion, reasonable pluralism, as a fundamental feature of liberal democracies, creates the space in which democratic deliberation and debate can occur. As a vital condition for the proper functioning of a democratic and liberal society, reasonable pluralism ensures that inclusivity and diversity occupy a fundamental position in Rawlsian liberal society. But this rebuke of Schmitt’s notion of the political, as defined by the friend-enemy distinction, does not yet provide an alternative account of national unity. Through his notion of overlapping consensus, Rawls proposes a theory of national unity grounded in shared norms and similarity across difference. Given the profound diversity of individuals’ values within a liberal society that reasonable pluralism implies, national unity, at least from the perspective of Schmitt’s critique, appears precarious. Yet Rawls denies that national unity is unattainable in liberal democracies, by exploring the distinction between an individual’s comprehensive doctrine and their non-comprehensive political views. Along these lines, two individuals—for example a Christian fundamentalist and a socialist atheist—could deeply disagree over many issues by virtue of their conflicting comprehensive doctrines; however, they might also hold some political views in common, like a commitment to the right to free speech. Thus, despite the radical heterogeneity and diversity of worldviews in a multicultural liberal society, there are certain principles that Rawls argues would be shared amongst opposing but reasonable comprehensive doctrines. These shared principles, to which any reasonable person would assent, constitute Rawls’ notion of the overlapping consensus, which unites individuals whose comprehensive doctrines may nonetheless be extraordinarily different. As establishing a common national commitment to certain principles, the overlapping consensus serves to unite a reasonably pluralistic society around inclusive norms. Rawls also frames his discussion of the overlapping consensus in explicitly normative terms, beyond the mere fact that the overlapping consensus is a collection of normative principles, by relating the overlapping consensus to liberal notions of legitimacy and autonomy: Since political power is the coercive power of free and equal citizens as a corporate body, this power should be exercised, when constitutional essentials and basic questions of justice are at stake, only in ways that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of their common human reason (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 139-140). Rawls’ insistence on certain limiting conditions under which coercive political power should be employed reveals a striking divergence from Schmitt’s unlimited notion of sovereign authority. Only authority exercised within these limits is legitimate in the Rawlsian sense. Furthermore, Rawls’ particular formulation of legitimacy is intimately related to the notion of autonomy, which literally means self-lawgiving. Since political coercion is only legitimate when any reasonable individual would assent to it, the state’s sovereign authority is strictly limited by the overlapping consensus, i.e. what reasonable citizens would mutually agree to. In stark contrast to Schmitt’s unlimited notion of sovereignty as rooted in a unifying principle of profound exclusion and homogeneity, Rawls outlines a liberal notion of unity through an overlapping consensus that emphasizes shared norms across reasonable differences and inscribes the state’s coercive authority within determinate limits. Rawls’ insistence on the rule of law and an inclusive notion of national unity becomes even more apparent through the concrete and realized form it assumes in Rawls’ reflections on the importance of constitutions for liberal societies. For Rawls, constitutions perform the essential function of codifying certain shared and fundamental values—aspects of the overlapping consensus—to ensure that they are consistently respected. In contrast to Schmitt, Rawls is an adamant supporter of the rule of law, who affirms the importance of consistently and impartially upholding rules. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls devotes a section to the rule of law, wherein he provides a simple and intuitive counter-argument to Schmitt’s contention that a rule is essentially defined by its ability to be suspended in exceptional cases: “The rule of law also implies the precept that similar cases be treated similarly. Men could not regulate their actions by means of rules if this precept were not followed” (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 237). Indeed, under a regime whose laws are frequently suspended or changed by the sacrosanct power of the sovereign, it would be prohibitively difficult to follow laws at all, given their constant mutability. Like Schmitt, however, Rawls argues that constitutions should and do reinforce his notion of national unity in important ways. First, the constitution provides specific procedures for conflict resolution that diffuse intra-societal tensions, instead of merely redirecting these antagonistic energies toward a common enemy. Second, Rawls claims that a state’s constitution, when successful, can reinforce reasonable pluralism and foster a positive feedback loop that stabilizes and unites the diverse members of a liberal society under their shared values and institutions: The basic political institutions incorporating these principles and the form of public reason shown in applying them when working effectively and successfully for a sustained period of time (as I am here assuming)—tend to encourage the cooperative virtues of political life: the virtue of reasonableness and a sense of fairness, a spirit of compromise, and a readiness to meet others halfway, all of which are connected with the willingness to cooperate with others on political terms that everyone can politically accept (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 163). In a gesture similar to Schmitt’s claim that the constitution must serve the telos of his exclusive conception of national unity, Rawls maintains that the constitution can be an important component in securing unity in a pluralistic liberal society by strengthening certain common virtues that promote inclusivity. Rawls therefore formulates a liberal conception of national unity that offers an attractive alternative to Schmitt’s vision of unity through a mutual enemy. Indeed, Rawls’ response to Schmitt also seems far better equipped to handle the multicultural realities of an increasingly globalized world, whose largest and most prominent states are and continue to become ever more pluralistic. While Rawls’ responses to Schmitt fail to explicitly address the problematic role of identity in Schmitt’s critique of liberal unity, Habermas addresses this issue from a liberal perspective similar to Rawls’. Although educated in different philosophical traditions, Rawls and Habermas share commitments to many fundamental liberal values. Like Rawls, Habermas begins with the factual assumption that contemporary liberal democracies are defined by their multiculturalism and plurality of worldviews. Given this diversity, Habermas likewise claims that these disparate groups can be brought together through shared norms and an inclusive attitude that rejects the radical homogeneity of the Schmittian political. Despite these shared preoccupations between Rawls and Habermas, their divergent emphases reveal crucial aspects of their philosophical vantage points. For example, Habermas imbues the question of national unity with an urgency and importance comparable to Schmitt. Although Rawls undeniably thought about and wrote on the question of national unity with acuity and insight, Schmitt and Habermas examine the threat of political fragmentation as fundamental because of their shared German inheritance of a national history marked by perennial partition and disunity. In contrast to both Schmitt and Rawls, however, Habermas turns to a nation’s constitution to provide—not merely a supportive element in fostering a unified national community—but a veritable foundation for a unified and inclusive liberal state. Referring to this political model as “constitutional patriotism,” Habermas proposes an alternative liberal principle of unity, one highly related to and coherent with Rawls’ liberal project, that Habermas argues can challenge Schmitt’s claim that liberal inclusivity cannot provide a substantive identity to the members of a society. Habermas’ groundbreaking essay, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” explores how globalizing forces have fundamentally altered identity-forming processes in a way that renders unity through nationalist identities no longer viable. By reflecting on the contemporary prevalence of immigration, the complex ways in which localities interact with globalized mass media, and the ease of communication across national and cultural lines, Habermas arrives at the conclusion that people have adapted a new sense of identity in response to these multifarious forces. Because ‘traditional’ modes of identity, in the nineteenth century for example, were more stable and consistent across localities, identifying with a particular town, religion, nation, and worldview was a more socially unifying and coherent process. Habermas contends that today, however, a single individual might identify with multiple hometowns, two or more national heritages, and a familial as well as a personal religious identity. Habermas vividly describes: [T]he dynamic image of an ongoing construction of new modes of belonging; new subcultures and lifestyles, a process kept in motion through intercultural contact and multiethnic connections. This strengthens a trend toward individualization and the emergence of ‘cosmopolitan identities,’ already evident in postindustrial societies Habermas, "The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," 76). This process, whereby interaction with global forces leads individuals to adopt layered identities, simultaneously threatens traditional models of national unity and underscores the need for a more inclusive and norm-based model of political unity. Undoubtedly, Schmitt’s conception of political unity would qualify as a ‘traditional,’ model of national belonging, whose unqualified insistence on the importance of national homogeneity does not seem capable of prevailing under these new conditions. Indeed, Habermas writes that Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction most often appears along ethnic lines, as in the case of National Socialism, although for Habermas this is a historically contingent fact. Regardless, Habermas considers Schmitt’s notion of the political a reflection of the ethnonationalist conception of national identity whose unity is predicated on a sense of belonging to a shared heritage: “‘ethnonationalism’ blurs the traditional distinction between ‘ethnos’ and ‘demos.’ This expression emphasizes the proximity between an ‘ethnos,’ a pre-political community of shared descent organized around kinship ties, on the one hand, and a nation constituted as a state that at least aspires to political independence on the other” (Habermas, "On the Relation between the Nation, the Rule of Law and Democracy," 130). The absolute nature of Schmittian homogeneity, especially when considered along ethnic lines, appears all the more reactionary and unviable in light of Habermas’ account of contemporary, complex identity formation. Thus, Habermas proposes constitutional patriotism as an inclusive way of identifying with the national community that opposes Schmittian ethnonationalism. Like the liberal commitment to shared norms and inclusive pluralism outlined by Rawls, Habermas’ constitutional patriotism entails a national culture that identifies with the values embodied by that nation’s constitution. Since liberal democratic constitutions use highly generalized language in order to encompass as many situations as possible, constitutional norms embrace the tolerance and equality that Habermas sees as vital to ensuring national unity in the contemporary, globalized world. In contrast to constitutional patriotism, Habermas characterizes ethnonationalism as entailing a pathological and exclusive fusing of the national culture with mere majority culture. Consider the case of Germany, wherein a conception of German identity that relies on a certain ethnic, religious, or even linguistic affiliation would exclude significant portions of the populace. For Habermas, the immediate gains of the Schmittian exclusionary approach will in fact undermine national unity on the long run, due to the unstoppable process of global connections forging complex identities within societies whose homogenous histories are quickly becoming relics of the past. Habermas therefore arrives at a normative claim intended to provide a solution to the problem of achieving unity through identity in a contemporary liberal state: “the majority culture must detach itself from its fusion with the general political culture in which all citizens share equally; otherwise it dictates the parameters of political discourses from the outset” (Habermas, "The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," 146). Constitutional patriotism is realized in this very act of uncoupling majority culture from national culture, wherein the national culture transforms into the identification with the shared norms and inclusive equality of constitutional values. Only then can national unity be achieved without resorting to Schmittian ethnonationalism, which Habermas argues excludes vast communities within contemporary liberal democracies. Although Habermas himself acknowledges that constitutional patriotism is more abstract than the primitive power of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, he embraces it as a normative necessity that citizens of liberal democracies should undertake, to ensure the stability and longevity of their nation’s political culture. By arriving at a moral injunction, Habermas fails to provide an adequate incentive for the majority to adopt constitutional patriotism; however, a Habermasian approach that more fully embraces the aforementioned fragmentary identity-forming processes solves this issue by pointing the way towards the dissolution of majority culture itself. The prospect of uncoupling national from majority culture is undeniably daunting, as the widespread introduction of constitutional patriotism as a national identity would involve the loss of significant privilege, status, and power for those who are current members of this majority culture. The roots of ethnonationalism continue to grip the political foundations of ostensibly liberal democratic societies, less because the public is convinced by the ideas of thinkers like Schmitt—although segments of these populations undoubtedly are, as the so called “alt-right” has recently demonstrated in the US—but rather because the majority gains an elevated status through exclusionary forms of national unity. The ethical cost of this exaltation of the majority culture on a national scale is the demeaning alienation of minority communities and, while Habermas is right to advocate for a more inclusive national identity that would remain faithful to liberal values, it seems unlikely that the majority would freely give up its status by adopting constitutional patriotism only to benefit the greater good. If one believes that people tend to act out of self-interest instead of morality, then the incentive to preserve the connection between majority and national culture itself must be nullified before constitutional patriotism can prevail. The tools for solving this problem are present in Habermas. To take Habermasian thought a step beyond Habermas himself, one can imagine what the process of complex identity fragmentation and formation would look like in the long term. In this scenario, the majority of people would no longer subscribe to a singular or even predominant identity. On the contrary, the very fragmentation that Habermas argues unsettles national unity would transform the populace of a liberal democracy into a vast network of many small communities, whose individual members would each belong to a great multitude of them. Such a nation would be so deeply fragmented that any given aspect of one’s identity would not provide a sufficiently large community to establish a majority. Instead, majority decisions would be made entirely by heterogeneous coalitions whose interest overlap for the time being, but who remain fragmentary constellations of various communities without a single or cohesive identity. Under such conditions of extreme fragmentation and individualization, Schmitt would argue that the nation itself has ceased to exist, even if its political institutions persist. From a Habermasian perspective, however, everyone would finally have an incentive to adopt constitutional patriotism, as the majority culture itself has dissolved. To some, this thought experiment may appear extreme, unfounded, or idealistic; but, by revealing a path to constitutional patriotism that does not rely on the mere moral goodness of an entire population, it offers a compelling reason to embrace the fragmentation that Habermas himself ambivalently describes. In doing so, the positive potential of fragmentation provides the possibility of a more hopeful future, in which liberal unity can be fully realized through the widespread adoption of identities as malleable, personal, and idiosyncratic as their individual subscribers. Thus, the future of liberal unity can only be attained through a confrontation and embrace of the very fragmentation that political theorists have feared for far too long. A Habermasian solution to the problem of national identity’s role in fostering political unity thereby completes the liberal project, developed by Rawls and Habermas, of formulating an adequate response and alternative to Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. As the nation-state continues to assert its relevance in the global consciousness of the 21st century, the naïve question to ask would be when the nation-state will fall into obsoleteness and thereby cease to exist. On the contrary, the deep political impulse in humanity and the social need for some form of unifying structure mean that the future of the liberal state will entail a transformation instead of an extinction. But the new political arrangement awaiting humanity at the end of this metamorphosis is yet undecided—making the path to be pursued all the more crucial. By recognizing that national unity as we know it will need to be radically reshaped and may even appear in the guise of what we now perceive as fragmentation, a new path toward this future emerges that rejects neither globalizing fragmentation nor the national community. Only through such affirmation can the enduring negativity of exclusion and perpetual violence someday be overcome. Endnotes 1 Readers may question the philosophical value of engaging with a theorist as reprehensible and repulsive as Carl Schmitt; however, I remain convinced that vigilant opponents of fascism must constantly challenge its foundations, not only to demonstrate the intellectual illegitimacy of totalitarianism, but also to better discern the fascistic modes of thought insidiously purveyed by alleged proponents of liberalis 2 This empirical claim is disputable, but simply assumed in this paper. I ask that skeptical readers grant it arguendo. References Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. “The Concept of the Political: A Key to Understanding Carl Schmitt's Constitutional Theory.” Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism. Ed. David Dyzenhaus. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. “On the Relation between the Nation, the Rule of Law and Democracy.” The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy.” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. Print. Müller, Jan-Werner. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1971. Print. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2007. Print. Schmitt, Carl. Constitutional Theory. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. Print.

*Feature* Jorge O. Elorza Jorge O. Elorza Mayor of Providence, RI Spring 2018 The strength of a society is a function of how equally its members share in its growth and progress. In a time when people throughout the country feel as though they are being left behind, Providence has invested in a full cradle-to-career approach to help all of our residents reach middle class by middle age. There is no single intervention that is either necessary or sufficient. Instead, what makes the difference is two fundamental beliefs: first, the understanding that a comprehensive infrastructure of support is required in this work, and second, that the community itself must be involved in designing the system. The City is taking a holistic approach to our economic revitalization process by hosting hundreds of community conversations across the City to help inform decisions around major projects. After hearing from our residents, we’ve prioritized investing in innovative educational programming to address historic inequities; creating dynamic workforce programs more suitable for an inclusive new economy; and leveraging our inherent strengths to produce more sustainable growth. One of our City’s greatest strengths is our diversity – nearly 60 percent of our public-school students come from homes where English is not the primary language spoken. Combined, students and their families speak 31 different languages and hail from 52 countries of origin. As mayor, one of my priorities has been to invest in innovative cradle-to-career programming to give all our students a competitive advantage in their education and eventually, in their future careers. The City has hired school culture coordinators for all middle schools who will serve as role models and provide support to students. To answer calls for better facilities, the Administration also announced a plan to invest up to $400 million in school infrastructure throughout the next 10 years. A yearlong public visioning process for school repairs, in which hundreds have already participated, was launched for a five-year plan that will later be submitted to the State. Here in Providence, only one out of three kindergarten registrants enter the classroom at the appropriate literary benchmark. Through Providence Talks, a nationally recognized program that aims to close the 30 million-word gap that separates children who grow up in less affluent homes from their peers who are raised in middle- and high-income households, we are working to ensure that every child enters kindergarten ready to succeed. By providing free or low-cost innovative programming and initiatives, we are making sure that students will continue to build upon the strides they make all school year long. Our Eat, Play, Learn summer initiative ensures that our youth are spending their summers participating in outdoor, educational and thoughtful programming. Last year, we served over 188,000 free summer meals and distributed 15,000 summer reading passports where students could track their reading progress. Providing students with tools and resources needed to succeed in the 21st century is also among the highest priorities. That’s why we’ve set an ambitious goal of providing every Providence student with access to a tablet, laptop or computer in the classroom by the end of this summer. To close the digital divide, the City launched a partnership with Sprint, which has committed to providing 600 kids from all ten high schools with free 24/7 access to high speed internet throughout their high school careers. We’re also helping adults adapt their skills to the changing demands of our economy. With the launch of the Office of Economic Opportunity in July 2017, the City undertook critical work to provide training, support and resources to residents, particularly those unemployed or underemployed, to connect them to employment or prepare them to launch their own business. The City also supported Amos House’s A Hand Up program, which has offered over 350 people experiencing homelessness daily work opportunities. Through the Providence Business Loan Fund (PBLF), we’re helping existing businesses launch, scale and innovate, promoting economic dynamism and productivity. Under my administration, the PBLF has been restructured and rebranded and now has a board knowledgeable in lending practices with upgraded loan underwriting and record-keeping standards. Over the last three years, the PBLF has issued nearly $2 million in loans to help local businesses expand and create new employment opportunities. As the City is working to couple students, residents and entrepreneurs with better opportunities, we must also improve connectivity between our world-renowned public and private organizations to create new prospects for collaboration. Providence is an educational powerhouse – we are home to eight colleges and universities including Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and the culinary arts institute Johnson & Wales University. In addition to these assets, we also possess eminent healthcare and cultural institutions. The City of Providence is teaming up with these institutions to expand employment opportunities and reinvent our Downtown. Partnering with Brown University, the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing and Rhode Island College and the state, the City could redevelop a century-old power station – one of its most iconic and beautiful buildings – to produce one of Providence’s greatest historic preservation success stories. This project is a perfect example of what is possible when the private sector joins with ‘Anchor Institutions’ to make something meaningful happen. Preserving and reusing our historic former industrial spaces is creating new energy in our Downtown Jewelry District, catalyzing development in the I-195 land, and promoting the new knowledge and innovation-based economy. When I-195 was relocated and 20 acres of Downtown land was suddenly made available for redevelopment, we were able to capitalize on this momentum to attract the interest of distinguished organizations such as Wexford Science & Technology and Cambridge Innovation Center. Providence is utilizing our inherent strengths and new tools to leverage rapid growth in ‘New Economy’ sectors such as food and biotechnology. In addition to having some of the most critically acclaimed restaurants in the country, Providence is growing as a food hub. As consumers are increasingly focused on healthier, locally-sourced and sustainably-produced foods, Providence is strategically positioned to take advantage of this economic trend. Food production, processing and other commercial industries can provide light manufacturing jobs to Providence residents as locally-sourced foods become more popular. Take, for instance, the case of Farm Fresh RI – Farm Fresh began in 2004 as a student project at Brown University to develop a direct connection between local farmers and residents. The nonprofit now operates 11 farmers markets, coordinates the distribution of more than $2.2 million in locally-grown food to more than 80 vendors and 200 customers annually and operates two Harvest Kitchen programs that have trained more than 300 young people who were directed into the job-training program through the state’s juvenile justice system. This model represents a paradigm shift in the way that we think about – and support businesses. Farm Fresh was recently awarded an $850,000 loan through the PBLF to relocate from Pawtucket to a 60,000-square-foot building it plans to construct on 3.2 acres in our Valley neighborhood. An attractive factor of the national trend is that when investments are made in local food, those dollars are reinvested in creating jobs and spurring the local economy. That’s why it’s particularly a growth area that we want to emphasize. In Providence, we’re preparing our talent and organizing our assets to produce long-term sustainable growth that is both inclusive and equitable. By making long-term investments in our schools and students, we’re inspiring the next generation to learn and empowering them to succeed. Through innovative workforce development programs and public-private partnerships, we’re catalyzing economic growth and attracting significant investments while creating sustainable employment opportunities for all of our residents.

Respect for the Smallest of Creatures An Analysis of Human Respect for and Protection of Insects Grace Engelman Brown University Author Nidhi Bhaskar Zoe Zacharopoulos Nicole Tsung Naima Okami Nicole Fegan Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (19 pages) Abstract: Humans have a complicated relationship with insects. Fearing them, we are quick to kill spiders and stomp on ants. Benefitting from them, we raise honeybees and silkworms and use their products for our enjoyment. Depending on them, we try to save bee populations, realizing that many of our food sources would be lost if bees died out. My goal in this paper is to find ways to justify respecting and protecting insects. They have been systematically excluded from animal rights theories because we tend to believe that they lack sentience, the main criterion used to extend rights to nonhumans. As I will argue, the sentience criterion relies on anthropocentric thinking about the ways that animals experience the world. Choosing an alternative to the sentience criterion—one that does not rely on commonalities between insects and humans—is a necessary step in finding a motivation for respecting insects. I will test two approaches to respecting insects—one that involves granting them rights and another that requires thinking of them as possessing inherent worth. Then, I will use my analysis of insects to answer some broader questions in environmental political theory. Mainly, what is the basis for respecting nature even when it does not directly benefit us? Finding a way to respect the creatures that we consider the most difficult to live alongside and relate to serves as a useful test for determining the limits and scope of our respect for nature. "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." -E.O. Wilson Insect populations have declined rapidly in the last twenty years, and no one seems to care. As we gain more knowledge about the disappearance of insect species, some scientists and media outlets have publicized the news of a climate change-driven insect decline. But the vast majority of us remain unaware of the importance and vulnerability of the insect world. Given the abundance and variety of insects, it may seem as though the loss of certain species is insignificant. And yet, the complex web of life suggests otherwise. Almost every type of insect interacts with plant and animal species, providing necessary food, pollination, or fertile soil. These small creatures maintain life. Despite their importance, insects have been systematically excluded from theories of animal rights. We often fail to recognize in insects the qualities—such as sentience or the ability to feel pain—that we use to establish the rights of other animals. Our ignorance of insect sentience stems from the practical difficulty of studying their tiny nervous systems, along with an evolutionarily ancient aversion that creates barriers to understanding and relating to them. This failure to connect with insects often leads us to think of their death and suffering as insignificant. My goal in this paper is to analyze how we should interact with insects and find ways to justify respecting and protecting them. Overcoming the instinctual fear and repulsion many of us feel for these creatures is a necessary aspect of any proposal for respecting insects. Additionally, approaches to insect protection require adopting ecocentric views of conservation. Usually, arguments for protecting insects rely on their benefit to us. Many people care about saving bees, for example, because they pollinate plants that we eat. But given some of the shortcomings of anthropocentric approaches, it is necessary to think of alternative theories that guide us to respect insects apart from their relation to us. Finally, our consideration of insects challenges some of the criteria that we often use to extend rights and consideration to nonhuman animals. As I will argue, the popular sentience criterion relies on anthropocentric thinking about the ways that animals experience the world. Choosing an alternative to the sentience criterion—one that does not depend on commonalities between insects and humans—is another necessary step in finding a motivation for respecting insects. In sum, I will argue that respecting insects requires overcoming stigma, adopting an ecocentric approach, and abandoning the sentience criterion. After describing our current relationship to insects and their importance to various ecosystems, I will test two approaches to respecting insects—one that involves granting them rights and another that entails thinking of them as possessing inherent worth. I will assess each theory in terms of its treatment of stigma, ecocentrism, and the sentience criterion. Finally, I will discuss some of the implications of our treatment of insects for broader questions in environmental political theory. I. Our Relationship With Insects We use insects for a variety of purposes. In labs, scientists experiment on fruit flies to study ageing, genetics, human disease, and countless other topics. In gardens and on farms, we depend on bees and butterflies for the pollination of crops and flowers. It would not be possible to produce silk fabric and clothing without the labor of silkworms, nor would it be possible to break down soil or compost materials without various flies and maggots. Some people eat high-protein insects such as crickets and grasshoppers, and claim that entomophagy, or bug-eating, will become a necessity in the future as other food sources run out. Despite our dependence on and benefit from a wide range of insects, we tend to respond to them with fear or repulsion. Our nicknames for bugs—"creepy-crawlies and pests"—capture this attitude. Part of our aversion may stem from our negative associations with insects and the harm they cause. Ticks, mosquitoes, and other insects carry diseases such as Lyme, the Zika virus, and malaria. Parasites, including lice and bed bugs, encroach on our personal space and threaten the sanctity of our homes and bodies. Various types of locusts, worms, and beetles damage crops, threatening the livelihoods of farmers and those who rely on them for food. In contrast, the vast majority of insects neither pose a direct threat to us nor even benefit us in some way. And yet, our aversion to harmful insects usually extends to all insects. Many people are quick to kill the ants, spiders, and flies that appear in their homes, even when these insects pose no immediate threat. The ease with which we kill these insects stems from our fear (phobias of spiders, for example, are fairly common) and from our inability to relate to them. Perhaps we fail to connect with them because of their divergence from mammalian bodies—their wings, shells, and antennae contrast with the appendages of more familiar animals. Insects' size and abundance also seem to play a role in our tendency to discount them. How could an ant—a being as small as a crumb—possibly matter, especially when there are millions more of them? Most of all, it is difficult for us to recognize sentience in insects—the main attribute used to determine the degree to which an animal can be likened to humans. Our simultaneous dependence on and inability to relate to insects merge to form our complicated relationship with them. II. The Necessity of Insects What would the world look like without insects? Not only do insects benefit us in certain ways, but they also serve a vital role in ecosystems more generally. The naturalist E.O. Wilson refers to insects as "the little things that run the natural world." Though we are often unaware of their presence and necessity, their disappearance would spark a cascade of additional extinctions. Vital to the food chain, insects serve as a food source for most bird and fish species. Plants also benefit from insects in numerous ways, mainly through enhanced soil quality and pollination. Some plants depend on specific bee species for pollination, and some bee species can only acquire food from certain types of plants. This symbiotic relationship entails that when either partner—plant or insect—becomes endangered, the other suffers as well. Climate change has caused a massive decline in insect populations that humans are only just beginning to quantify and analyze. Given the size and abundance of insect species, it is difficult to track their decline. Additionally, there are millions of species that humans have never studied or counted before. But recent experiments that involve catching and recording large quantities of insects in certain areas have demonstrated that their numbers are declining quickly. For example, researchers studied arthropod populations in Puerto Rico's Luquillo rainforest between 1976 and 2012, a period in which maximum climate temperatures increased by two degrees Celsius. The decline of the arthropods mirrored a loss of lizard, frog, and bird species in the same forest. As the authors of this study write, "climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance," and leads to the "collapse of the forest food web." The decline of insects has caused a similar cascading effect in other parts of the world as well. Pollinators of all types (mainly bee and butterfly species) are declining at an unprecedented rate. Many native bee species in New England have become endangered due to disease, pesticides, and a reduction in the plants they require for food. As the bee species go extinct, native plant species die as well, and this dual decline harms bird populations in return. As biologist and bee ecologist Robert Gegear explains, the resulting lack of biodiversity could cause gardens and fields to transform into endless, green lawns. Vibrant gardens full of plant and animal life will wither away without pollinators. III. Approaches to Respect How should we interact with these creatures which we depend on but cannot relate to? Broadly, there are two categories of approaches that we could take. First, there are anthropocentric approaches, or strategies, that frame motives for conservation around human interests. There are at least two forms of anthropocentrism: (1) viewing the world from the perspective of humans without considering the perspectives of other beings or the natural world as a whole or (2) prioritizing the interests of humans over everything else. An example of (1) would be failing to grant moral consideration to insects because they may lack consciousness, a trait we sometimes use to determine whether we should extend moral rights or standing to other beings. As conscious animals ourselves, we often believe that consciousness is a key feature of a being that is "advanced enough" to receive our consideration. There are multiple examples of (2) in relation to insects. Some people believe that we should protect insects because they contribute to biodiversity, making the world more aesthetically pleasing to us. On a more drastic scale, some people argue that we should protect insects because ecosystems will collapse and we will lose food sources without them. One of the main dangers of anthropocentric thinking is that it leads us to exclude from our consideration the aspects of nature that do not (as far as we know) directly benefit us. This exclusion entails that we should not attempt to avert the suffering or extinction of plant and animal species that we have not decided benefit us in some way. Ironically, this exclusion fails to achieve the goals of anthropocentrism: it is likely that, due to our limited knowledge of nature and ecosystems, we will fail to save a species that we need. Given the complex web of organisms that makes up the natural world, it is not possible to foresee all of the consequences of failing to respect and protect a particular species. Additionally, this anthropocentric approach to conservation is dangerous in the sense that it could easily lead to more environmental harm in the future. As biologist Jeffrey Lockwood acknowledges, it was an anthropocentric view that "created the environmental problems confronting us today." Even if we could successfully use anthropocentrism and our fear of human extinction to motivate ourselves to reverse the trends of climate change, our lingering dominance over nature and prioritization of our immediate interests will lead to additional environmental problems in the future. A more radical shift in our relationship with nature is necessary to ensure lasting, positive change. Anthropocentric views contrast with ecocentric approaches to conservation, or approaches that take into account the needs and interests of beings besides humans by treating nature as an end in itself. An example of an ecocentric approach to conservation is arguing for the protection of a species of bees not because that species is necessary for human food sources or enjoyment, but simply because the bees matter inherently. When considering ways to interact with insects, we should prioritize ecocentric approaches over anthropocentric approaches, given the pitfalls of anthropocentrism. An ecocentric approach to interacting with insects involves some form of respect for insects and a motive for their protection beyond their relation to us. If insects are inherently valuable, then we owe them respect and should care about their interests. Theories of respect guide our actions and the way we treat other beings. For centuries, Western political theory framed humans as the only creatures deserving of respect. For example, the Kantian theory of respect features humans as the only rational beings, and thus the only entities that we should treat as ends in themselves. But this theory of respect entails that nonhumans can be exploited for the benefit of rational beings. The theories that I will analyze call into question this assumption, and provide us with alternative grounds for respecting nonhuman animals and aspects of nature. A) Insects as Citizens, Denizens, and Sovereigns One approach to respecting insects is to grant them rights. There are many different types of rights, including moral rights, legal rights, civil rights, and political rights. It may benefit insects and elevate their standing to extend some of these rights and protections to them. In their book Zoopolis , Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka propose a model for animal rights that ensures that animals' "basic interests cannot be sacrificed for the greater good of others." Even though Donaldson and Kymlicka label these rights "inviolable," they also acknowledge that there are situations in which these rights are not "absolute or unconditional," including when animals harm or threaten to harm humans. By centering animal rights in political theory, Donaldson and Kymlicka demonstrate ways to integrate animals into our existing models of citizenship and sovereignty. One of their strategies is to separate animals into three broad categories based on our levels of interaction with them: domesticated, liminal, and wild animals. Domesticated animals such as dogs, pigs, and chickens are oppressed in many ways; they are held in captivity, their labor is exploited, and some of them are killed and eaten on a daily basis. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that, because we have integrated these animals into our society, we have certain obligations to them—mainly to listen to and interpret their interests and needs. The best way to reverse their oppression and ensure that their needs are met is to grant them full citizenship rights. Using comparisons to children and mentally disabled people, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that humans can extend assistance and representation to animals by noticing their interests and then communicating them to the rest of society. Nonhuman animals are capable of communicating to us in nonverbal ways, and with the support of human companions, these expressions of their interests can be translated into the political system. Based on this citizenship theory of the rights of domesticated animals, humans should not harm them or exploit them for food or labor. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that liminal animals should be allowed to live near and around us without subjection to extermination or harm. Even though they are not granted the rights of full citizens, they are still guaranteed the right to not be harmed and the right to have their interests included in decision-making and urban planning. Additionally, fully wild animals are granted rights to be protected from human destruction of their habitats. As sovereign beings, they are members of their own communities that humans cannot disrupt or harm. Their needs must be taken into account any time that humans build on or otherwise disrupt the land they inhabit. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, the basis for granting these rights to animals is their sentience, which "has distinct moral significance because it enables a subjective experience of the world." Sentient creatures possess interests and goals; in other words, they "care about how their lives go." Based on this theory of animal rights, the possession of interests differentiates certain animals from rocks or trees. Though there may be reasons to protect and care about forests, we do not need to grant forests inviolable rights because trees are not sentient. When we look at them, we do not feel as though there is "someone home," or a person there. Thus, we only have obligations towards animals with subjective experiences of the world. If we apply this animal rights model to insects, then it is necessary to determine whether insects are sentient. Donaldson and Kymlicka explicitly exclude insects from their analysis, explaining that current evidence and scientific analysis suggests that insects are not sentient. Thus, insects are not granted inviolable rights or included in our conceptions of citizens, denizens, or sovereign beings. As Lockwood proposes, however, insects are more intelligent and aware than we might think, and our tendency to think of insects as "genetically programmed robots" has contaminated our ability to consider their sentience. In contrast with the view of insect sentience that Donaldson and Kymlicka propose, there exists evidence that suggests that insects can experience pain, form relationships, and solve problems. Testing whether a being has a subjective experience of the world is not a simple task; there is no standard set of attributes that determine sentience. To solve this issue, we can rely on some of the common criteria for sentience including consciousness, awareness, the capacity to feel pain, the ability to communicate, and the potential to problem-solve. Based on many definitions of sentience, if a living being possesses one or more of these attributes, we can regard it as sentient. Many scientists suggest that, at a bare minimum, insects have interests. For example, they try to avoid painful stimuli, including dangerous temperature changes, toxic chemicals, and electrical shock. They also writhe in response to pesticides, and they try to escape if they are physically restrained. It is possible that insects do not feel pain in response to these stimuli (pain is subjective, and therefore difficult to study in other beings). However, multiple studies indicate that insects can experience some form of visceral pain. It is also possible that insects communicate with each other. For example, honeybees use "an elaborate form of symbolic communication" or the "dance language" to share information on the "distance, direction, and desirability" of food sources and nesting sites. If, as this research suggests, insects possess the capacity for language, pain, and awareness, then they meet some of the criteria for sentience. Humans, however, tend to find it difficult to accept this conclusion. Regardless of our scientific advances in studying insect behavior and nervous systems, we remain quite removed from the insect world. No matter what we learn about insects, they are still (at least for most of us) difficult to relate to. Once again, the size of insects becomes a barrier to understanding them. It is difficult to imagine that such a small creature could have a complex enough nervous system to possess any criteria for sentience. Additionally, we may find it difficult to believe that insects are sentient because we tend to study pain, consciousness, awareness, and language in vertebrate animals. Many of our tests for sentience, for example, rely on verbal language or other human-centered ways of thinking about sentience. In order to adequately study insect sentience, we need to develop ways to test for consciousness and awareness that do not depend on our understanding of language. As Gegear explains, studying insect behavior and consciousness is akin to "studying a group of people where you don't know the language." In his book How Forests Think , Eduardo Kohn presents us with ways to think about human-insect communication. Based on observations of the rainforest in Ecuador's Upper Amazon as well as the people who live there (the Runa), Kohn suggests that "seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs." Kohn develops an expanded and flexible definition of selfhood; according to him, anything that interprets or represents the world in some way possesses a form of selfhood. For example, as flying ants in the rainforest relate to the environment and the beings around them in a certain way, he would argue they possess selfhood. One feature of their selfhood is their ability to communicate with other animals and to behave in a manner dependent on factors in the external world. Humans enjoy eating these flying ants, and are able to predict when the ants will emerge from the ground by paying attention to various signs from nature. These predictions are the result of "treating ants as the intentional communicating selves they are." The humans in this example use this form of communication to interact with the insects by hunting and eating them. It would not be possible to predict the ants' flight without implicitly acknowledging the ways that they understand and react to the world. With this example, Kohn demonstrates that in paying attention to and understanding the interests of insects, communication with them is possible. If we take all of these examples to suggest that insects have some form of sentience, then we can apply the Zoopolis theory to them. There are not many domesticated insects, but honeybees and silkworms would be extended full citizenship rights. Liminal animals such as spiders and ants would be denizens, and insects that live exclusively in the wild (the vast majority of them) would be sovereign beings. The rights of each of these groups may entail that we must avoid "unnecessary or insensitive handling or restraint" and refrain from killing them. Additionally, we could not use them as a food source or exploit them for their labor. The purpose of this paper is not to compile a comprehensive list of the rights of insects under this model, but rather to suggest that we could extend to them the rights of citizens, denizens, and sovereigns. Although it is possible to use the Zoopolis model to grant rights and protections to insects, this approach has two major shortcomings. The first involves barriers to communicating with and relating to insects. Based on this theory, taking into account the interests and needs of nonhuman animals requires crossing an inter-species communication barrier. As Kohn and Gegear argue (from an anthropological and biological view, respectively), insects are capable of communication. However, learning how to predict insect flight or studying insect behavior in a lab does not necessarily entail a full understanding of insects' interests. Donaldson and Kymlicka propose relying on humans to represent their animal companions in the political sphere. But do there exist willing and adequate human translators for insects? It is useful to consider as candidates the human members of our society who appear to know the most about insects. One group of candidates includes the farmers and gardeners who rely on certain species of insects for the pollination of crops and flowers. Their intimacy with plant life includes their knowledge of insect biology and behavior. Despite their reliance on (and perhaps respect for) pollinators, earthworms, and other "beneficial insects," many farmers and gardeners also engage in a constant battle with the insects that sabotage their plants. A farmer who cares about saving bee populations may simultaneously kill potato beetles, locusts, or other insects that damage crops. Although there may exist some exceptions, it seems as though most farmers and gardeners only engage with insects so far as they benefit or hurt plants, which is not an adequate foundation to build the type of relationship or companionship required for use of the Zoopolis theory. The Runa and other people who eat insects relate to them in a similar way. While they may learn a great deal about insects in order to predict their movements or learn how to raise them, the ultimate goal of their interactions is to hunt and eat the insects. It is important to note that eating insects does not necessarily entail a lack of respect for them. It may be necessary or justifiable in some situations to use insects as a food source. However, if the only goal of one's interactions with insects is to eat them, then the insects are used as a means to assuage human hunger; in other words, the insect serves a purpose for the human. Given the nature of this interaction, a person who eats insects is not in an ideal position to advocate for the insects' interests. Another group of humans who interact with insects frequently are entomologists and other scientists who study insects. Although these scientists may possess the best understanding of the biological mechanisms behind possible insect sentience, their scientific knowledge does not entail respect or a willingness to translate the needs of insects to the rest of society. In fact, many scientists who study insects keep them confined in tanks and cages for long periods of time and expose them to painful stimuli. Analyzing these various human-insect relationships reveals that, at least at present, it would be difficult to find adequate human representatives for the insect world. Even if it is possible to find some willing and knowledgeable humans, it is doubtful that there are enough of them to sufficiently represent the vast number of insect species that we interact with. There are far fewer domesticated animals in the world than there are insects, so domesticated animals are easier to accurately represent. However, it may be possible to overcome these difficulties by focusing our attention on a few of the species that we interact with most frequently or tend to exploit for resources and labor, such as honeybees and silkworms. The most significant barrier to finding human translators is the stigma associated with insects. Donaldson and Kymlicka write that "most humans come to understand and care for animals by having a relationship with them—observing them, hanging out with them, caring for them, loving and being loved by them." But we do not tend to think of people as "loving" insects or developing caring relationships with them. Because of our difficulty relating to them, which often takes the form of fear or disgust, our relationships with insects are not comparable to our interactions with dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals. This stigma against insects may begin to fade away. It is possible that, with more research on invertebrate nervous systems, we will gain enough knowledge of insect sentience to be able to relate to them. This scientific knowledge, however, may not succeed in helping us overcome the instincts that have led us to fear insects for centuries. Additionally, even if our view of insects changes, and we find a way to relate to them, it will only be because we recognize in them something that resembles us. A major flaw with our theories of respect is that each time we grant it to other creatures, it is often only because we see ourselves and aspects of our humanity in them. Even with enough research, it is possible that insects will never be considered similar enough to us to be included in this group. Therefore, we must overcome our dependence on relatability as a necessary criterion for respect. This shift in justification is a fundamental first step towards learning how to interact with insects in a more respectful way. The version of animal rights theory that Donaldson and Kymlicka articulate offers us no way to move beyond our narrow focus on resemblance as a basis for respect. The second problem with using the Zoopolis theory as the model for our treatment of insects is that, despite the extensive rights it grants to animals, it remains a fundamentally anthropocentric approach. The citizenship and sovereignty model that Donaldson and Kymlicka propose depends on existing political structures and concepts. As Donaldson and Kymlicka explain, "for many legal and political purposes, advancing an animal rights agenda will require using the pre-existing language of persons and extending it to animals." This dependence on human-designed models means that treating animals like citizens and sovereigns entails bringing them into a political landscape that was developed with humans in mind. The categories of citizen, denizen, and sovereign reflect language and political theory that is familiar only to humans. Thus, animals might be forced into a system that they ultimately cannot consent to, and that hinges on philosophical and moral principles that are inaccessible to them. To extend the human concepts of law, rights, and citizenship to animals entails viewing our relationship with them through an anthropocentric lens. Additionally, this theory's dependence on the concept of sentience allows the exclusion of many beings, including insects (at least until more scientific research is conducted and accepted). Humans have decided that sentience is a criterion for moral considerability because a subjective experience of the world is a core feature of humanity. Thus, when we recognize sentience in other animals, we begin to care about them as well. Donaldson and Kymlicka acknowledge that moral theories often fall into this anthropocentric trap by taking "humanity as [their] standard." Based on an anthropocentric view, animals "achieve moral standing only if they can be seen as possessing or approximating some aspect of [the] essence of humanity." Donaldson and Kymlicka believe that their theory avoids this trap by focusing on the protection of vulnerable beings rather than the protection of beings that relate to humans. Possessing sentience is a form of vulnerability because a being with sentience possesses interests that can be unfulfilled or harmed. But this response fails to demonstrate why the Zoopolis theory is not anthropocentric. Instead, it replaces sentience (an anthropocentric criterion for moral considerability) with another criterion that is equally anthropocentric: vulnerability. A human understanding of vulnerability suggests that a being must be sentient to have interests or be harmed. Again, this view of vulnerability is based on our own experiences of the world and fails to take into account the experiences or perspectives of other living beings. Thus, focusing on vulnerability does not demonstrate that this version of animal rights theory avoids anthropocentrism. B) Respecting Nature Another approach to understanding the way we should interact with insects is to rely on ecocentric views of their worth. In his article "The Ethics of Respect for Nature," philosopher Paul Taylor presents us with an alternative to anthropocentric environmental ethics. Taylor argues that we have moral obligations to plants and animals to "protect or promote their good for their sake." These moral obligations include respecting the "integrity of natural ecosystems," saving endangered species, and minimizing environmental pollution. The reason we should care about the well-being and survival of plant and animal species is that each living thing possesses an "inherent worth" and a "good," or well-being. In contrast with theories that depend on sentience as a criterion, Taylor's theory relies instead on these two features of living beings. According to Taylor, "every organism, species population, and community of life has a good of its own which moral agents can intentionally further or damage by their actions." Humans, plants, insects, and other animals all possess interests that can be protected or harmed (notice that inanimate objects such as rocks do not fall into this category). Generally, these interests include staying "strong and healthy." Thus, even if a plant is not necessarily aware of being harmed or benefited, it can still be injured or helped in certain ways. The second main feature of Taylor's argument is that all living things possess inherent worth. Part of this inherent worth stems from the fact that living things deserve moral consideration as "members of the Earth's community of life." Granting all living beings moral consideration does not mean that they possess inviolable rights; it only entails that every living being must be considered when making decisions. Establishing the inherent worth of living things also involves considering it "intrinsically valuable" to protect the interests of living things whenever possible. Taylor argues that granting each living being inherent worth and moral considerability allows us to develop a certain attitude towards all of nature that he labels "respect for nature." Taylor's theory accounts for some of the shortcomings with the Zoopolis theory. The respect for nature that he articulates does not entail granting consideration to living things based on their similarities to humans. For example, consciousness is not a necessary criterion for moral considerability. Rather, we begin to respect each living thing simply because it possesses intrinsic value. This theory allows us to transition away from the sentience criterion and other human-centric criteria for respect. Additionally, and more broadly, Taylor's theory outlines an ecocentric approach to respecting nature. When applied to insects, his theory entails that we should respect them because we understand that they possess a good and inherent worth. Thus, we are obligated to respect their interests by refraining from harming them, and we need to take into account their interests when interacting with them or making decisions that influence them. C) The Limits of our Respect How might we decide which species' well-being to prioritize when those interests come into direct conflict? The main problem with Taylor's theory is that he does not articulate the limits of our respect for insects or other aspects of nature. If we adopt Taylor's theory, then we must treat all living beings with equal respect. How then, can we determine whether and how to prioritize our interests above the interests of insects? This account of respect cannot effectively guide us in situations in which insects pose a threat to our wellbeing or survival. There are many situations in which it might be necessary to harm or kill an insect (or insects) in order to protect ourselves or others. In Zoopolis , Donaldson and Kymlicka present us with a way to think about potential conflicts between our rights and those of animals. Their solution to the human-animal conflict of interests is to apply what Rawls refers to as the "circumstance of justice." This principle, based on Hume's statement that "ought implies can," suggests that "humans only owe justice to each other when they are in fact able to respect each other's rights without jeopardizing their own existence." Thus, justice only applies in certain situations—when one's life is not at stake. If a mosquito that is likely to carry a disease is biting us, we are justified in killing it given that it has the potential to kill us. Our relationships with insects may also change over time. An insect that currently poses no threat may evolve to carry a fatal disease, changing the circumstances of justice. Thus, "assessing and sustaining the circumstances of justice is...an ongoing task." Another approach to recognizing the limits of our respect for or protection of insects is to "shift the burden of proof" onto humans. Lockwood establishes the moral considerability of insects by arguing (like Taylor) that they possess certain interests that can be harmed or helped by humans. Based on this moral considerability, Lockwood proposes a minimum ethic for our treatment of insects: We ought to refrain from actions which may be reasonably expected to kill or cause nontrivial pain in insects when avoiding these actions has no, or only trivial, costs to our own welfare. Lockwood describes a circumstance of justice; so long as insects pose no threat to our well-being, we should not kill or harm them in any way. This minimum ethic places the burden on humans to demonstrate the necessity of harming an insect before acting. Notice that this minimum ethic fails to grant any positive rights or protections to insects—it does not show us how we should help or protect insects in ways that exceed simply avoiding directly harming them. Instead, it demonstrates a baseline of respect for insects: it is not morally justifiable to kill an insect for no reason. These theories give different accounts of the type of situations in which we can justifiably harm insects. Donaldson and Kymlicka measure insects' threat to human existence, while Lockwood draws our attention to insects' threat to human welfare more generally. Lockwood's articulation of the limits to our respect is a more useful and practical approach. With their theory, Donaldson and Kymlicka ignore the fact that humans possess interests other than survival. Our health and happiness, for example, are additional human interests that may weigh into our decisions about how to treat insects. Lockwood presents us with a way to integrate some of our other interests besides survival into our consideration of human-insect conflict. Although Lockwood's theory provides us with a more useful account of the limits of our respect, it also complicates our decisions. When we expand our list of relevant human interests past survival, it becomes more difficult to measure them and to use them in decision-making. Determining whether an insect will kill us is more straightforward than determining the degree to which an insect will affect our quality of life or overall health. If one has a choice between eating insects or dying of starvation, the decision they should make is clearer than deciding whether to endure hunger for a short period or eat insects. Lockwood offers us no limit on the types of interests that we can take into account when prioritizing our wellbeing. He acknowledges that "the control of insects to prevent cosmetic damage" to crops is not justified by his minimum ethic. Additionally, he explains that major threats to our health justify harming insects. But many cases, including the consumption of insects as food, do not clearly fit into the categories of cosmetic harm or serious health threat. Thus, Lockwood's minimum ethic fails to offer us guidelines for navigating these more nebulous conflicts of interest. IV. Humans and Nature The current dominant approach to protecting insects is to articulate their benefit for humans. People might rally to save honeybees because of our reliance on their labor or our enjoyment of their honey. Similarly, people might feel motivated to protect insects in order to save certain plant or bird species they like. In each situation, the desire to protect insects stems from our needs and interests. Even when humans discuss the protection of insects in the context of climate change, their goals remain anthropocentric. A negative consequence of adopting anthropocentric views is that we tend to anthropomorphize nature. It is only when we believe we have recognized a "human" aspect of an animal (or plant) that we begin to view it as deserving of our moral consideration. But this approach to respecting nature fails to extend respect and protection to multiple nonhuman animals and plants, including insects. Until recently, we have assumed that insects are mere robots without any sort of consciousness or feelings. And even with the advent of promising research into the subject, we are not confident that insects are sentient. Our requirement that “respectable” creatures must fulfill a sentience criterion has led us to invest an insufficient amount of resources and energy into protecting insect species that are now endangered or extinct. The great insect decline of the last twenty years is a sobering reminder of the consequences of that perspective. Understanding the shortcomings of the sentience criterion leads us to understand that, more broadly, we cannot pick and choose the aspects of nature we want to respect. Each individual organism, plant and animal species, and community should be afforded the same baseline respect in terms of moral consideration. Even if there are reasons to prioritize one species' interests over the interests of another species, we must, at a minimum, consider the interests of all affected creatures before acting. We should not base our moral consideration of nature on arbitrary principles such as sentience. Nor should we base our moral consideration on the degree to which we fear or avoid certain species such as insects. Fear and a lack of understanding or relatability should not entail disrespect. To gain our respect and protection, it is enough just to exist. Taylor's theory encapsulates this message and offers us an ecocentric approach to respecting insects and nature more broadly. Adopting his theory would allow us to abandon the sentience criterion and respect insects even when we cannot find an aspect of resemblance or similarity between them and us. However, Taylor's theory leaves us with unanswered questions about how to balance our interests with the interests of nature, and how to determine the situations in which we can use insects for certain purposes. It is necessary, therefore, to piece together aspects of Taylor's theory with other theories that outline methods for weighing our interests against those of insects. Using Taylor's theory, we can think of our respect for insects as independent of the sentience criterion, and we can find inherent value in their existence. If we also draw upon Lockwood's minimum ethic, we can describe some of the situations in which it may be necessary to harm or kill insects, and we can find the justification for prioritizing our interests when our welfare is at risk. This blend of theories requires us to take into account the interests of insects and consider our effect on them when acting or making decisions. V. Conclusion Drawing to a conclusion our centuries-long domination of nature will require a change in our theories and our practices. In particular, it requires abandoning anthropocentric approaches to conservation. How can we convince people to adopt a more ecocentric view of nature in place of an anthropocentric one? One strategy is to acknowledge the degree to which the two approaches converge. Although their intents differ, their results may be similar. Saving the human species probably requires finding a way to protect and respect the environment so that our habitats, ecosystems, and resources are preserved. And, as I have argued, it is not possible to protect the environment without adopting a fully ecocentric approach. Thus, adopting an ecocentric view and learning to care about the environment for its inherent worth would directly benefit us and improve our chances of survival. Unfortunately, acknowledging the convergence between the two approaches seems to require an ecocentric view in the first place. If we continue to view ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, then we will not notice the myriad ways in which we are woven together with the natural world and share the same habitat and desire for survival. In contrast, if we begin to see ourselves as more connected with nature, then a clear delineation between anthropo- and ecocentric views will fade away; all efforts to care for the environment will benefit nature (which includes us). But how can we break down this barrier that we have established? For inspiration, we can look to the pollinating bee and the pollinated flower. As Gegear explains, the two beings are not individuals—rather, they are a combination, an interdependent relationship, an assemblage. Neither one can exist without the other species. The bee and the flower represent the interconnectedness essential to all ecosystems and the strength of a relationship rooted in common interest. If we similarly begin to see our interests in survival as intertwined with the interests of nature, then it will be far easier to overcome anthropocentric barriers to respecting nature. Even if some of our interests come into conflict, our ultimate interest in preserving the natural habitat that is common to all living things. We are forced to share the same space and resources. Acknowledging the areas in which our interests merge helps us to understand that we are not separate from this network of life. Even the smallest of creatures—the ants, bees, and worms of the world—depend, like us, on the health of the environment, and thus deserve our respect. Works Cited Chittka, Lars and Catherine Wilson, "Bee-brained." Aeon . November 27, 2018. Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights . New York, Oxford University Press, 2011. Interview with Robert Gegear, November 29, 2018. Jarvis, Brook. "The Insect Apocalypse is Here." The New York Times Magazine , November 27, 2018. King, Barbara J. "The Joys and Ethics of Insect Eating." NPR, April 3, 2014. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human . Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013. Lister, Bradford C. and Andres Garcia. "Climate-driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA , September 2018. Lockwood, Jeffrey A. "The Moral Standing of Insects and the Ethics of Extinction." The Florida Entomologist 70, no. 1, 1987, pp. 70-89. Smith, Jane A. "A Question of Pain in Invertebrates." ILAR Journal, vol. 33, no. 1-2, 1991, pp. 25-31. Taylor, Paul. "The Ethics of Respect for Nature." Environmental Ethics , vol. 3, 1981, pp. 197- 218. Wilson, E. O. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth . New York, W.W. Norton, 2006.

A Fair Free Lunch A Fair Free Lunch? Reconciling Freedom and Reciprocity in the Context of Universal Basic Income Olivia Martin Stanford University Author Noah Klein Christopher Lingelbach Orly Mansbach Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (13 pages) A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life. – Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Introduction In the 1970s, the Canadian federal government ran a large randomized experiment in giving citizens a basic income called “Mincome.” When Mincome participants were asked “Why wouldn’t you go on welfare, even if it would improve your income?” 37% responded that they would rather support themselves, giving explanations such as, “Welfare to me was accepting something for nothing,” or, “I feel more useful working.”[2] Similarly, in a survey of 121 working Germans, most participants rejected the provision of a basic income, because it was independent of level of need or contribution.[3] In both the scholarly discussion of basic income and in public opinion surveys, the unconditional freedom granted by universal basic income (UBI) seems to directly contradict the social norm of reciprocity. Reciprocity, most generally, is the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able.[4] This concept of reciprocity is central to the idea of the social contract itself: citizens owe to each other some degree of cooperation in order to receive social benefits. Is it possible to reconcile reciprocity and freedom in this context? If so, how? I argue that UBI succeeds in reconciling reciprocity and freedom by making its definition more inclusive, and by restricting our definition of freedom to a more morally defensible conception of republican freedom, all while endowing trust in participants. First, I briefly define basic income. Second, I explain the ethical conflict inherent between freedom and reciprocity as discussed by contemporary basic income scholars, primarily Stuart White and Philippe Van Parijs. Third, I argue that republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom in a non-ideal society. Fourth, I argue that a more egalitarian and inclusive conceptualization of reciprocity is required for justice in a non-ideal society. Finally, I compare UBI’s efficacy in achieving this reconciliation to Anthony Atkinson’s proposal of participation income. Defining Basic Income and This Paper’s Normative Framework UBI generally has five definitional features: basic income is in cash, unconditional, universal, individual, and consistent. In this way, UBI is a significant departure from most welfare benefits in the United States. Existing benefits are almost all means tested and often in-kind (e.g., food stamps) rather than cash, given on a household basis (allowing for potential domination of one spouse over another), and conditional on the performance of paid work for a period of time—as is required by the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance. There are also features of UBI that vary dramatically across proposals: the specific cash amount given, the frequency with which it is given, how it is funded, and the package of policies it entails. The exact features of basic income greatly affect the extent of the tension between freedom and reciprocity—for example, the larger the grant is, the greater the freedom of the individual, but also the smaller the impetus to reciprocate. For the sake of this paper, I will assume a UBI as a $1,000 monthly grant, as is being tested by Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and I will assume that UBI will be in an addition to existing welfare, save for the most redundant programs. I will limit this paper to considering UBI in the context of the United States. As this is a primarily conceptual paper, I will not construct my argument from a specific full-bodied normative framework, such as republican or libertarian political theory. Rather, I will rely on the normative framework of an egalitarian policymaker interested in the principles of justice required for a non-ideal society, and I will hold that a nonideal society is one without institutions that fully correct for unequal access to the means of production and inequalities of natural ability.[5] The United States, of course, is one such nonideal society. As such, I write from a framework that (1) recognizes the inability of current institutions to meet the basic requirements of a social contract that requires all citizens, regardless of race, gender, or class, to be treated equally, and (2) strives to evaluate policies by their success in treating all citizens as moral equals while still protecting citizens’ basic freedoms. The Conflict Between Freedom and Reciprocity While UBI offers a radical but simple proposition to provide a basic level of economic security for all regardless of one’s history of paid work, it also appears to contradict the social norm of reciprocity: the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able. The idea of reciprocity is often incorporated as a central tenet in theories of justice, such as in John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, as well as in economic theory, as in Adam Smith’s theory that reciprocity serves as a social invisible hand that allows the free market to function. On a societal level, one might say that citizens internalize the idea of reciprocity by performing paid work, paying taxes, and performing civic duties, while receiving government benefits in the form of public services, protection, and the insurance of government transfers in times of need. Stuart White, in his book The Civic Minimum, provides a useful account of justice as fair reciprocity. In society’s nonideal form where institutions are incapable of correcting for inequalities of natural ability, society must only meet the “threshold of basic fairness”—meaning that class inequality is minimized to the extent possible and that all citizens have access to jobs with above-poverty wages, opportunities for self-realization, and security against abuse and vulnerability. In a society that has met this threshold, citizens are required to reciprocate either in the form of paid labor or specific kinds of care work. One reason that White finds fair reciprocity to be essential is that it is both a product and stimulus of a society of democratic mutual regard, in which “individuals seek to justify their preferred political and economic institutions to others by appealing to shared basic interests, and to related principles that express a willingness to cooperate with their fellow citizens as equals.”[6] As such, White finds this form of reciprocity necessary to the social cooperation inherent in a functioning social contract. Justice as inextricably connected to reciprocity seems to be critically at odds with the unconditional freedom granted by UBI. It is most at odds with Philippe Van Parijs’s account in “Why Surfers Should be Fed,” in which Van Parijs argues that the most central tenet of justice is not reciprocity, but rather “real freedom.”[7] Under this conception of justice, society ought to maximize individuals’ ability to pursue their own conception of the good life, including what they might want to do in the future. This would imply that even able-bodied individuals who decide to spend all their time surfing (i.e., not concretely contributing to society) deserve a basic income just as much as those who spend time working in various ways to contribute to society and the funding of basic income. His argument centers on the following provocative thought exercise: Consider Crazy and Lazy, two identically talented but rather differently disposed characters. Crazy is keen to earn a high income and works a lot... Lazy is far less excited by the prospect of a high income and has decided to take it easy. With the Basic Income at the highest feasible level… Crazy is rather miserable because her net income falls far short of the income she would like to have. Lazy however is blissful.[8] Our traditional understanding of reciprocity would say that Crazy is being exploited by Lazy, whom we might see as free-riding off of the hard work of Crazy. Van Parijs turns this argument on its head with his Job Assets Argument, in which he asserts that jobs are an asset essential to real freedom, and that in our arguably non-Walrasian world, there will remain “morally arbitrary inequality in opportunity” between those lucky enough to be employed, and the involuntarily unemployed.[9] Thus, it might be Crazy, not Lazy, who has unsustainable preferences, and perhaps individuals like Lazy deserve to live off of their share of capital rents that have been monopolized by individuals like Crazy. Whether or not one believes Van Parijs’s Job Assets argument, Lazy is still exploiting Crazy by free-riding off of the work of Crazy, thereby violating the norm of reciprocity. Van Parijs does not try to imply that Lazy is not exploiting Crazy; rather he argues that Crazy has also exploited Lazy in an equal if not more severe way. Crazy’s exploitation of Lazy, however, is an issue that White finds to be based in the structural inequalities of society that cannot be directly solved by basic income. Regardless of whose understanding of asset distribution one believes, the debate between White and Van Parijs demonstrates that there is a clear and serious tension between reciprocity, as it has been traditionally defined, and real freedom. Real freedom, by definition, places the individual’s ability to realize their own potential above all else, including reciprocal obligations. Thus, a basic income that prioritized individuals’ real freedom could make no promise that recipients would make specific contributions in return if these contributions conflicted with the recipients’ ability to realize their real freedom. To resolve this tension, it is necessary to critically examine what definitions of reciprocity and freedom are those most necessitated by the pragmatic justice of an egalitarian policymaker. A Republican Re-Conception of Freedom In this section, I assert that real freedom is the inappropriate freedom to be juxtaposed with reciprocity, both because real freedom is nearly impossible to measure and because republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom in a nonideal society. Republican freedom is defined as freedom from nondomination and independence from arbitrary power. Real freedom, as defined by Van Parijs, necessitates not only the negative freedom required by republican freedom, but also the resources and capacities to carry out one’s will.[10] First, it seems nearly impossible to measure whether or not real freedom is being maximized in a society, unless one makes the assumption that income can be translated to real freedom on a one-to-one basis. How is it possible to measure the achievement of individuals being as free as possible to do what they might want to do? While there are some ways to estimate achievement of republican freedom, such as the number of workers with basic protections or changing poverty rates, it seems impossible to measure real freedom without assuming that income and real freedom share a monotonic relationship.[11] Though we cannot expect an exact measurement of whether or not a society is meeting the goal set by a theory of justice, such as equality, it does seem important to be able to at least approximate the extent to which we are meeting that goal in order to reassess and reevaluate policies. For real freedom, this process of approximation seems impossible. Second, republican freedom deserves moral priority over real freedom even under the most base egalitarian framework. Philip Petit defines republican freedom as nondomination, or the absence of unreasoned control.[12] Under a republican conception of freedom, the protection of individuals’ negative liberty (e.g., the freedom from exploitation and violation) is prioritized over the protection of individuals’ positive liberty—like the freedom to choose to spend one’s day surfing. Elizabeth Anderson critiques Van Parijs for not considering the fact that certain freedoms might deserve to be considered more worthy of defense than others. In explaining what freedoms are worth defending, Anderson says: What we owe [to each other] are not the means to generic freedom but the social conditions of the particular, concrete freedoms that are instrumental to life in relations of equality with others. We owe each other the rights, institutions, social norms [and] public goods … to exercise the capabilities necessary for functioning as equals in a democratic state.[13] In stating this, Anderson asserts that in the context of UBI, republican freedom is more morally defensible than real freedom. To an extent this seems to be true. An argument for real freedom could easily be co-opted by the wealthy asserting that any form of taxation is an affront to their real freedom, which may consist of purchasing multimillion-dollar yachts. Cases such as this would seem to erode the foundation for a social contract grounded in some idea of reciprocity, as any level of tax or contribution necessary to fund the freedom of the disadvantaged could be seen as an undeserved attack on the real freedom of the advantaged. It would seem more morally desirable to an egalitarian policymaker to first protect individuals from base levels of oppression—such as a woman who can leave an abusive relationship or an immigrant who can leave an exploitative job due to UBI—before protecting an unmeasurable freedom to do that which one might want to do. In Stuart White’s ideal world, in which all citizens already possess egalitarian social rights and in which institutions have the capacity to correct for inequalities of ability, there seems to be a reason for thoughtful debate on the relative moral priority deserved by real freedom and republican freedom. Increasing equality in individuals’ sense of real freedom constitutes a necessary later step in treating all citizens as moral equals. However, in the nonideal society of the United States, republican freedom is both the freedom most deserving of moral prioritization for anyone concerned with egalitarian values and the freedom that is most compatible with reciprocity. As demonstrated by the yacht example, real freedom will often create conflict with even the broadest definition of reciprocity. However, republican freedom will rarely create this same conflict. In fact, one might even argue that protecting people from base levels of oppression and domination empowers people to better reciprocate, rather than removing the impetus to do so. Once society moves closer to White’s ideal society, it will be appropriate to reconsider the prioritization of real freedom. Until then, there is a hierarchical order of priority in which, to meet Stuart White’s “threshold of basic fairness,” republican freedom ought to be prioritized over real freedom. An Egalitarian Re-Conception of Reciprocity Although prioritizing republican freedom over real freedom has brought us closer to reconciling freedom and reciprocity, there remains the issue of what precisely we ought to mean by reciprocity. Reciprocity, most generally, is the idea that those who enjoy a share of the benefits of social cooperation owe a corresponding contribution to that society in return, as long as they are able.[14] If we take the existing structures of welfare benefits in the US as a model of what it means to reciprocate in our society, then reciprocation largely means to have paid work, to have recently had paid work, or to actively be in search of paid work. Paid work, as valued by the current structure of policies, is elevated as the most—if not the only—legitimate form of reciprocity. This constitutes an unacceptably exclusive form of reciprocity for a theory of justice concerned with treating all individuals as moral equals. Large parts of society are excluded from a narrow definition of reciprocity that focuses on the economic contributions made through paid labor in the form of taxes. The most excluded cohort is the severely disabled, who are mostly unable to obtain paying jobs to economically contribute to society. According to Eva Kittay, to assume (as does John Rawls) that individuals are “normal” and cooperating members of society and that justice for disabled individuals can be determined at a later point is to fail to meet a standard of justice in which principles apply equally to citizens capable of fully cooperating and those unable to cooperate.[15] That standard of justice is one which treats all citizens as moral equals. A second cohort that is excluded by a narrowly-focused definition of economic reciprocity is those who perform unpaid labor in the home, primarily women. This exclusion has been noted by feminist proponents of basic income who lament the androcentric basis of the current social safety net.[16] The US welfare system is almost entirely built on such androcentric norms; a number of benefits are conditioned on whether the recipient engages in paid work outside the home, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, Unemployment Insurance, the Child Tax Credit, and to an extent, Social Security. Single mothers are particularly penalized by the system’s current structure. These women are often forced to choose between taking care of their child and not having enough to live off, or working enough to pay for child care, not seeing their child enough, and still barely having enough to live off. Unsurprisingly, the poverty rate for single-mother families in 2016 was 35.6%, or five times the rate for married-couple families.[17] A narrow definition of reciprocity that excludes the disabled, women performing unpaid labor, and others such as children and the elderly, is unacceptable under an egalitarian framework in which humans are to be treated as moral equals. To solely focus on reciprocity as an economic activity is to neglect the fact that such economic participation would be impossible without the unpaid and socially necessary caregiving work within homes. In fact, one could argue that such a narrow-minded definition of reciprocity performs the precise injustice that reciprocity seeks to avoid: exploitation, in which those performing unpaid and socially unrecognized contributions to society are exploited by those who are performing paid contributions enabled by unpaid, unrecognized care givers. Lastly, the number of people excluded from a narrow definition of reciprocity as purely economic will only grow to be more unsustainable in a future scenario in which available employment decreases and more are employed involuntarily or part time. Basic income, by definition, does not depend on a form of reciprocity that only recognizes monetary contributions. Instead, basic income recognizes a more inclusive form of reciprocity in which recipients can reciprocate in a number of ways: child care, volunteering, civic participation, accepting lower paying jobs, and more. In this way, basic income not only acknowledges that there are multiple ways to contribute to society, but also is forward-looking in recognition of the fact that access to dependable, well-paying wage employment may decrease in future scenarios of technological unemployment. Participation Income vs. Universal Basic Income: A Matter of Trust We have now clarified the moral priority of republican freedom over real freedom under the framework of a pragmatic, egalitarian policymaker, as well as the need for a more inclusive definition of reciprocity. A policy that prioritizes republican freedom over real freedom would presumably first focus on offering a basic level of income (i.e., an amount sufficient to offer citizens the ability to “say no” to oppressive environments and situations, but perhaps not enough to do all that which they might want to). A policy that rejects the current exclusive definition of reciprocity would either explicitly expand reciprocity beyond financial contributions to include specific forms of participation or be entirely value neutral in allowing for a variety of interpretations of reciprocity. At first glance, Anthony Atkinson’s participation income appears to be the version of UBI which most directly addresses the tension between freedom and reciprocity inherent in basic income. Participation income is basic, like in UBI, but is conditional on “participation,” which includes a broad range of activities ranging from employment or self-employment to education, training, care-taking, or volunteer work. The condition necessitates “neither payment nor work,” and thus greatly expands what is meant by social contribution, despite not quite being value neutral.[18] Conceptually, participation income succeeds at addressing the serious concern regarding basic income’s threat to reciprocity by making reciprocity a condition of UBI. Furthermore, Atkinson’s broad definition of participation mitigates most concerns about the groups that are arbitrarily excluded from current interpretations of reciprocity. Of course, practically enforcing the conditions of participation income would be a public administration nightmare. It would be impossible for a government to measure whether or not a citizen made their “quota” of contribution hours for a month without enacting an immense surveillance state that would deprive from citizens the very freedom that basic income is supposed to expand. Nevertheless, participation income succeeds in providing a useful framing mechanism by which UBI proponents can assuage public concerns regarding the effect of basic income on traditional reciprocity. However, there is also a normative trade-off for this improved political framing. By making income conditional on immeasurable outcomes, rather than trusting citizens’ own sense of justice to constructively contribute to society, participation income fails to endow citizens with trust. This notion is both unreasonable and undesirable. It is unreasonable to think that citizens will wholly stop constructively contributing to society if the cash amount is in fact “basic”; one would only be able to live an extremely simple life off of $12,000 per year (it should be noted that the federal poverty level income for a family of four is $24,600, or about $12,300 per adult). It is undesirable because participation income continues to rely on the norm of distrust that is a foundation for today’s conditional welfare system. If UBI is to constitute the beginnings of a new, more just social contract, that contract cannot be created without the development of trust. In his essay “How can we trust our fellow citizens?” Claus Offe defines trust as “the belief that others, through their action or inaction, will contribute to my/our well-being and refrain from inflicting damage upon me/us.”[19] Offe notes that trust is often self-stabilizing; in other words, being trusted creates within us moral obligations that make us act in a trustworthy fashion in return. There is already some degree of empirical evidence that unconditional income creates self-stabilizing trust. For example, in a World Bank report reviewing 19 global experiments in unconditional cash income, only one study showed a statistically significant increase in the purchase of temptation goods such as alcohol and tobacco. Many studies actually showed statistically significant decreases in consumption of alcohol and tobacco. This result seems to further suggest that when people are trusted, they often act according to the moral obligations that receiving that trust creates.[20] Furthermore, in the Canadian Mincome experiment, participants stated they felt greater trust in their government and in themselves, with one respondent saying that “[basic income] trusts the Canadian people and leaves a man or woman, their pride.”[21] Alaska’s Permanent Dividend program offers insights similar to those of the Canadian Mincome experiment. Due to abundant oil production and revenue, the Alaskan government has, since the 1980s, paid out an annual dividend of around $1,000 to all eligible Alaskan residents. The majority of residents in Alaska now say that that they would prefer higher taxes as opposed to ending the Alaska Permanent Dividend,[22] indicating a new trust in government and fellow citizens. Economic research has recently showed that the Alaska Permanent Dividend has had no effect on full-time employment, and has actually increased part-time work by 17%.[23] The experiments in Canada and Alaska not only show that basic income has the potential to increase trust in others and the government, but also that there is little evidence of unconditional basic income negatively affecting economic reciprocity. As early experiments in basic income are beginning to show, the statement of trust made by unconditional income may reinforce the very reciprocity that many are concerned the unconditionality in basic income will destruct. Thus, while participation income provides useful political framing that connects basic income to reciprocity and boldly expands our definition of reciprocity, it fails to constitute either a practicable policy solution or an ideal toward which we ought to strive as a society. If we truly desire to create a fairer, more inclusive social contract, it must begin with trusting our fellow citizens. UBI is precisely the policy with which to create that new standard of trust. As experiments demonstrate, that trust will likely pay off. Conclusion I have shown that, for a theory of justice striving to treat individuals as moral equals, a republican conception of freedom is more appropriate than a conception of real freedom. I have also shown that current definitions of reciprocity are inadequate in treating all individuals as moral equals. I have compared the capacity of unconditional basic income and participation income to respond to this tension, and have asserted that only unconditional basic income succeeds in rectifying an exclusionary social contract by endowing all participants with trust. As the social contract currently exists, UBI may not be the most efficient way to reduce inequality. However, only UBI provides the groundwork for a new social contract in which not only freedom and reciprocity are reconcilable, but citizens are also trusted to meaningfully contribute to society. If current experiments in basic income continue and do not significantly diverge from the findings of ones previously conducted in Africa, Alaska, and Canada, this normative conclusion will continue to be furnished with empirical evidence about the self-stabilizing nature of trust endowed by UBI. Endnotes [1] A play on Philippe Van Parijs’s book title, What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch? [2] David Calnitsky, “‘More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 54. [3] Stefan Liebig and Steffan Mau, “A Legitimate Guaranteed Minimum Income?” in Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America, ed. Guy Standing, 210-224. (London: Anthem, 2004), 210. [4] Catriona Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, s.v. “Reciprocity,” Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. [5] Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17. [6] White, The Civic Minimum, 17. [7] Philippe Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,”Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (1991): 103. [8] Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed,” 105. [9] White, The Civic Minimum, 156. [10] Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed,” 104. [11] Brian Barry, “UBI and the Work Ethic,” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.5/barry.html. [12] Philip Petit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007): 4. [13] Elizabeth Anderson,“Forum Response: A Basic Income for All,” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/elizabeth-anderson-optional-freedoms. [14] Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 1. [15] Mackenzie, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 7. [16] Almaz Zelleke, “Institutionalizing the Universal Caretaker Through a Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 3 (2008): 2. [17] Kayla Patrick, “National Snapshot: Poverty Among Women & Families, 2016,” National Women’s Law Center: Washington, D.C., 2017. [18] Anthony Atkinson, “The Case for a Participation Income,” The Political Quarterly 67, no. 1 (January 1996): 69. [19] Claus Offe, “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” in Democracy and Trust, ed. Mark Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47. [20] David Evans and Anna Popova, “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6886, The World Bank Africa Region, Office of the Chief Economist, Washington, D.C., 2014: 23. [21] David Calnitsky, “‘More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 61. [22] Michael Coren, “Alaska Shows Even People in the Most Conservative States Prefer a Basic Income to Lower Taxes,” Quartz, June 30, 2017. [23] Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu, “The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund,” NBER Working Paper No. 24312, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2018. References Anderson, Elizabeth. “Forum Response: A Basic Income for All.” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/elizabeth-anderson-optional-freedoms . Atkinson, Anthony. “The Case for a Participation Income.” The Political Quarterly 67, no. 1 (January 1996): 67-70. Barry, Brian. “UBI and the Work Ethic.” The Boston Review, October, 2000, http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.5/barry.html . Calnitsky, David. “’More Normal than Welfare’: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience.” Canadian Sociological Association 53, no. 1 (February 2016): 26-71. Coren, Michael. “Alaska Shows Even People in the Most Conservative States Prefer a Basic Income to Lower Taxes.” Quartz, June 30, 2017. Evans, David and Anna Popova. “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6886, The World Bank Africa Region, Office of the Chief Economist, Washington, D.C., 2014. Jones, Damon and Ioana Marinescu. “The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund.” NBER Working Paper No. 24312, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2018. Liebig, Stefan and Steffan Mau. “A Legitimate Guaranteed Minimum Income?” In Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America, edited by Guy Standing, 210-224. London: Anthem, 2004. Mackenzie, Catriona. The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, s.v. “Reciprocity.” Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Offe, Claus. “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” In Democracy and Trust, edited by Mark Warren, 42-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patrick, Kayla. “National Snapshot: Poverty Among Women & Families, 2016.” National Women’s Law Center: Washington, D.C., 2017. Petit, Philip. “A Republican Right to Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007): 1-8. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Van Parijs, Philippe. “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 2 (1991): 101-131. White, Stuart. The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zelleke, Almaz. “Institutionalizing the Universal Caretaker Through a Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 3 (2008): 1-9.

Can You Rationally Disagree with a Prediction Market? Nick Whitaker Brown University April 2021 This paper brings together two literatures: That of the efficient market hypothesis in economics and the relatively recent literature on disagreement in epistemology. In economics, there has been a substantial discussion of how markets aggregate knowledge through prices. In the philosophy of disagreement literature, there is significant agreement that you should defer to those with more knowledge and better judgments than you. I argue that, given these two conclusions, we are epistemically bound to defer to prediction markets in most situations, though I discuss possible exceptions. On the website PredictIt, one can find betting markets for a number of future political events like “Who will be the 2020 Democratic nominee?”, “Will Maduro be in office at the end of 2019?”, and “Will Trump be impeached in his first term?” Shares can be bought at and sold at floating prices between $.01 and $.99, and pay out a dollar if the bet wins. Share prices can be converted into probabilities, i.e. a $0.25 share represents a P(.25). I pose the question of how a rational person must change their credence when they encounter a prediction market like those on PredictIt. I will argue that under almost all normal circumstances, it is not rational to disagree with a well-functioning market. In fact, one should adopt the credence suggested by the prediction market. As I argue, a well-functioning prediction market is, on a given issue, almost always one’s epistemic superior with regard to that issue because it tends to incorporate all available information and aggregate that information effectively in its suggested credence. Given that you are likely not incorporating all available information nor aggregating that information into your credence, you are in a worse epistemic position about a given issue than its prediction market is. Thus, upon encountering a prediction market, you are rationally bound to adopt the credence suggested by it. I see this conclusion as emerging naturally from the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) literature in financial economics and the burgeoning disagreement literature in epistemology, but I think the combined implications have been underappreciated. For example, together they imply that things which normally guide our credence on a given issue – like pundits’ predictions or our interpretations of poll data – ought to hold little influence, if any, over our credence relative to the credence suggested by a prediction market. In many cases, the suggested credence of a prediction market will be surprising. Often, one is inclined to reject it. After looking at enough prediction markets, on will almost certainly find a suggested credence that he or she is convinced is wildly wrong. Nevertheless, I will argue that we should adopt the credence implied by markets, despite how reluctant we may feel. Finally, as I will argue, if one refuses to adopt the credence implied by a betting market and they are not averse to betting, the most rational course of action would be to bet on that market. The Market as an Epistemic Tool: A Short History Markets are efficient. This is suggested by basic economic theory: Given competitive markets and free entry, if people knew the price of an asset would rise or fall, they would buy or sell the asset until the market price of the asset reflected that information. This obviously cannot be exactly the case in reality; no markets are perfectly competitive, and entry is never completely free. Yet just how efficient markets are has been surprising to many, as this fact has been established by over half a century of economic theory and empirical evidence. There are important outstanding questions about how strong a claim “efficiency” should imply, and whether there are times when markets are not efficient, referred to as market anomalies. But, let us begin by reviewing the history of the theory. Efficient Markets Hypothesis was popularized by University of Chicago economist Eugene Fama. The idea began as an outgrowth of his dissertation, published in The Journal of Business in 1965 as “The Behavior of Stock Prices.” The paper argues that stock prices are essentially a “random walk” in that the “patterns” perceived in the past performance of a stock in no way indicate the stock’s future performance. Thus, for asset price movement to be a random walk, the future price needs to be independent of past prices. As Fama writes: In statistical terms independence means that the probability distribution for the price change during time period t is independent of the sequence of price changes during previous time periods. That is, knowledge of the sequence of price changes leading up to time period t is of no help in assessing the probability distribution for the price change during time period t. (35) Given that future prices are independent from past ones, no amount of study of the past performance of a stock will allow one to predict future performance. To the extent that the future is known, we should expect that information to be already incorporated into the asset price. Thus, the question becomes: Why are future prices independent of past prices? It is this question that led Fama to his work on EMH. Roughly speaking, if markets are efficient, only what is truly unknown is not incorporated into an asset’s price, and thus future movements in that price are random. As investors with information about the future buy and sell a given asset, the price of that asset would come to reflect all available information about the future. In 1970, Fama published his most cited paper, “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work” in The Journal of Finance. In the paper, Fama clearly defined the terms on which a market can be considered efficient: “A market in which prices always ‘fully reflect’ available information is called ‘efficient.’” As this cannot be exactly true, Fama proposes it rather as a null hypothesis in the paper. To test efficiency more precisely, Fama delineates three versions of the hypothesis: The weak form, the semi-strong form, and the strong form. The weak form states that markets are efficient if future performance cannot be predicted from past prices. The semi-strong form states that markets are efficient if future performance cannot be predicted based on any publicly available information. The strong form states that the future performance cannot be predicted even with insider information. As the title of the paper suggests, Fama discusses the theoretical and empirical foundations for our beliefs. The theoretical work is interesting, but perhaps not worth exploring here. Essentially, there are different mathematical models which are able to test different versions (weak, semi-strong, strong) of the hypothesis. As Fama explains, early studies mostly focused on the weak version, essentially testing for the independence of new prices from historic prices. As the weak version gradually became established, research turned to the semi-strong version, which can be thought of as the question of how quickly newly public information is incorporated into market prices. Fama finds that tests of the semi-strong EMH lend “considerable support” to the hypothesis (408). The strong hypothesis had not been extensively studied at the time, but limited evidence did show that insiders were able to generate super-normal returns, and thus asset markets are likely not strong-form efficient. As Fama concludes, “For the purposes of most investors the efficient markets model seems a good first (and second) approximation to reality” (416). Since its publication, Fama’s account of EMH has faced decades of empirical scrutiny and has become a major topic of debate in finance. This is especially true as EMH challenges the value proposition of active money managers, who charge their clients fees to supposedly “beat the market.” According to EMH, their ability to do this is essentially as good as anyone else’s. Thus, many have sought to demonstrate market inefficiencies of which savvy investors could take advantage. There is a certain irony to this process, as whenever an inefficiency becomes known it becomes accounted for in the market prices and thus the prices cease to be inefficient. Conversely, in the event that everyone believed markets were efficient and invested passively, markets would become inefficient. A major meta-analysis of EMH literature was conducted in 2002 by Burton G. Malkiel, one of Fama’s coauthors. As Malkiel writes, if market anomalies were abound, we would expect that actively managed funds would be able to capitalize on these anomalies and consistently make supernormal returns. Thus, we can test market efficiency by looking at whether actively managed funds have been able to outperform diversified index funds. When fees charged by actively managed funds are considered, investment firms have actually underperformed relative to the market (Malkiel 2002). This suggest that even to the extent markets are inefficient, we are bad at consistently identifying these inefficiencies. Beyond Finance: Prediction Markets The key insight of EMH is an epistemic one: Markets tend to reflect all publicly available information. Though the theory has been traditionally framed as a theory of asset pricing, research was quickly done as to what information about the future could be gleaned from asset prices. In 1975, Fama published a paper on “Short-Term Interest Rates as Predictors of Inflation” to do just that. Since then, the idea has been taken further, to structure assets for the explicit purpose of efficiently aggregating information about the likelihood of future events. Economist Robin Hanson has been a major proponent of this, proposing that we develop “prediction markets,” sometimes referred to as “idea futures” or “information markets”. Typically, a prediction market is structured as a binary option that pays out either 0% or 100%. Thus, the price of bets can be converted into credence. If the prediction market is quickly incorporating all publicly available information, as EMH would suggest, then we can expect the credences suggested by the prediction market to be maximally informed. Relative Epistemic Positioning Given the epistemic power of prediction markets, we may ask how we should respond when we disagree with the credence suggested by the prediction market. Perhaps the initial question in any disagreement scenario should be: “Are you in a better position to judge B than your interlocutor is?” This question can be answered by considering a number of factors. Bryan Frances, in his book Disagreement, enumerates a number of considerations for epistemic positioning. Some of his main criteria are: • Cognitive ability had while answering the question • Evidence brought to bear in answering the question • Relevant background knowledge • Relevant biases After these factors, we can follow the disagreement literature in categorizing our interlocutor as being an epistemic peer, superior, or inferior on the given issue B. With this in mind, we can ask a central question: Given the efficiency of prediction markets, what is their epistemic positioning relative to us? If prediction markets are approximately semi-strong efficient, then, by definition, they are incorporating all public information into their implied credence. In most circumstances, one’s credence is formed with less information than all publicly available information. Depending on the topic, the difference in information between you and a given prediction market may be small or vast, but regardless, the prediction market is likely your epistemic superior in this regard. Additionally, a prediction market is almost certainly has better judgment than you do. We can think of good judgment as aggregating information in an accurate way. Implicit in any bet is the bettor’s weighting of his or her evidence. Just as a bettor would have an opportunity to profit on unique evidence they possessed, so to could they profit from weighting the evidence in a more accurate way than others. For example, we can imagine a prediction market on a mayoral race for a town. Let us assume that all of the relevant information about the race was comprised of three polls, and everyone betting in the market was aware of this information. Though there is no disparity between the bettors this information, a bettor could gain an edge by having the best sense of which of the polls were more accurate than others. By making these bets, he would push the betting market towards aggregating the poll results in the most accurate way. A better would be incentivized to do this, as they could profit off of a correct opinion until it was fully represented in the market price. Indeed, we could think of good judgement (or accurately aggregating information) as another type of information, higher-order information. So, we should expect a prediction market to not only to be incorporating more information, but also to be incorporating more higher order information leading to prediction markets aggregating that information more accurately. Thus, we can classify prediction markets as epistemic superiors on their relevant proposition under normal circumstances. Disagreeing with Epistemic Superiors In his paper “Reflection and Disagreement,” Adam Elga discusses how we should be guided by our epistemic superiors. He gives the example of the weather person, to whom we defer completely. If the weather person says there is a 60% chance of rain today, my credence that there will be rain today becomes 60%. Elga calls this treating the weather person as an “expert.” When someone is an expert with regard to weather, “Conditional on her having probability x in any weather-proposition, my probability in that proposition is also x” (2). As Elga writes, this means deferring to the expert on two accounts: Information and judgement. By deferring to the weather person with respect to information, we admit that she has more information (regarding weather) than we have. By deferring to the weather person with respect to judgement, we admit that she has a better manner of forming opinions (regarding weather) than us. Presumably, some people or things should be treated as experts and some people or things should not be. If a person or thing does deserve to be treated as an expert on a given domain, we should defer to their credence. If a person or thing does not deserve expert treatment, perhaps they or it should play some other role in our credence formulation. As Elga points out, there are two obvious ways the forecaster could cease to be an expert, either by failing to have more information or in failing to have better judgement. If I knew that the weather person’s radar was broken, and thus her information was corrupted, she would cease to be an expert. Similarly, if she were very drunk such that her weather judgment was inhibited, she would also cease to be an expert. Given the previous discussion of EMH and prediction markets, I will assume that they are, in general, incorporating more information and better judgment into their suggested credence than a given individual is. Thus, a prediction market is an expert with regard to its topic, and one should normally defer to it. However, just as there are situations in which a weather person fails to be an expert with regard to weather, we might expect that there are situations in which prediction markets cease to be experts. Let’s discuss a few potential situations. Information Errors For any market to function, it must be sufficiently thick, as opposed to being a thin market, one with few buyers and sellers. If I set up a prediction market on a subject and only allow three of my friends to bet on it, the market would have only as much information as the three of my friends have, and thus could not be considered an expert. For my purposes, I will limit the following discussion to thick, functioning prediction markets, though thin markets would constitute exceptions to my arguments here. One initial first information error is that you might be privy to important insider information that has not been incorporated into prediction market prices. If that were the case, the prediction market would cease being an expert to you on account of it lacking knowledge you have. However, whether there is insider information that has not been incorporated into the price is a question of whether prediction markets are efficient in the semi-strong sense or strong sense. As has been discussed, stock markets have not been found to be efficient in the strong sense. However, in the stock market, buying and selling stocks based on insider information is illegal under insider trading laws. In many prediction markets, which are not regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, this is not the case. So, one might expect more insider information is incorporated. Indeed, there is a substantial question of whether the insider information you possess is not already part of the price. If it is, your disagreement with the suggested credence of the prediction market may not be justified. So, there is a substantial question of whether your “insider information” has not already been incorporated into the suggested credence of the prediction market. However, let’s assume that the information is actually something only you possess. How then, should the prediction market be treated? In this case, Elga argues that we can treat the prediction market as a “guru.” In guru cases, rather than accepting a credence unconditionally as we do with an expert, we can accept their credence conditionally. We can formalize this following Elga. Let H represent a given proposition and P’ represent the prediction market’s probability function. In the expert prediction market case: P (H| Prediction Market has P’) = P’ (H) In the guru prediction market case where “X” is your insider information: P(H|Prediction Market has P’) = P’ (H| X) Thus, Elga advises we conditionalize the guru’s probability on our unique information. So we truly have unique information, we can conditionalize the prediction market’s implied credence on it to form our optimal credence. How exactly this conditionalization should work could be simple or complex. If you were the doctor of a presidential candidate and, after an appointment with the candidate, you came to the conclusion that the candidate had a terminal illness and would die before the election, P’(H | X) would be near zero, as we would obviously expect the prediction market to suggest something similar if the information was known. However, if you were a friend of a presidential candidate, and the candidate told you: “I have just decided that tomorrow I will be announcing new policy X. I have not told anyone besides you.” How could you conditionalize a prediction market’s suggested credence on this information? It is hard to say. Perhaps you could see if any other candidate had announced a similar policy, or look at how the policy was polling, to try to get a sense of whether your candidate friend more or less likely to be elected after he or she announces the policy. Yet, this will always require some degree of guesswork and judgement. At the same time, this problem is common to conditionalizing on other types of evidence. Let us assume that your P(raintomorrow)=.5, and your friend said, “What would your credence be if I told you my Dad guaranteed it would rain tomorrow?” You might have some sense of this depending on what you knew about your friend’s father, but some degree of fuzziness here seems inevitable. Another possibility the market might have anomalies or biases which would allow for a rational disagreement with its suggested credence. The most commonly discussed bias in prediction markets is called “Favorite-Long-Shot Bias.” The bias is an empirical phenomenon; bettors have been known to over-value “long-shot” bets relative to favored ones. For example, the 1/50 horse at the horse race might actually perform closer to 1/100. Both rational expectations and behavioral explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon as it violates EMH. The nature of the explanations themselves is not relevant to the current discussion, but the existence of favorite-longshot bias does suggest that if a prediction market is suspected to be manifesting the bias, one should treat the market as a guru and conditionalize the market’s implied credence on the bias: P (Long-Shot | Prediction Market has P’) = P’ (Long-Shot | Long-Shot Bias) We may not be able to conditionalize perfectly, but we could look to the typical effect size of long-shot bias in similar prediction markets, and try to work towards the conditional probability from there. Thus, the bias can at least be mitigated. A final information error might be that a prediction market is being fed bad information by a manipulating bettor, who, knowing that people were using the prediction market inform their view about the future, seeks to manipulate the prediction market. Hanson discusses this potential problem in 2007 paper, “A Manipulator Can Aid Prediction Market Accuracy.” As the title implies, Hanson comes to the surprising conclusion that manipulators not only do not impede the functioning of a prediction market, they make it more accurate. As Hanson suggests, we can think of a potential manipulator as adding “noise” into the market. Because of this noise, the expected return on accurate information increases, thereby attracting more investors. With more investors, more information comes into the market, making it more accurate. However, if you did suspected that other investors were not capitalizing on the manipulator and correcting the market, you could also conditionalize on the suggested credence of the market towards what the suggested credence would look like without a manipulator. Though there are potential information related risks, they seem to be sufficiently uncommon that one should not expect them in normal circumstances. Insider information is possible, though may not actually be truly non-public. Prediction market biases may exist, but can be accounted for. Market manipulation seems counterproductive. Information related errors should be looked for, but they are not able to diminish the established informative power of prediction markets. Judgment Errors The second type of errors, judgment errors, relate to the ways in which information is aggregated. Markets are one way of aggregating information, but there are others, like deliberation. What if you came to your credence as part of a deliberating group, incorporating the knowledge of many into your credence? Let us even assume, for the sake of argument, that your deliberating group had access to all the same information as all of the bettors in a given prediction market. If your credence differs from the credence suggested from the betting market, would it be rational to conciliate? Cass Sunstein takes on this issue in a 2006 paper, “Deliberating Groups Versus Prediction Markets.” Sunstein points out that this is a particularly important case, as many of our decisions and credences come about through deliberation with others. Why should we expect this deliberative process to be desirable, especially relative to prediction markets? Indeed, as Sunstein argues, we should not expect deliberation to work better. We should actually expect it to be a less efficient way to aggregate information. Sunstein focuses primarily on two reasons: Group members failing to disclose what they know out of deference to the public information announced by others and social pressures leading members to not dissent from the group. As Sunstein writes, “Groups often amplify rather than correct individual errors; emphasize shared information at the expense of unshared information; fall victim to cascade effects; and tend to end up in more extreme positions in line with the predeliberation tendencies of their members” (192-3). On the other hand, prediction markets provide potential financial reward for individually held information and contrarian opinions, succeeding exactly where deliberation fails. Indeed, the profit motives makes uncommon knowledge especially profitable, where social, deliberative situations make group approved, desirable information most valuable. Thus, deliberation is, on average, a worse method of aggregation. One still ought to defer to the judgment of the prediction market. What about if you create another information aggregating mechanism to inform your credence on a given issue that you think may outperform a prediction market? There have been two notable recent attempts at this: Nate Silver in his elections forecasting and Philip Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project. In 2008, Nate Silver rose to prominence by using Bayesian statistical techniques to aggregate poll results, leading to highly accurate electoral predictions. Silver’s work provides a case study in whether advanced statistical techniques can aggregate information more effectively a prediction market. In 2009, economist David Rothschild tested Silver’s prediction against those suggested by a leading prediction market at the time, Entrade. He concludes, “I demonstrate that early in the cycle and in not-certain races debiased prediction market-based forecasts provide more accurate probabilities of victory and more information than debiased poll-based forecasts” (895). Rothschild’s technique is interesting. When he debiases Silver’s results, they become more accurate than the raw prediction market results. But, when he accounts for the favorite-longshot bias discussed earlier in the prediction market results, the debiased prediction market becomes most accurate. To put this into Elga’s framework, the prediction market makes for a better guru than Silver. Silver addresses the study directly in his book, The Signal and the Noise. He takes some issues with Rothschild’s methodology, that he debiases the prediction market results, and, more importantly, that the prediction markets move in response to Silver’s poll aggregation. Yet nevertheless, as Silver writes, “Over the long run, however, the aggregate forecast has often beaten even the very best individual forecast.” Silver is skeptical of the current state of prediction markets, thinking that there is not yet enough competition and the markets are still relatively thin, but is open to their potential superiority. Thus, Silver asserts the earlier caveat, that the current set of prediction markets, given the current legal restrictions on them, may suffer from the market thinness discussed. Philip Tetlock’s work on forecasting has also become an interesting potential challenge to prediction markets. In Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project, he sought out people who were outstanding at predicting the future over a number if years. He called this group “superforecasters.” In his book on the subject, Superforcasting, Tetlock describes testing the results of teams of superforecasters against prediction markets. His results: “Teams of ordinary forecasters beat the wisdom of the crowd by about 10%. Prediction markets beat ordinary teams by about 20%. And superteams beat prediction markets by 15% to 30%” (207). The result is fairly surprising, given the power of prediction markets. But, it is perhaps not entirely fair. As Tetlock admits, “I can already hear the protests from my colleagues in finance that the only reason the superteams beat the prediction markets was that our markets lacked liquidity: real money wasn’t at stake and we didn’t have a critical mass of traders. They may be right” (207). Interestingly, the argument is very similar to that of Silver, that the relatively small scale of current prediction markets suggests they are not operating as well as they could be. So, if you are a superforecaster working with a team of other superforecasters, perhaps your group’s combined judgement is sufficiently better than current prediction markets that you need not defer to them. But, this may cease to be true if better prediction markets were developed. So even between the narrow cases of Silver and Tetlock, the practitioners themselves are skeptical of their own ability to beat more robust prediction markets. And, this makes sense. As soon as a strategy develops an edge on prediction markets, they are incentivized to bet on that information until their information is fully incorporated into the betting market’s price. Indeed, a betting market can, as is actually encouraged, to subsume all other deliberation mechanisms into it until it obtains maximal accuracy. Staying Steadfast Against Your Superiors Let us assume you do not adopt the credence suggested by a prediction market because you wish to remain steadfast and think the credence suggested by the prediction market is incorrect. Bryan Frances discusses a similar epistemic situation in his piece, “Philosophical Renegades,” where an amateur astronomer retains her belief that Jupiter has fewer than 10 moons even after the vast majority of professional astronomers have come to believe the planet has over 200 moons. The astronomer has no concrete reason to reject the opinions of the expert astronomer community, but perhaps would say she expects that the others are making a mistake. This is not unlike the situation one is in disagreeing with a prediction market, as the prediction market is likely aggregating all available evidence in an effective manner. To some extent, the rationality of retaining one’s credence in the face of this disagreement depends upon how much one knows about prediction markets. If he or she were unaware of their epistemic virtues, the disagreement may be justified. But, if he or she understood prediction markets, their disagreement may be blatantly irrational. There is another interesting dimension to disagreeing with prediction markets, whether that be because you remained steadfast or because you have conditionalized on the suggested credence of the prediction market. In either of these situations, you should see yourself as having the opportunity to arbitrage. Let us assume, for example, that a prediction market suggests that the chance of Donald Trump being elected is P(.42), as PredictIt suggests at the time of writing. Let us also assume that your credence in Donald Trump being reelected is (.1). Given your credence of (.1), you would be rational to take a bet at 9/1 odds or better that Trump is not reelected. A prediction market at P(.42) would offer odds at 11/8. Indeed, if you really believe your credence is (.1), this should be seen as a profitable strategy over the long run. If you do not have an adversity to betting, then you should bet. Even if you treat the prediction market as a guru and conditionalize against its suggested probability, rationality would still suggest you bet against the market, as it would have positive expected value. Conclusion The disagreement literature discusses the different ways in which we should engage with our epistemic peers, inferiors, and superiors. As I have shown, we should look to prediction markets as our epistemic superiors, and as experts or gurus in Elga’s sense. I see this as being action guiding in a number of ways. First, if we wish to have more accurate credences about future events, we should create larger scale prediction markets. Second, when we have access to sufficiently thick prediction markets, we should defer to their suggested credences. To the extent one disagrees with a prediction market suggested credence, they should bet in the market as they would have a positive expected return. Works Cited Christensen, David Phiroze, and Jennifer Lackey. The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford University Press, 2016. Elga, Adam. “Reflection and Disagreement.” Nous, vol. 41, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 478–502., doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00656.x. Fama, Eugene F. “Short-Term Interest Rates as Predictors of Inflation.” The American Economic Review, vol. 65, no. 3, June 1975, pp. 269–282., doi:10.1787/157052064225. Fama, Eugene F. “The Behavior of Stock-Market Prices.” The Journal of Business, vol. 38, no. 1, 1965, pp. 34–105., doi:10.1086/294743. Fama, Eugene F., and Burton G Malkiel. “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” The Journal of Finance, vol. 25, no. 2, May 1970, pp. 383–417., doi:10.2307/2325486. Frances, Bryan. Disagreement. Polity, 2014. Hanson, Robin, and Ryan Oprea. “A Manipulator Can Aid Prediction Market Accuracy.” Economica, vol. 76, no. 302, 2009, pp. 304–314., doi:10.1111/j.1468-0335.2008.00734.x. Hanson, Robin. “Decision Markets.” IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 14, no. 3, 1999, pp. 16–20. Malkiel, Burton G. “The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59–82., doi:10.1257/089533003321164958. Rothschild, David. “Forecasting Elections.” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 5, 2009, pp. 895–916., doi:10.1093/poq/nfp082. Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise. Penguin, 2013. Sunstein, Cass R. “Deliberating Groups versus Prediction Markets (or Hayek's Challenge to Habermas).” Episteme, vol. 3, no. 3, 2006, pp. 192–213., doi:10.3366/epi.2006.3.3.192. Tetlock, Philip E., and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Random House, 2016.

The Life Cycle of the Responsibility to Protect The Ongoing Emergence of R2P as a Norm in the International Community Maxine Dehavenon Brown University Author Fabienne Tarrant Tathyana Mello Amaral Harry Xie Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (10 pages) Introduction The “life cycle of a norm,” as presented by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, holds that for a norm to become fully accepted and internalized as the rational action in a certain situation, it must travel through three phases of existence: norm emergence, norm cascade, and norm internalization. At this point in time, there is a norm of a responsibility to protect, referred to as R2P, manifesting itself in the international community. However, it is currently stuck in the second phase of its evolution. While the actions taken by the Security Council in Bosnia represent R2P’s emergence as a norm championed by “entrepreneurs,” and the US-led NATO intervention in Libya, as well as the passing of Resolution 1764 in 2005 prove R2P’s successful passage beyond the “tipping point” into the stage of “norm cascade,” the current inaction on the part of the international community in the case of the Syrian genocide reflects the fact that the responsibility to protect has not yet become a fully realized norm to the point where it is universally recognized as the appropriate response to all human rights violations. This is due in part simply to the precedent set by the “failure” in the eyes of the international community of past invocations of R2P – a fact which is not a shortcoming of the strength of the norm, but rather of its application - but also to the structural challenges associated with allowing the application and trial of a norm to be dictated by a body as politicized as the Security Council. As reflected in the case of Syria, the veto power accorded to the P5 on the Security Council provides outliers to the acceptance of R2P, such as Russia, to hijack its trial process and stagnate its chance to become fully internalized. This paper begins with a discussion of the theoretical process by which a norm comes into being as described by Finnemore and Sikkink, followed by an application of such a process to the emerging norm of responsibility to protect through the framework provided by the cases of Bosnia, Libya and Syria. It then tackles the question of why the norm has yet to be fully internalized in the international sphere, presenting an argument for the fact that this is due to the undue power over its application given to the permanent members of the Security Council, and finally in the conclusion, it goes on to make an argument for how to overcome the incommensurate, politicized sway of the Security Council over R2P’s evolution as a norm. Theoretical Framework A norm in international relations is most commonly defined by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink in their article “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change” as a “standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity.” Such a definition provides a succinct, yet comprehensive inclusion of the major characteristics of norms, namely, their status as an ideational standard of conduct given a particular circumstance, and the universality of acceptance on the part of a certain group with respect said conduct’s legitimacy and necessity. It is also important to note, that for a standard to be considered a fully formed norm, it can’t only be acted upon physically or rhetorically by states, it must essentially be a “foregone conclusion” in the eyes of those party to it as the appropriate behavior. This distinction, though subtle, is crucial, in that it separates an emerging norm from a fully formed one; while an emerging norm is represented as such by conspicuous, conscious efforts to fulfill a standard set forward by norm entrepreneurs, an absolute norm is such because “[it is] internalized by actors and achieve[s] a “taken for granted” quality that makes conformance with the norm almost automatic.” This distinction is what separates a norm from something like a law, or a resolution; states do not just comply with it because of a positive duty to a legally or politically binding force, they comply with it as part of a negative duty to follow a principle so embedded in code of behavior as correct, that no thought goes into its action whatsoever. Finnemore and Sikkink outline in their article what has come to be known as the “life cycle” of the emergence of such a norm, or the evolution of a standard of behavior must follow in order to become a fully formed norm within the international community. This cycle has three phases. Phase one, titled “norm emergence,” is characterized by the promotion of a certain standard by what Sikkink and Finnemore call “norm entrepreneurs,” or those within the international community who could be considered “thought leaders” with respect to normative formation, through “organizational platforms” such as international institutions, NGO’s or transnational advocacy networks. The goal of such entrepreneurs during this stage is to persuade the most powerful states within the international community to accept and promote the norms they set forth, a process that is characterized by their calling attention to issues “using language that names, interprets, and dramatizes them.” The second stage in this process is characterized as the “norm cascade,” and is catalyzed by a “tipping point” when “norm entrepreneurs have persuaded a critical mass of states to become norm leaders and adopt new norms.” After this point, all other states will follow in the footsteps of those that set precedents within the international community, and a norm’s legitimacy and reputation as a standard of behavior is strengthened through socialization, institutionalization and demonstration. As mentioned above, while this stage may appear to produce fully formed norms, the limiting factor of the complete integration of norms is the fact that many countries accept or act upon it not because they feel they must from an internalized need, but rather as a way to either extend their own legitimacy, or please the great powers. The full internalization of a norm is what distinguishes stage three, or the idea that at this point, a norm has acquired a “taken-for-granted quality, and [is] no longer a matter of broad public debate.” This phase is somewhat paradoxical, in that if a norm has reached this point, it has been so intrinsically embedded in the rational behavior of a state, that in many cases, it is not even considered a point of discussion when states engage in decision-making; it has been so imbued in the framework of the international community, that its employment is no longer even up for debate. Such a theory has elements of both constructivist and realist strains of thought. The idea that international norms dictate the proper (in both moral and legitimate terms) behavior of states is one rooted in constructivist ideology – namely that states act based on the “logic of appropriateness” rather than the “logic of consequences.” Such a difference holds that norms represent an international system of social construction in which states make choices based on how appropriately their actions will fit within the framework of legitimacy of the international system. This paradigm supports the concept of the “life cycle of the norm” through the idea that a norm is created not by one individual state or organization which imposes it on others, but rather by an engaged process through which all states (and independent actors) have at least some level of agency. However, the notion that in phase two of the process, much of the universal acceptance of a norm (the “tipping point”) is based on its acceptance by the most powerful state actors holds some of its roots in realist theory, predominantly in the idea that the most powerful states hold sway over the actions of other states given their belief that it is rational to cooperate with the global powers. In this sense, the constructivist paradigm of norms as presented by Fennimore and Sikkink exists atop a realist foundation, still based on the whims of the hegemon. The Norm of R2P in Action – Its Life Cycle Through Cases The emergence of the norm of the responsibility of the international community to protect the human rights of all citizens holds its origins in the program of transitional justice implemented following the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This feeling has evolved over time from one based in the allocation of aid and peacekeeping forces to civilians in conflict zones to the legitimation of military intervention as a method of quelling human rights violations, through the manifestation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. This document - signed into action unanimously by all member states - outlined a radical program of duty on the part of the international community to place human rights at the utmost level of importance and gave them the rhetorical allowance to supersede the Westphalian tradition of state sovereignty in cases of mass atrocities. However, while this represented a theoretical acceptance on the part of the international community – a sort of “tipping point” - with regards to the potential for military intervention in defense of human rights, it can merely be regarded as a singular step in R2P’s process to become a fully formed norm, a process which is recognized to have been in phase one during the Bosnian War, phase two during the Libyan intervention, and is currently showing its inability to pass into phase three as evidenced in its lack of invocation with regards to the current human rights crisis in Syria. Through these three cases, R2P can clearly be seen to be in the midst of Sikkink and Fennimore’s norm life cycle. The case of UN intervention in the war in Yugoslavia represents R2P’s status as a norm in the first stage of internalization. Widely considered to be “too little too late,” the actions of the United Nations through the UNPROFOR did not adequately serve their purpose as a force defending the human rights of all citizens; rather, their lack of decisive action – especially in the case of the Srebrenica massacre – highlights how an international standard of responsibility to protect had not yet fully emerged on the global stage; its proponents were weak, and its application half-hearted and timid. It is true that peacekeeping forces were allocated by the United Nations protect Bosniak civilians, however, their inaction speaks to the fact that the United Nations, and the states controlling it, were not under the impression that the responsibility to protect civilians extended all the way to military intervention to the point that they felt obligated to break the norm of state sovereignty and engage directly with the Bosniak Serbs. As stated by Sikkink and Fennimore, norms “never enter a normative vacuum but instead emerge in a highly contested normative space where they must compete with other norms and perceptions of interest;” in this case, the norm in competition was state sovereignty. There were motions on the part of individuals who could be seen as “norm entrepreneurs,” like Shashi Tharoore, who is the US-based leader for peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia. These motions called for more expanded intervention, “even if such actions entailed calling in NATO airstrikes.” However, the majority of those with the capabilities to pressure the UNSC to engage more directly in the conflict on behalf of the citizens being slaughtered had not yet been convinced that R2P should override the sovereignty of Bosnia. As stated by David Rieff in his article damning the inaction of the UN, the “firm and long-standing United Nations tradition of peacekeeping rooted in international law, impartiality and procedural objectivity,” turned out to be a tradition of peacekeeping so apolitical, it failed to uphold the key tenets of the UN Charter. Luckily, this disaster proved to hold some positive implications for the promotion of the norm of R2P. As part of the post-conflict reconciliation process, the UN itself released a report questioning if it could not have done more to protect the innocent civilians killed in Bosnia. They state “it is true that UNPROFOR troops in Srebrenica never fired at the attacking Serbs. Had they engaged the attacking Serbs directly it is possible that the events would have unfolded differently.” Here, an example of a shift in the position of a leading influence such as the UN with regards to a specific norm can be seen. The cries of outrage on the part of many in the international community serve to show how norm entrepreneurs were able to effectively re-characterize the UN’s action as an “inappropriate” response to the issue at hand and sow the seeds for a more comprehensive acceptance of the suppression of state sovereignty in the name of peacekeeping operations. This report, written in 1999, can be seen as something of a “first draft” of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, signed unanimously by all UN member states in 2005. As stated by Sikkink and Fennimore, “in most cases, for an emergent norm to reach a threshold and move toward the second stage, it must become institutionalized in specific sets of rules and organizations,” and the R2P doctrine was just that. The fact that this document, in which state sovereignty was challenged for the first time as a conditional privilege, was signed unanimously proves it to be the symbolic, as well as rhetorical “tipping point” for the norm of R2P into its second phase: norm cascade. The first case that truly represented an attempt to implement the norm of responsibility to protect, as laid out in the 2005 doctrine, and was universally supported (at least at first) by much of the legitimized international community, was the case of Libya in 2011. As stated by Roland Paris, this effort to intervene “provided the first major test of R2P’s most coercive policy instrument: large-scale military intervention, against the wishes of the target state, in order to protect civilians from the threat of mass atrocities.” In March of 2011, after months of less invasive measures were attempted, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1793, calling for airstrikes to be carried out by NATO under the justification provided by R2P. Finally, the norm of R2P had reached the second phase of its life cycle: it’s application as supported by all members of the international community as a way to test out, legitimize, and institutionalize its status as a norm. However, as the mission quickly expanded into one more clearly resembling “regime-change” than humanitarian intervention, many important countries, namely China and Russia who had both abstained to vote on the Resolution, pulled their support, condemning NATO’s actions as “overreach.” While this mission may have been something of a failure on the part of the international community to successfully invoke R2P, it is not so much a failure of the inherent characteristics of the norm of R2P, but rather of its application. As stated above, a norm in phase two of its life cycle is still recognized for its potential to account legitimacy in the eyes of the global powers; at this time, “state leaders conform to norms in order to avoid the disapproval aroused by norm violation and thus enhance national self-esteem.” As it has not quite been internalized as a standard that must be followed in all circumstances – it is still a tool for states to mold and apply selectively as they see fit. Once its application no longer fits with their own interests (as was the case here), states still feel as though they are able to pull their support for it without receiving backlash from the international community for directly violating the norm themselves. Had R2P been in stage three of its normative life cycle, the states who withdrew support, regardless of whether that withdrawal was reasonable or not, would have been ostracized, maybe even punished, for going against what all states thought to be an inherent, morally incorruptible norm. Secondly, as stated above, in order to become a fully formed norm, R2P must supersede the other theories in its way. The fact that R2P must overcome the strength of the norm of state sovereignty – one that has existed for almost 500 years – posits a great challenge towards its success, and while states may have signed a doctrine labeling its status superior, in the same way that such a doctrine does not immediately represent the creation of a fully formed norm of R2P, it does not immediately confirm the collapse of the norm of sovereignty. According to Sikkink and Fennimore, “to challenge existing logics of appropriateness, activists may need to be explicitly “inappropriate.” While perhaps unethical, and extremely damaging, the drastic measures accorded by NATO in the case of Libya could be seen from one (albeit controversial) perspective, as simply a form of such “inappropriateness,” requisite to prove the extent of sacrifice made on the part of those involved to uphold the norm of R2P. In this way, although the Libya intervention is seen mostly as a failure, this is due for the most part to the fact that those critiquing it are not analyzing R2P as a norm still in its second phase, but rather as a fully formed one. That being said, the responsibility to protect does currently face a great obstacle with regards to its complete evolution into an internalized norm that again comes from the structural weaknesses that surround the norm of R2P, rather than from a failure of the norm itself. The fact that the implementation of R2P can decisively be enacted – or blocked – by the UN Security Council leaves its application up to an inherently politicized body. The veto power accorded to the permanent five (P5) members of the SC, Russia, China, UK, US and France, allows these five states an undue amount of influence over R2P’s future as a normative standard; they can choose when and where it can be executed, and have the power to block its use in cases where it does not fit with their goals. Fennimore and Sikkink define in their article what they call a critical state; “What constitutes a ‘critical state’ will vary from issue to issue, but one criterion is that critical states are those without which the achievement of the substantive norm is compromised.” In this case, the entire structure of R2P is in danger of being corrupted by the fact that all five states accorded the power to limit R2P’s applicability are critical states, and if even just one of them does not approve – for political as well as moral reasons – R2P is limited in its ability to prove itself as a norm worth internalizing to the international community. In order to cross over into the final phase of its life cycle, R2P must be free to be accepted as such by all, a process which rests on proof of its success, and any measure that puts roadblocks on such a process in the name of personal and political interests’ damages R2P’s chances of being fully accepted. Such a problem is currently being exhibited in the United Nation’s inability to invoke R2P in Syria. Although there is very clear evidence that a major violation of human rights is being executed by Bashar Al-Assad on his own citizens, the international community has yet to take any decisive action in the name of intervention, holding severe consequences not just morally in the name of the civilians being murdered, but also in R2P’s evolution towards its final phase. Since 2011, 8 draft resolutions calling for the SC to act in Syria have been vetoed; Russia and China voted no them all. Such a blatant display of politicized promotion of self-interests over the expansion of the norm of R2P underscores the problem with allowing the norm’s development to be controlled by a body that accords some states increasingly greater rights than others. Akbarzadeh and Sabah highlight how John Bellamy considers Russia’s invocation of the veto to stem from “Russia’s significant economic and strategic interests in Syria,” and that it is “these Syria-specific factors that underlie the Security Council’s paralysis over Syria, rather than more generalized concerns about R2P and the experience in Libya.” This argument supports the claim that it the Security Council, and not any structural problem with the norm of R2P itself that is preventing its invocation in Syria; Russia would block any measure putting its own interests in the region at risk, whether that is relating to R2P, or a nuclear proliferation resolution, or a trade agreement. However, while this theory takes the pressure off of R2P in terms of what is to blame, it also highlights the fact that R2P will not be able to enter its final stage until it is no longer reliant on a body such as the SC who is so greatly influenced by individual interests. While a norm is still in the norm cascade phase, critical states still have the ability to influence global perception of said norm, meaning that Russia’s continuous blockage of R2P’s use in Syria is slowly but surely convincing other states not to support it as well. In this sense, the case of Syria highlights the fact that in order for R2P to fully complete its evolution into a norm in international relations, it must separate its implementation from the politicized Security Council. Conclusion: Looking Forward Such a process of separation will be extremely difficult to complete: at this point in time, the Security Council is the only body accorded under international law with the ability to legitimately invoke the use of force, and is thus the only body in the position to spur military intervention in the name of R2P. A better solution would be not to remove R2P from the SC’s mandate altogether, but rather to nullify the P5’s veto power – at least when it comes to the responsibility to protect. While this is a drastic proposal, it is supported by the fact that if R2P were truly to become a completely internalized norm, theoretically, states would be willing to renounce their veto power in order to implement it, due to the fact that it would become such a “no-brainer” to support measures of R2P, that either they would not feel the need to have the veto power in the case of R2P, or political pressure from other countries existing within the normative framework of R2P to relinquish it would be so strong, they would have to. This would allow R2P to be invoked only in cases necessary; states would still be able to vote on it, and if it was decided R2P was unnecessary or inappropriate it would not be used, but if one state only did not support it for political reasons, they would not be able to hijack the entire process. Unfortunately, until the barrier imposed by the veto power on the Security Council is abolished, R2P will not be able to extend to its last phase of becoming a fully formed norm. As seen in the case of Syria, the power of critical states such as Russia through the veto power to hijack the ability of R2P to be implemented – and thus prove to the international community its worth as a norm – is the last major obstacle the responsibility to protect must overcome in order to complete its life cycle. Works Cited Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Arif Saba. “UN Paralysis Over Syria: The Responsibility to Protect or Regime Change?” International Politics . 2018. Press, Associated. “Deaths of Venezuelan Protesters Appear to Be Targeted Killings, Rights Groups Say.” NBC News. February 20, 2019. www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/human-rights-groups-say-deaths-venezuelan-protesters-appear-be-targeted-n973651?icid=related Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization vol. 52, no. 4, 1998, pp. 887-917. “Nearly 900 Killed’ in DR Congo Clashes.” BBC World News, sec. Africa. December 7, 2019. www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p06vwdrc/46896159 Paris, Roland. “The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention.” International Peacekeeping , vol. 21, no. 5, 2014, pp. 569-603. Rieff, David. “The Institution That Saw No Evil.” The New Republic . 1996. UN General Assembly. “Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 - The Fall of Srebrenica.” United Nations: United Nations General Assembly, 1999. “UN: Recent Myanmar Army Attack May Have Killed Dozens of Rohingya.” Al Jazeera . April 9, 2019. www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/myanmar-army-attack-killed-dozens-rohingya-190409062501653.html

The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Political Theory Project and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Program at Brown University. The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics & Economics *FEATURES * FROM Nicola Sturgeon, MSP First Minister of Scotland Gen. John R. Allen President of the Brookings Institution Editorial board forward Volume I Issue II Introducing the second issue of JPPE Click to flip through the journal and see previous JPPE issues Philosophy Moral Manipulation Politics Transparency and Compliance A Kantian Take on Advertising and Campaigning The Strength of EU Lobbying Regulations By Sylvia Gunn By Abigail Borges Philosophy Health/Disease Distinction And Its Normative Uses Economics Vermont Act 46 Implications for School Choice By Margot S. Witte By Quinn Bornstein Politics Georgian-South Ossetian Conflict Philosophy Statelessness Is Secession a Viable Solution? A Contradiction in International Law with Asymmetrical Regional Solutions By Tathyana Mello Amaral By Samantha Altschuler Politics Imagined Isle Economics Public Funds, Private Interest The Role of Private Companies in Shaping US Cybersecurity Policy Irish Catholic Identity in the Restoration Era By Nathan Mainster By Justin Katz

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, PASCUAL RESTREPO: Pascual Restrepo is an assistant professor at Boston University. His research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labour markets and economic growth. Prior to joining BU’s faculty, he was a Cowles Foundation Fellow at Yale University, and earned his PhD in Economics at MIT. Besides research work, he has given numerous lectures at conferences, workshops and seminars across the country. October 2020 JPPE: Hi, everyone. I'm speaking right now with Professor Pascual Restrepo, who is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, whose research focuses on the impact of technology on inequality, as well as labor markets and economic growth. Hi, Pascual. How are you? Restrepo: Hi, Julian. How are you? Thanks for inviting me. JPPE: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. So, the first thing I wanted to talk about is how you got into automation and inequality, and I saw that in your earlier work you tended to focus on the illicit economy--and from what I could tell, within that, the illicit economy in Colombia. And I wanted to know how you shifted from that towards automation and inequality. Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from Colombia, you know, and when I was doing my undergrad, I started doing my undergrad in mathematics, but then I got interested in economics. And the key topics in the public discussion in Colombia was always about violence, always about state capacity, always about corruption and political economy. And at the center of all of that, you always have these big illegal markets that were reinforcing, if not causing many of these things. So as a Colombian, it's natural to be interested in that, because it's a topic that is very close to our hearts, our history, and our future. And that's why I started doing research on that topic. Then when I moved to the US to start my PhD, the focus shifted a little bit. I guess that doing a PhD is a great opportunity to start seeing the world from a more global perspective, perhaps, and so I became more interested in problems that were perhaps not as important for Colombia. I mean, Colombia, I wouldn't say right now that automation, it's a big concern there. There's a lot of inequality, but for very different reasons. And so I became interested in these topics that I saw were very relevant for the developed world. And so I think that it's kind of nice that you get to do research on topics that you hear people talking about, right? So like, you open a newspaper, you read The Economist, and they're always talking about, you know, automation, inequality, technology, and so on, but when I was in Colombia, it was the case with illegal markets, so I guess that I'm just trying to follow that trail. You know, like, interesting stuff. JPPE: So the shift towards a more global topic, with far-reaching implications. So, do you remember, was there a specific thing that you read? That made you interested? Do you remember the moment when you thought that this is something you wanted to focus on? Restrepo: Yeah, I don't think that it was anything specific. I just think that it was like an accumulation of stuff. And you know, when I was starting my PhD, there was all of the fuss about Artificial Intelligence. Everyone was fussing about what it was going to be. And I was, like, listening to podcasts by, I don't know, Sam Harris and other people, or the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and I started reading all of these things, and I was like, "Oh, this is super interesting, I wonder if you can analyze this from an economics perspective," right? JPPE: Right. Restrepo: And then, like, Daron--who was my advisor--and Daron apparently was also super interested in this thing, so we started this collaboration. JPPE: Yeah, yeah. So, I- and I think that this is one of the things that is so interesting about the topic, too, is that it is something that gets discussed in these journalistic spheres like The Economist or more central, mainstream publications, but also in academia. And also in a slightly more sensationalistic way by futurists and so on, because the name 'Artificial Intelligence' is kind of, you know, some people think of Blade Runner, or cyborgs walking down the streets. So I think cutting through that is very interesting, which is why one thing I did want to ask is where you stand on the question of automation. And I have four or five studies that you wrote that I just wanted to briefly mention, in case some people aren't familiar with that. One is a piece that you co-authored called "Demographics in Automation," where--and correct me if any of these takeaways are wrong, but--you showed that robots tend to substitute for middle-aged workers. In the paper "Automation of New Tasks," you showed that there is a reinstatement effect of labor, these new digital, labor-saving technologies. In "Competing With Robots," you showed that the overall impact of robot adoption on an industry tends to reduce the employment in that same industry--the number of jobs, at least in the short run. And in "Unpacking the Skill Bias," which I believe is the most recent paper you showed that there is this powerful impact on inequality, and that there is a reduction in real wages. And that productivity increases might not even be that high relative to inequality, which I thought was a very interesting point. So to the extent that you can, where do you stand on automation and AI? Restrepo: Perfect, so let me try to reframe this question a little bit. One of the questions that you sent me earlier on--and feel free to tell me if you're going to discuss it later on, or where this is a good moment to discuss it, because you asked what's wrong with public discourse about automation, right? JPPE: That was my next one, so we can do that now. Restrepo: Perfect. So I guess that what would be useful for me is to tell you how I see public discourse, and where I see myself into the public discourse, and why I think that some of the perspectives that Daron and I have brought are different from the main views that you would find out there, right? Because you see that you are asking me where do I stand on automation. And I think that that's part of what's the problem with this topic, is that people want to divide themselves into two groups. There's kind of a false dichotomy, so either you believe in the robot-apocalypse: you know, robots are going to come and are going to take over all of jobs or you are a firm believer that this has happened before, and that we have already seen this, and technology is great, and nothing is going to happen. And I think that the reality's in the middle. Undoubtedly, technology is the only thing that has allowed us to achieve our standards of living. But I also think that there's no denying that technology sometimes achieves that at the expense of some groups of society. And I think that that's where I stand. Technology is a great force. Technology allows us to live better lives. But some technologies--not every technology, because technologies are all so different, right? Like, I wouldn't say that automation is the same thing as inventing new products, right? Those two things do different things. Some technologies, like automation in particular, have this peculiar feature that the way that they generate productivity--that the way that they generate additional capacity to produce--is by substituting very specific types of human labor. And those workers that get replaced and that get substituted, from their perspective, technology is a bad thing. Socially, technology is a good thing, but there are going to be losers--net losers. And I think that my thing is just to put the spotlight on those losers, and try to identify them and quantify those losses. The idea that technology generates winners and losers--I mean, people have that around, but we tend to think that the gains are so large that this is okay, we just need to redistribute. I don't know, the losses sometimes might be much more problematic than what you can compensate for with the gains. JPPE: Right, certainly. I think even in the way that people phrase it: 'short term losses,' 'disruption.' Some people might say that there's a slight underselling of what the human costs of that disruption are. But I wanted to ask about whether or not AI is fundamentally different in your view, because you said it's somewhere in the middle. And it sounded like you were saying it's not going to be "a temporary loss of some jobs, but it's fine because we'll create new ones" or "a complete joblessness apocalypse." It might be somewhere in the middle. And that seems to me very much in line with what past labor-saving technologies did during the Industrial Revolution. You know, the classic example where you had a spike in the automation- or, a spike in labor-saving devices that increased inequality in the short run--and we can talk about the extent to which that was tolerable--but in the long run, those jobs came back. So do you think that it is fundamentally different from how devices in the past performed, or is it in line with that history? Restrepo: Perfect, so that's a great question. You know, we talk a lot about Artificial Intelligence, but we don't really know what it does. Right? JPPE: [laughing] Yeah . Restrepo: Right, so I can talk about technologies that I know what they do. So for instance, automation of manufacturing via industrial robotics, or automation of white-collar jobs via software, right? So let's just start there, and then we'll speculate a little bit more about AI. So I think that industrial robotics and automation of white-collar jobs via software--the economic forces are very similar to what we saw in the past, let's say, with the mechanization of agriculture. Or the mechanization of textile production in England during the Industrial Revolution, right? You have very artisanal techniques where it took a bunch of people, kids and women, to weave and knit a particular piece of clothing. And then you come out with these machines where you just need one person to operate the whole machinery, and essentially what you did is you replaced all that artisanal and labor-intensive technique that used to be the main technique before. Like with agriculture, you see the same thing, right? Before it was like people with rudimentary tools, such as a scythe, or whatever who would reap the land. And then you have a tractor, right? And the tractor, there's just one person; and that person, the only thing that he has to do is drive the tractor. Nowadays they don't even need to drive the tractor, because these tractors are becoming increasingly self-driving tractors. And so, you can see that, essentially, we are moving to technologies that are more, more, more capital-intensive and that rely less and less and less on human labor. And I think that the consequences, to some extent, are similar. So like, many people say, "Oh no, we have a lot of mechanization in history, and we still have a bunch of jobs, so that's not bad." But then you look at historical records; that argument is not exactly right. Because for instance, England around the Industrial Revolution, there were about 60 years where wages were essentially stagnant. So yes, this technology created more bounty, they created higher incomes per capita, but most of this income went to the hands of capital owners: people who owned the machinery, people who owned the land. And those gains didn't trickle down to wages until after 60 years of these developments. 60 years is a long time. During these years we had a lot of unrest. We had many, many social reforms to appease, some of the unrest that resulted from these. We had the Luddites, right? That was kind of a response to all of these developments. So, you know, it was not a rosy- it was not an easy transition. Now, of course, that puts us into a fantastic path where eventually, people acquire skills; we came out with new industries, products, and so want to employ a bunch of people. But that was kind of like a choice, right? I mean, maybe that wouldn't happen. And so I guess that that's the next question: what are we going to be able to come out with? The jobs, the ideas, the tech force, the tasks, or all of the people that we displaced from manufacturing and all of the people that we are displacing from services. I mean, what are we going to employ all of these people, right? And perhaps, what if the future is one where we're going to have fewer jobs? JPPE: You really think that there's a chance that the future could look like, on aggregate, there are fewer jobs that the economy requires. Restrepo: Yeah. JPPE: So in essence, the whole principle of efficiency gains creating jobs in new industries, that that principle might break down. Restrepo: I mean, I think that that principle has worked in the past, but the fact that it has worked in the past does not guarantee that it's going to keep working in the future. I think that at least theoretically, conceptually, I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but it's possible that we go into a future where the economy uses less labor. So you know, like, only 20% of the population works, and that's enough to supply all of the labor that the economy needs. I mean, this is a great thing if all of us only work one day per week. But the problem is that we might be going to a future where only 20% of us work the entire week. And that's very different because the implications for inequality are quite different, right? So I guess that that's kind of the challenge. The challenge to me is not so much whether the level of employment that you need to produce something is going to go down--for sure that's going to go down. I mean, we're going to produce much more with fewer workers. The question is, who's going to provide those hours of human labor, and who are the people in a position to benefit from that demand for labor that's going to be out there? JPPE: Mm. So, I'd love to talk more about the social and political implications of what you just said, but first I want to ask about a pandemic-related question. Restrepo: Yep. JPPE: So, The Wall Street Journal just ran a headline where they said that, essentially, meatpackers were, all of a sudden, beginning to automate more and more labor, and that that automated technology was not necessarily doing as good a job as the humans were, but the coronavirus had essentially hastened that shift. And I believe there are other instances of that in manufacturing as well. So is this something that you view as bringing automation much faster? Restrepo: Totally. One of the papers that you mentioned earlier on was this paper on demographics. And in that paper, what we showed is that a lot of what you see in terms of industrial automation--that is, automation by industrial robots and machinery in car manufacturing plants, for example--is driven by the scarcity of work. This is technology that responds to incentive. So what are the most automated countries in the world? Japan, Germany, Italy, countries where the population is aging very rapidly--where young workers with the muscle to weld a car are scarce. And so it's that scarcity of labor, in some sense, what has fueled a lot of this automation. And you can think of the pandemic as doing something similar; it's generating a scarcity of labor. Because workers--on the one hand, they cannot go to work because of either concerns or lockdown measures--but also, there's also some safety measures that might make some automation technologies more safe than human workers, right? So there's an element of that. On the other hand, you know, this pandemic also gave me another reflection that many of us- or, many people thought that humans were already kind of obsolete, and humans were no longer needed, and this pandemic kind of made me revisit that view because it does suggest that humans are still extremely important for the country. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: Extremely important, right? You take out the human element, and the economy completely gets destroyed. JPPE: And human contact too. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, it's not only about production, but so much of our economy is about humans interacting with other humans, and human contact that- it also kind of gives me some pause. Yeah, maybe, sure, maybe we're going to automate a lot of jobs, but maybe there's- you know, the economy's increasingly becoming more intensive in the sort of activities that, by their nature, they're just not automatable. Or we don't want to automate them because the quality of the goods that we are consuming then, they're dependent on human interaction, right? JPPE: Mm. And certainly I think there are instances- I mean, the skeptics that I've talked to about AI have definitely brought up instances; they'll pull up a treasure trove of articles where someone says, "We can now automate kindergarten teachers." Restrepo: Exactly. JPPE: And then we could do some polling on the number of moms and dads that would be happy with a robot teaching their kids- or, their kindergarteners. Restrepo: Yeah. Absolutely. JPPE: [laughing] But, so, I did want to ask more about the social and political side of this as well, and I don't mean to be flippant with this question, but I wanted to know why inequality is necessarily a bad thing. Restrepo: Great. I think that that's a great question, and I think that the answer is that it's not necessarily a bad thing, at least in my mind. Let me tell you the feature about current inequality that I think is absolutely a bad thing. I think that the problem with current inequality is not- I mean, you can have inequality for two reasons. You can have inequality because everyone's incomes are growing, but some incomes are growing much more rapidly than others. Right? Maybe there are some political, philosophical, or ethical reasons to be opposed to that type of inequality. Okay. But there, I don't think there's a very strong argument that everyone should agree that that type of inequality is very bad. Because that type of inequality might reflect, "Oh, maybe the people whose incomes are growing more, it's because they started a business." Right? You know, like Bezos. But Bezos has- is like a billionaire. But I would say yeah, if you ask me, I think that--well, maybe I'm more stating my case here, but--yes, he deserves to be a millionaire because-and a billionaire, because the product that he created delivers a lot of value, right? So I think that there's a chunk of inequality that is good and that I'm not opposed, at least, in terms of first principle. But. I do think that the nature of contemporary inequality is very different from that story that I was telling. Contemporary inequality is not just about some people who came up with great ideas, and their incomes grow a lot, and all of our incomes kind of grow just if we happen to work hard, and so on. Contemporary inequality, if I had to describe it, has this feature that we see groups of society who are worse off than before. So it's not just how incomes are growing. It is that some incomes are falling in real terms. And for me, that is something that is just... the biggest contemporaneous problem. That we have people who are worse off than their parents, than their previous generation. So if, in the U.S., you are a person who has high school or less than a high school degree, who comes from a poor background, actually your parents were better off than you in terms of labor market income. And that's kind of the scary aspect of inequality, that it's not even progress, but sometimes it means no progress at all for some society. That's the reason that makes me worry. And those groups, of course--I mean, that's going to have political implications, everything. But just from a humanity perspective, I think that as a society we can afford- I mean, we should aspire for trying to make everyone gain from technology, everyone gain from globalization, there shouldn't be anyone who is worse off than a person like him or her 30 years ago. JPPE: Mm. Mm. Yeah, and so, I mean, there is the data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez that tries to quantify how that inequality is today; and from what I have seen, it shows that it's roughly where it was at in the early 20th century. And so when you think about automation in conjunction with the general financialization of the economy, the rise of private debt, the extension of credit in the economy, do you feel like now is a particularly vulnerable moment for a shock to inequality through digitally-enabled automation? Restrepo: Yeah, absolutely. I think that part of the problem is that there's no safety net in this country. I mean, the safety net is kind of like- I mean we are seeing that with COVID, right? There's people whose finances are in an incredibly vulnerable position. And so imagine that you're in your 30s, you're in 40s, you have some debts, you don't own a lot of assets, and then they come out with this software that can do exactly what you're doing at your work, right? You are screwed! There's nothing you can do. JPPE: [laughing] Yeah. Restrepo: And then we turn to economists and the economists said, ‘no, because people can re-train, and people can relocate, and we're going to take that person and make that a coder, right? Or a software engineer.’ That's not going to happen! That's kind of like a lost generation there. And I think that we should care more about that potentially lost generation. JPPE: Mm. And in terms of reducing inequality, I actually- a month ago, I got to speak with historian Walter Scheidel on his thesis and The Great Leveler, that inequality only gets reduced or leveled by mass military mobilization, civil war, plague, or government collapse. And what was so striking about reading his book and talking with him was, it seemed to--on some level--be in opposition to a lot of the language in economics that seems to frame inequality and shocks as almost cyclical in nature, where there's a short run and a long run. And it seemed like Professor Scheidel's point was essentially that actually, there's been these exogenous forces in the form of, essentially, catastrophe, that have reduced inequality. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. Restrepo: Yeah. So I think that for economists in general, I wouldn't say that inequality's just a cyclical phenomenon. I mean, if you read the labor economics literature, there's a lot of literature kind of emphasizing these trends and it's long-run trends. So like, over the long run, what we are seeing is that someone who has a college degree is earning much more than someone who does not have a college degree. And that just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding, and decelerated a bit and so on. But you know, there are these big trends. I wouldn't say that it's only about shocks. But I do think that economists emphasize much more the role of technology than politics. Right? I mean, there are some fields in Economics that emphasize much more the role of politics, and I think that in these shocks that you're mentioning, what needs to happen is a big shock, so that it triggers political reform, and so on. And that perhaps hasn't been so much included into the language of economists. The other thing that I would like to say is that, while I think that thesis is kind of interesting, you also see a lot of variation across countries. When you look at the data that are countries that technology is kind of universal- I mean, I was telling you about, you know, the Germans were the ones who invented industrial automation, same as Japan. And they don't have as much inequality as we do here in the U.S., right? That's also kind of a choice; I don't think that you need to have a war to reduce inequality. But you need to have more progressive taxation, and I mean when you think about inequality, that's the first thing that you should do! I mean, it's very simple. I mean, simple, technically. Politically, it might be difficult, but the solution is clear. JPPE: Right. And so, what do you think about proposals like a universal basic income, or a progressive basic income, or any variation of that? Negative income tax, and so on. Restrepo: Yeah, I think that anything that looks like a negative income tax, I think that would be greatly beneficial. Anything that looks like an earned income tax credit, that is subsidizing work for low-wage workers would be very beneficial. Also because it helps convince firms not to automate those jobs, so part of those jobs are subsidized. Anything like a universal basic income, I mean, I think it's- again, I like the idea; I don't like the idea of a universal basic income essentially substituting the whole safety net. I think that still having a government that buys insurance and that supplies all our programs that are more targeted to whoever it's useful. But I think that the spirit of all of these things is the same. We need a better safety net, right? And so, if you implement it one way or the other; if politically this is more feasible than this...I don't know. I'm fine. I just think that we do need some more safety net. JPPE: Right. So the last question I wanted to ask is: looking to the future, what are some open questions that you think would be really interesting to look at, either on inequality alone, or on automation and inequality and so on? And also, if not questions, some areas of research that you think, thus far, have been untapped. Restrepo: Perfect. So let me start with the first one. I think that one of the things that I find more puzzling about current technologies is that if you look at the labor market, you would conclude that there is a lot of disruption. You would conclude that there's inequality; the prices of different skills are changing the nature of jobs is changing; the types of jobs that we are posting are changing the skills that the labor market is valuing are changing. From looking at that, you would think, "Oh, technology is advancing at this amazing pace," but when you look at productivity, there's not a lot of productivity growth. And you know, this lack of productivity growth has been used by many to argue that automation, or that technology, is not a concern. So like, I saw that you did an interview with Paul Krugman at some point. JPPE: Yeah. He brought it up. Restrepo: Yeah, and I think he made that point. And I think that that point is kind of misguided. Because I think that one of the interesting things about automation technologies is that--and you already mentioned that this is something that we emphasize a lot--is that you can have automation without big productivity gains. And let me just give you an example of why that is the case. Imagine that I'm a worker working in a supermarket checkout machine, right? And then someone comes and invents a self-service kiosk, or whatever, right? That innovation is going to substitute me; but in terms of cost, how much is it going to reduce the cost for the supermarket? Very little! Because the worker was already very cheap; the machine itself is very cheap, but not as much! Right? Installing all of the equipment, programming, all of that--at the end of the day, the productivity gains is, I don't know, 1%? Something even smaller than that, that's just a small part of the cost? So at the end of the day, you unroll this technology, you deploy this technology, you substitute all of the checkout clerks, right? So that's a chunk of the population, and what are the productivity gains from doing that? Not that big. They're not that big; it's just like, you saved a little bit on costs. So automation has this thing that as long as you save a little bit on costs, you're going to adopt it. So you can have the adoption of a lot of automation technologies that have very small efficiency gains. And I think that that principle has escaped current discussions about automation. People equate productivity or technology with automation. Automation is just one particular type of technology--concerning one particular component of productivity--that has this feature that it can generate big distributional impacts just by having small productivity gains. But I think that the interesting research question there is to try to understand, why are we adopting automation technologies that have such, very low productivity gains? And that our candidate- one candidate is perhaps taxation. Maybe we're doing this because we're taxing labor a lot so that's inducing us to adopt more automation, even if that's not very profitable, from an engineering perspective. Or maybe it's a cultural thing. So I think that those are the big, important questions. What determines the direction of technology? Are we going to keep focusing on automation, automation, automation? Or are we going to have a more balanced element of technologies that, in the long run, it's going to end up being more beneficial for all of those people--that I already discussed--that have experienced net losses in their income in the last 30, 40 years? JPPE: Professor Restrepo, thanks so much. Restrepo: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Julian.

Transparency and Compliance The Strength of EU Lobbying Regulations Abigail Borges Brown University Author Miles Campbell Audrey McDermott Sydney Munro Editors Fall 2018 This essay discusses the outright robustness of the European Union's lobbying regulations in comparison to the regulations in the EU countries, concluding that it is on par with or surpasses regulatory strength in the states. The interactions between politicians and lobbyists present a challenge to governments’ transparency and accountability, and affect supranational entities like the European Union. Before evaluating a lobby’s influence, it is necessary to understand what exactly defines these groups and how they interact with governments. ‘Lobbyists’, which will be used synonymously with ‘interest groups’, are defined as those seeking to influence the outputs of a given policy-making process. Lobbyists attempt to support their interests by affecting policy outputs through methods like maintenance of a status quo or the implementation of a new policy. In response to lobbyist manipulation, recent policy trends have been in favor of controlling lobbying by creating level playing fields for interest groups to operate. Such policy trends include an expansion of the European Union’s lobbying rules over time. In 1996, the European Parliament introduced provisions for simple yearly passes for lobbyists seeking access to the Parliament building. The European Commission implemented its own rules that likewise lacked teeth in 2008 by instituting a voluntary lobbyist register.[1] The bodies’ recent replacement regulation, the Joint Transparency Register (JTR), has prompted a re-evaluation of the EU’s robustness in terms of lobbying controls, especially when considering the precedents set by national governments. Scholars in the field take robustness to mean “the capacity of the regulation to increase transparency and accountability,” which reflects the rules’ level of usage and reliability.[2] Though there is certainly room to strengthen its provision of regulations regarding lobbyists, the EU is holistically and comparatively more robustly regulatory than EU member nations in managing interest groups. This lead is earned both by having regulations in the first place and by these rules’ ability to equal or surpass the robustness of lobbying regulations in the EU’s member states. First, a brief overview of the implications of the JTR for the EU and its lobbyists is necessary to more clearly understand how the regulations imposed by the JTR compare with the regulations enacted its constituent states. The JTR’s stated goal was to increase transparency, replacing regulatory structures in the Parliament and Commission for a joint registration for all lobbyists.[3] Transparency and accountability are the two main goals associated with lobbying regulation. These standards aim to let voters know who influences whom and allow them to see the degree to which a given politician or lobbyist is responsible for a policy. The EU’s definition of a lobbyist expanded “to include law firms, NGOs, think tanks - indeed any organization or self-employed individual engaged in influencing EU policy making and implementation.”[4] This expansion ensures that no agents seeking to affect policy can find a loophole or excuse to avoid the option of registering for the JTR. The most crucial detail about the JTR in this sense is its voluntary nature: since it allows the option for groups not to register, one can question the extent to which such a transparency register can be effective. Still, the JTR did strengthen disclosure provisions and data accessibility with measures such as necessitating yearly reports on personal and organization information and financial details at the time of register (though notably not in regular reports thereafter). All of this information was then made available to the public online. Finally, registration required compliance with a code of conduct that includes pledges against dishonesty, incentives for disclosure, and mechanisms to handle breaches of the code.[5] Scholars Chari and Crepaz maintain that interest groups have largely complied with the JTR system, suggesting that many of the goals the JTR had in its launch have proven successful.[6] In several ways, the regulations imposed by the JTR are on par with other European countries. In terms of the Centre for Public Integrity’s index of lobbying regulation robustness, the JTR’s regulations fall directly in the middle of the EU nations’ regulation ratings, with a score of 31. Slovenia, Hungary, Lithuania, and Austria received higher scores, and Poland, the UK, France, and Germany received lower.[7] This measure indicates that the JTR is indeed more robust than some, but falls short of others, with almost a twenty-point difference between it and the most regulated European lobby (Slovenia at 49). Notably, the JTR proposes more stringent regulations than the major constituent EU states, suggesting that the EU does more to control the actions of its lobbyists than the national entities that wield much of the power within it. This is especially true for Italy, who has no interest group regulation at all. Additionally, if judging instead by specific provisions of the JTR, the EU’s system again proves to be average in many dimensions. All states mentioned above in the CPI index have a register for lobbyists of some kind, which defines the substance of the JTR. Additionally, provisions like its code of conduct and voluntary nature are mirrored in countries like France and the UK.[8] Like the public lists of lobbyists found in Poland and Germany, the individuals and groups registered under JTR are openly accessible on the internet.[9] These measures all help establish the rules of the game and increase transparency and accountability in the overall process of lobbying. These aims are desirable because they give actors more information and require justification of one’s actions to the public. Thus, the EU and its JTR prove to be just as strong in a range of provisions as the other member states regulating interest groups. As much as the EU is on par with member nations that regulate lobbying, it is distinctly advanced among the other countries in Europe that do not have rules at all. Of the about fifty European nations, including the EU, only nine have enacted laws to regulate lobbying to speak of.[10] Thus, in its implementation of any regulations at all, the EU proves to be ahead of the curve. Some may argue that many of the states lacking lobbying rules do not need them because they do not have the same scope of lobbyists present as those systems with laws; this may be true, but not relevant to the question at hand evaluating outright robustness. Additionally, there have been many calls for increased regulation throughout Europe in general, to achieve the stated aims of increased transparency and accountability. Transparency International, a group centered on fighting corruption, released a 2015 report evaluating lobbying in Europe, its effectiveness, and its future. It concluded that the EU Commission’s rules are among one of only two of the nineteen European entities that score above 50% on its measures of transparency, integrity, and equality of access.[11] The authors also note that only seven of the entities feature any lobbyist-specific regulations, a fact which in the report it finds problematic and wishes to see changed.[12] Hence, the EU already surpasses many nations in its rule robustness simply by having regulations, regardless of what the regulations entail. Still, it becomes clear upon scrutiny that the details of the JTR’s regulation also prove more stringent than those of its European counterparts. This finding is true especially regarding the disclosure of financial information, the level of compliance, and the scope of lobbyists to which the rules apply. The JTR requires an initial submission of information concerning an organization’s spending and activity, and each type of lobbyist must disclose varying levels of financial information at this stage.[13] Though it does not require yearly spending reports, this documenting of finances is equivalent with, or stronger than, all other governments with registers. For comparison, Germany requests no information at all, nor does Poland.[14] Lithuania requires yearly spending and salary reports, which appears more robust than the EU, but compliance with its register is thought to be very low; 2004 estimates place the number of lobbyists registered at about one in seven of those who operate within the state.[15] Austria, too, requests yearly reports, but, similarly, this regulation does not effectively apply to many lobbyists.[16] By these terms, then, the manner in which the JTR requests financial information makes it stronger in interest group transparency, who cannot in theory spend considerable sums of money without at least some documentation. Money often captures influence in government, so it follows that financial disclosures are also significant in terms of accountability at the EU level. The JTR provides an effective medium for this disclosure, unlike most of its peers. Also related to this discussion are issues of compliance levels, for disclosures of any type do not matter if no one complies. In their recent comparative study of the JTR, Crepaz, and Chari found that based on the registration and spending disclosures of the largest corporations seeking to influence the EU, it can be concluded that firms are taking the JTR more seriously, with all examined firms registering and giving seemingly more accurate spending disclosures.[17] Comparatively, this is quite remarkable, as many other registration systems see low levels of compliance. Chari, Hogan, and Murphy find that in Lithuania, Hungary (whose 2003 regulations have been removed), and Poland, regulations are often ignored or maneuvered around, often because the term ‘lobbyist’ retains negative connotations.[18] The 2013 Venice Report on the Role of Lobbying puts forward a similar argument about Germany, explaining that “not being on the register is no real barrier to being in contact with Parliamentary committees or members of the Bundestag.”[19] With ability and ease to get around lobbying regulations, then, the regulations prove somewhat ineffective in Germany as well. Yet, as Crepaz and Chari point out, the JTR has in fact seen increased registration by EU interest groups since its adoption.[20] Low effectiveness in complying with registration could also be related to the scope of lobbyists to which the legislation applies, which in the EU is all activity, but in most other nations is narrowly defined. This scope and compliance indicates success on the part of the JTR in terms of transparency over the aforementioned countries, as it comes closer to the ideal of providing the most information about influence in political systems. Finally, the EU does feature less regulation for lobbyists in some dimensions of transparency and accountability that at first glance makes it seem like the JTR is not very robust, yet in practice this observation proves untrue. The first such category which the JTR lacks is a set of provisions regarding the so-called ‘revolving door’, preventing civil servants from immediately working as lobbyists and vice versa. The JTR fails to prevent such capacity for corruption. However, of the four European nations studied by Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, only Lithuania has these rules.[21] Further, Transparency International explains that most of the countries it studied have some sort of “cooling-off period” for officials, but Slovenia was the only one to implement the period for legislators. And yet, it also reports that none of these countries had “effective monitoring and enforcement of the revolving door provisions,” calling into question the effectiveness of the laws even where they exist.[22] Furthermore, Crepaz and Chari recognize that the EU Commission, top officials, and the EP all have internal revolving door regulations.[23] Therefore, even if the JTR itself does not provide cooling-off periods, the issue is effectively dealt with in other ways, which is not the case for the EU countries that on paper seem more regulated. Despite appearances, then, the EU still emerges with more robust and effective regulations than most, if not all, of its EU counterparts. For its strengths and advances, however, the JTR does have several other comparative drawbacks that leave room for improvement in relation to other European state entities. Primarily, it could make its law mandatory, as Austria and Slovenia have sought to do, to improve relative robustness. Transparency International analyzed the effective impact of Slovenia’s mandatory register and found that it operates on a “wholly inadequate scope covering only a small proportion of lobbyists,” because it defines interest groups so narrowly.[24] An analysis of the Austrian system found similar results.[25] In this way, the EU regulations are still arguably as strong as Slovenia’s and Austria’s laws, because they apply to a much broader scope of lobbyists and are complied with, as evidenced earlier by Chari and Crepaz. This engenders more compliance with and operation within the register in the EU. Aside from implementing a mandatory register, another way the JTR is comparatively less robust involves its sanctions and enforcements, of which it has few. Slovenia, Lithuania, and Austria score higher on the CPI index much for this reason.[26] For example, Slovenia has a Commission for the Prevention of Corruption (CPC) that provides oversight on many types of lobbyists, such as professional, in-house, and lobbyists from private sector interest organizations.[27] Though the JTR has a Secretariat intended to watch activity, its only effective power is naming and shaming, which Crepaz and Chari find especially problematic given the voluntary nature of the register.[28] As always, though, one must keep in mind that although the JTR is less regulated in oversight, its high compliance and the often low enrolment in other countries problematizes deeming the JTR less robust due to its less strict enforcement and sanction rules. Still, in these areas there is room for improvement of the JTR in comparison to other EU nations. Ultimately, on most dimensions the JTR proves generally stronger than, if not at least as strong as, its counterpart laws in EU member nations. In providing a voluntary register, public internet accessibility, and a code of conduct, the EU regulations are in line with the rules of its peers. In fact, in even having a register at all, EU lobbying laws are more robust than the lobbying regulations found in the majority of EU nations. When one examines precedents of financial disclosures, levels of compliance, scope of application, and even revolving door rules, the JTR is arguably strongest among its counterparts in effectively handling them. One must note that the voluntary nature of the JTR and its enforcement mechanisms could be improved considering the rules of countries scoring higher than the EU on the CPI index, even if these rules are not effectively followed. Overall, regardless of the diverse characteristics of distinct regimes, lobbying regulation systems seek to achieve the ideals of transparency and accountability. Considering the totality of the strengths mentioned above, by increasing public access to the entities and insight into their inner workings, the JTR moves the EU much closer to these goals than other regulating systems have proven to accomplish. Still, even if the EU is more regulated, it is not precluded from needing to further strengthen its provisions. A mandatory system of registration, for example, would ensure maximum transparency and accountability through behavioral regulation, as argued by Direnc Kanol.[29] In the realms of financial disclosures and sanctions, too, the JTR could seek improvement by strengthening its policies, further augmenting transparency and accountability. However, the aim of this study was to evaluate comparative, rather than outright, robustness, and by this measure the EU and its lobbying regulations prove decidedly strong. Endnotes [1] Michele Crepaz and Raj Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives to Regulate Lobbyists: Good or Bad Administration?,” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 82, no. 5 (2014): 77, accessed December 7, 2016, https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/assets/pdfs/eu_lobbyist_regulation_crepaz_ chari_2014.pdf. [2] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 81-82. [3] European Commission, Commission and European Parliament launch Joint Transparency Register to shed light on all those seeking to influence European policy, 2011, accessed December 7, 2016, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-773_en.htm?locale=en . [4] European Commission, Commission and European launch Joint Transparency Register. [5] European Commission, Commission and European launch Joint Transparency Register. [6] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 89. [7] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 82. [8] Assemblée Nationale, "Interest Representatives in the National Assembly," Assemblée Nationale, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/representant-d-interets/repre_interet and UKLR, "About the Register," UK Lobbying Register, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.lobbying-register.uk/about-.html. [9] Deutscher Bundestag, "Public List of Associations Registered with the Bundestag," Deutscher Bundestag, November 24, 2016, accessed December 10, 2016, http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/lobbyliste/ and OECD, Lobbyists, Governments and the Public Trust, Volume 2: Promoting Integrity through Self-Regulation (OECD Publishing, 2012), 62, accessed December 7, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264084940-en . [10] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 82. [11] Suzanne Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe: Hidden Influence, Privileged Access (Berlin: Transparency International, 2015), 8, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Lobbying_web.pdf . [12] Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe, 8. [13] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 79. [14] Raj Chari, John Hogan and Gary Murphy, Regulating Lobbying: A Global Comparison (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 61, 173. [15] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 75-76. [16] Peter Köppl and Julia Wippersberg, “The State of Public Affairs in Austria,” Journal of Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2014): 35-36, accessed December 9, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pa.1503 . [17] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 88-89. [18] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 76, 80, 84. [19] Venice Commission, Report on the Role of Extra-Institutional Actors in the Democratic System (Strasbourg: Venice Commission, 2013), 16, accessed December 8, 2016, http://www.venice . coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2013)011-e. [20] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 90. [21] Chari, Hogan, and Murphy, Regulating Lobbying, 168, 177. [22] Mulcahy, Lobbying in Europe, 9. [23] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 80. [24] Transparency International Slovenia, Lifting the Lid on Lobbying - Call for Transparent and Ethical Lobbying (Ljubljana: Transparency International Slovenia, 2014), 35, accessed December 1, 2016, http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/TI_SLO_LLL_report_ANG_web.pdf . [25] Köppl and Wippersberg, “The State of Public Affairs in Austria,” 36. [26] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 90. [27] Transparency International Slovenia, Lifting the Lid, 14. [28] Crepaz and Chari, “The EU’s Initiatives,” 80. [29] Direnc Kanol, “Should the European Union Enact a Mandatory Lobby Register?,” Journal of Contemporary European Research 8, no. 4 (2012): 524, accessed December 8, 2016, http://www.jcer.net/index.php/jcer/article/view/460/371 . Works Cited Assemblée Nationale. "Interest Representatives in the National Assembly." Assemblée Nationale. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/representant-d-interets/repre_interet. Chari, Raj, John Hogan and Gary Murphy. Regulating Lobbying: A Global Comparison. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010. Crepaz, Michele and Raj Chari. “The EU’s Initiatives to Regulate Lobbyists: Good or Bad Administration?” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 82, no. 5 (2014): 71-97. Accessed December 7, 2016. https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/assets/pdfs/eu_lobbyist_ regulation_crepaz_ chari_2014.pdf . Deutscher Bundestag. "Public List of Associations Registered with the Bundestag," Deutscher Bundestag, November 24, 2016, accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/lobbyliste/ European Commission. Commission and European Parliament launch Joint Transparency Register to shed light on all those seeking to influence European policy, 2011. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-773_en.htm?locale=en . Kanol, Direnc. “Should the European Commission Enact a Mandatory Lobby Register?” Journal of Contemporary European Research 8, no. 4 (2012): 519-529. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://www.jcer.net/index.php/jcer/article/view/460/371. Köppl, Peter and Julia Wippersberg. “The State of Public Affairs in Austria.” Journal of Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2014): 31-43. Accessed December 9, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pa.1503 . Mulcahy, Suzanne. Lobbying in Europe: Hidden Influence, Privileged Access. Berlin: Transparency International, 2015. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Lobbying_web.pdf OECD. Lobbyists, Governments and the Public Trust, Volume 2: Promoting Integrity through Self-Regulation. OECD Publishing, 2012. Accessed December 7, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264084940-en . Transparency International Slovenia. Lifting the Lid on Lobbying - Call for Transparent and Ethical Lobbying. Ljubljana: Transparency International Slovenia, 2014. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/ 12/TI_SLO_LLL_report_ANG_web.pdf. UKLR. "About the Register." UK Lobbying Register. Accessed December 10, 2016. http://www.lobbying-register.uk/about-.html. Venice Commission. Report on the Role of Extra-Institutional Actors in the Democratic System. Strasbourg: Venice Commission, 2013. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.venice . coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2013)011-e.