I entered the Asian antique store on a whim.  No sooner had the bell hanging over the door signalled my entrance than three large wooden busts of the famously hideous Buddhist saint Bodhidarma caught my eye.  The craftsmanship evoking the misshapen features of this holy sage from within the natural curves and sinews of the tree trunks intrigued me.  The asking price: less than twenty dollars a head, a ridiculously low sum for art made of Indonesian teak.

After lugging two of these precious noggins back to my apartment and displaying my savvy buy to an acquaintance well-versed in forest science, I was met with an awkward silence.  Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, I was informed, a whopping eighty-five percent of which comes from the harvesting of rainforests for lumber and other forest products, such as my two sylvan skulls.

I realized that though I had bought these items third or fourth hand, I was now a part of a morally reprehensible  consumer-driven cycle of forest destruction in South East Asia whose aura will forever linger about these objects.  Had I known, I wouldn’t have bought them.

Now whether or not you believe that the disappearance of South East Asian rain forests is a problem, you have most likely accidentally consumed an object which is the output of a process you would normally oppose on moral grounds: the bride-to-be receiving an engagement ring set with blood diamonds, the vegetarian who realizes mid-mold that gelatin is made of ground-up bones. Although I didn’t participate in the morally reprehensible action, the property is morally tainted by virtue of its provenance.  It is on similar grounds, that leather made from many endangered species is banned from importation.

The solution is not to exploit what could be a moral loophole (“I didn’t cut these trees down, so let me look for more of these cheap wooden heads”) as I have heard some vegetarian Buddhists do with fish that suffocate “by themselves” in nets.  Nor would it be to destroy the property – that wouldn’t erase my purchase act or help the Indonesian rainforest.

Having entered into a stage of an immoral process, I really have the moral imperative – the opportunity – to atone for this action. In this case, an appropriate “offset” would be a contribution to a rainforest NGO and an explanation of the questionable provenance of the heads when I give them as a gift.  This will lighten the smudge of immoral consumerism on my character and at the very least, leave my conscience clean to sin again.

Accordingly, we can hold the United States after 1787 responsible for the debts incurred under the Articles of Confederation, but not responsible for the pre-1776 debts of the British Empire. (On this point, among others, Mr. Goodwin seems to misunderstand Mr. McArthur’s argument, which does account for the different debt responsibilities of a country borne of another country’s borders.) The argument works conversely as well. A debtor to a country should meet his debt obligations even if that country changes its constitution. This is because the debtor is just as much in debt to that country’s People as the country itself. If the People, i.e. the creditors, remain roughly the same between one constitution and the next, they still deserve their interest payments.

Mr. McArthur errs, however, when he assumes that all governments necessarily embody a sovereignty deriving from the people. By definition, a tyrannical government does not. A tyranny flouts The People’s sovereignty, it operates beyond the confines of the state’s legal framework, and often enough, it disregards the commonweal for its own selfish interests. The international community recognizes North Korea, but this is a recognition out of pragmatism. Few would seriously suggest that Kim Jong Il leads a legal government operating as a legitimate representative of the North Korean people.

I accept Mr. McArthur’s basic premise, but add one corollary. When a People are held hostage by a tyrant, The People cannot be made responsible for his debts. Indeed, in the same way that an individual is not legally responsible to respect a contract entered into under coercion, a People cannot be responsible for a debt forced onto them by a tyrant.

Of course, the argument can get more nuanced. Not all tyrants act tyrannically all of the time. When a sometime tyrant incurs a debt legally, and in the interest of the commonweal, The People ought to bear responsibility for that specific debt (no matter how many times they may later change their government). Naturally, this raises several new issues. What constitutes tyrannical behaviour? How do we judge what is in the interest of the commonweal? But these are questions for another discussion.

Rather than engage McArthur’s appeal to sovereignty directly, I’ll counter this oblique attack with a similar, but more devastating enfilading fire. To wit, in no particular order, McArthur’s mistakes.

First, McArthur assumes that the obliteration of a democracy by a dictator is necessarily ethically wrong. While democracies on balance tend to be more rights-protective regimes, there is nothing that logically compels us to sneer at a benevolent monarch from overthrowing a tyrannical majoritarian regime.

Second, York’s proposal deliberately eschews a discussion of representativeness, relying instead on constitutional consistency as a means of identifying whether a government may be held accountable for its debts. Recall again York’s central query: “when, as an ethical matter, is a government liable for the debts of its predecessors?” Notice the conspicuous absence of the inclusion of a nation’s citizens or even a People.

Third, McArthur’s appeal to the People raises serious definitional questions. Regime changes, particularly the violent ones he mentioned, do more than just put a different person on the throne. They alter boundaries of nations, expanding and contracting them, sometimes fracturing nations altogether, splitting empires into constellations of independent satellites. This is hardly a rare occurrence. We’re a quarter century removed from the dissolution of the USSR, less from the crackup of the Balkans, and since my childhood a country named Zaire no longer exists, to name a few that come to mind. While the international community may recognize North Korea’s borders, one suspects it has less to do with the starving masses trapped within them and more to do with the pair of crackpots who have kept the Communist country together.

Fourth, McArthur seems oblivious to the relatively recent rise of the nation-state, as well as the increasing threats to its continued existence. Pan-nationalistic forms of government as well as stateless groups, subject to alternative forms of governance: these still need to answer York’s question, but they need not bother with McArthur’s inapt challenge, since they aren’t nations at all.

Fifth, and finally, what separates the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the United States, from a dictatorship to a democracy? The People, as McArthur likes to note, were substantially the same and had just won a war of independence from England, and clearly existed and identified themselves as something. How does this merit McArthur’s begrudging approval.

While I remain unconvinced of the effects of York’s proposal, I see no substantive threat to in McArthur’s rebuttal to the original theory of governmental obligation as an ethical matter.

I’d like to fill in this normative vacuum by suggesting why it is not. What distinguishes loans to a state, as opposed to those to an individual or institution, is that state borrowing is an exercise of sovereignty. The debtor, then, is the sovereign itself; and the source of sovereignty, by any account, is The People as a collective.

With this in view, perhaps Mr. York’s argument could be recast in the following sovereignty-conscious terms:  when a government changes in an extra-constitutional manner, The People as defined by the old regime is a fundamentally different entity than The People as defined by the new one; hence, it would be unjust to hold the latter accountable for the debts of the former. By this account, determining whether The People really has changed would require evaluating the representativeness of the predecessor government vis-a-vis its successor: if citizens are truly represented in the second regime but were not in the first, then perhaps one sovereign has disappeared and another formed.

Such an inquiry, however, is foreclosed by Mr. York’s framework, which mechanically equates sovereign continuity with constitutional consistency. The perverse result: while a fledgling democracy could disavow the debts of an overthrown dictator, a newly crowned dictator could just as easily – just as ethically – wash his hands of a vanquished democratic government’s obligations; and these obligations would be forever forgotten even if democracy should soon reemerge.

The real problem for Mr. York’s argument, though, is that in neither of these cases – democracy-to-dictatorship nor dictatorship-to-democracy – has the nature of sovereignty actually changed.  Sovereignty is conceptually prior to government, regardless of the government’s structure, representativeness, or continuity with a predecessor regime. Even the most wicked of governments is presumed to embody national sovereignty, as derived from The People: this is why the international community recognizes North Korea’s borders no less than Switzerland’s. It follows that constitutional upheaval within an established nation, while perhaps changing the form of the leviathan, does not transform its essence or dismantle its constituent parts. The People remains an intact and unchanged entity – with the capacity to meet prior obligations incurred on its behalf.

Two of Mr. York’s examples, West Germany and the United States, are exceptions tending to prove this rule. Both cases featured the emergence of an altogether new political unit, as opposed to merely a new form of government. Since The People of the United States was a previously non-existent entity, a new sovereign had emerged – and then, and only then, is there an argument that previous debts can be ethically ignored.

Although wealthy nations like the United States typically meet their financial obligations, not all nations are so fortunate or conscientious. Such countries, many of which are left to chafe under the backbreaking debt of prior regimes, usually have two options: devote massive portions of already impoverished national budgets to make interest payments (to say nothing of repaying the principal); or repudiate the debts as incurred by an illegitimate predecessor. The latter option invites some interesting policy questions, many of which balance a debtor nation’s short-term fiscal needs against its long-term economic stability. However, I’m more interested in a philosophical question: when, as an ethical matter, is a government liable for the debts of its predecessors?

At the extremes, this question seems unproblematic. No one would hold modern Egypt liable for the Hebrew slavery, but France is still on the hook for debts incurred under Chirac’s government. But many cases are especially difficult. Must developing countries pay debts incurred by spendthrift dictators or modern governments compensate victims of generation-old genocides?

My answer is fairly simple: a government is liable for the debt of a previous government if and only if the present regime is the same state as that which incurred the debt. The modern Egyptian state is not the same one as that which oppressed the Hebrews millennia ago, but the current French government is, despite some changes, the same as that under President Chirac. But though the answer is simple, its contours and limits are somewhat less straightforward. For determining when a modern state is the same as one previously in existence, requires that one have an account for when one state ends metaphysically and another one begins. And since the personnel, size, structure, and rules of governments change all the time, drawing this line may be somewhat difficult.

Consider, then, the following theory: a state is metaphysically identical to a prior iteration so long as the changes necessary for transforming the old state to the new state were internally consistent with the old state’s own rules. If, for example, the United States amends its Constitution—even in some major respect—such an alteration is consistent with the rules governing the state itself, since Article V of the Constitution itself provides for this contingency. However, if the President declared himself no longer beholden to Congress, and his popularity and power were sufficient to back up this authority, the present United States would cease to exist and be replaced by a new state altogether, albeit one that may possess several similarities to the previous one.

What does this mean in practice? First of all, it would be as illegitimate to demand nations to repay debts incurred by prior (but metaphysically noncontinuous) states as it would be to hold one nation responsible for the liabilities of another. As a result, several difficult cases become somewhat clearer: on the one hand, a dictator who racks up massive debt does not pass this on to the democratic government that expelled him from power. On the other hand, a nation cannot divest itself from its financial obligations simply by electing a new president to replace the old and incompetent one. Perhaps counterintuitively, West Germany’s government was not obligated to pay reparations to the families of Holocaust victims (though it may still have proven an instance of good public policy); however, (at least based on my understanding of the power transition there) the current Serbian government is liable for the crimes of the Milosevic regime.

While I believe this account of the metaphysical continuity of states has considerable explanatory power, it does have some limits.

First of all, my account must be limited by some sort of materiality requirement. In other words, an internally inconsistent change in the nature of a state must be material to constitute a metaphysical break with its prior incarnation; otherwise, metaphysical continuity could be negated by an administrative agency interpreting an environmental statute too broadly.

Secondly, if my principle were actually implemented globally, it might invite woefully indebted nations—perhaps at the behest of their government leaders—to revolt and change the state in such a way as to allow it ethically to repudiate its national debt. I concede that philosophically, nothing exists in my account to prevent this. But just because a nation is not obligated to act in a certain manner does not imply that there is no reason to do so as a practical matter. A new state in such circumstances should probably choose to adopt the obligations of the previous state in order to demonstrate economic soundness (much as the nascent United States did after replacing the Articles of Confederation). Otherwise, just as the Constitutional Framers feared, the new state may find itself hard-pressed to find future creditors.

My account of the metaphysical continuity of governments may not always yield intuitive outcomes, nor does it always cohere with the pragmatic best interests of either debtor or creditor nations. Nevertheless, I believe it offers a principled philosophical account of governmental debts—one that is superior to the ad hoc analysis that typically governs this field.



The core of my claim: “Is it?”

What’s so bad about losing blood? Sure, if you bleed enough out, you’ll eventually expire, a dried-up raisin of a student. But contrary to McArthur’s claim of a “violence,” the students won’t be hemorrhaging from the righteous wounds of a wrathful dean. No doubt these venesections will occur under  the watchful eyes of trained professionals, witnessing a scene that would have brought a smile to phlebotomists of yesteryear. We see the miracle of modern medicine, nurses conveying the vital fluids of happy donors to even happier recipients. In a matter of minutes, they’ll gladly swap as much blood as a gross of the cat o’ nine tails would take out of their back, but walk away munching cookies, sipping juice, and mildly mocking their mutual anemia.

After all, they’re merely losing, as McA puts it, “bodily fluids.” To be sure, they are losing a vital bodily fluid, but so are the students out on the neighboring football field, and without a single cookie. In fact, while football practice produces lamentable deaths by dehydration every season, the scourge of expiration by blood donors is, ahem, slightly less notorious. Yet that hasn’t discouraged the Coach Sweeney’s of this world from making their charges run laps in hundred degree heat, do somersaults until they vomit (speaking of violent loss of bodily fluids), or scream until the weaker freshmen wet themselves (see previous parenthetical).

In fact, while there are plenty of parts of your body that you can’t sell, unless you live in a country that rhymes with Shmoshmalia, blood is. Your blood is something you can use as a second income, at least the plasma part of it. And judging from the pay that plasma will get you, it doesn’t seem all that valuable.

Nor is the amount of blood so terrible, typically a pint or 500 ml. By comparison, consider what used to happen when you walked into a top of the line hospital:

The kids should be happy the school lets them off so easy!

I have further, and significantly more serious, problems with McArthur’s second implied charge of incommensurability, as well as Felix’s misconceived notions of punishment and our penal system. Those I will address in a subsequent dissent: The Discursion of Coercion.

I would rather comment on this statement

Self-sacrifice is admirable, even heroic. But compulsory self-sacrifice is at odds with our society’s commitment to personal autonomy. So strong is this commitment, in fact, that we think it cruel and unusual to invade the bodily integrity of those who rape and kill.

Our society is not yet, and should never be in my opinion, fully committed to “personal autonomy.” The military draft is (or has the possibility of being) compulsory self-sacrifice, right? Personal autonomy must often yield to the common good. And it is certainly not the case that a majority of Americans now believe it an 8th Amendment violation to execute rapists and murderers. I’m just curious about who this “we” is.  Four or five members of the Supreme Court, sure; a cadre of international lawyers, sure; the rest of us?  I think (happily) not.

First, there is the issue of retributive proportionality. If an offense merits a certain punishment, then that is the punishment it should receive. Presumably, unless he is unnaturally contrite, an offender will choose what he perceives as the lesser punishment. As a result, the penalty smorgasbord will systematically underpunish wrongdoers.

Moreover, providing punitive options establishes an unhealthy identification of the process with commercial bargaining. In effect, offenders choose their punishments from a menu of options. But this is not the type of association we should favor; wrongdoers should view punishment as inevitable and expressive of deep-seated societal disapproval. Punishment should not become a fee one pays in order to indulge one’s illicit preferences. Otherwise, just as an NBA team owner may choose to pay the luxury tax to secure a more talented team, a would-be offender may rationally calculate that the risk of prison is a price he is willing to pay in order to commit a rape.

To some extent, criminals (and misguided students) probably already engage in these sorts of cost calculi. But at its best, there is a moral element attached to punishment as well. And sometimes this moral element is as essential to deterring wrongful behavior as the penalties themselves. It is something similar to this, I believe, that people found so abhorrent in the Church’s sale of indulgences.

Surely, blood for detention does not mark an imminent apocalypse, but it is symptomatic of some troubling schemes that risk taking the “wrong” out of wrongdoing.

“Donate blood to help out children that are in need. Sign up in Rm. 177 and get 10 hours of DETENTION CLEARED!!!!”

Clever idea, I thought. Misbehaving students learn a valuable lesson while serving a socially useful purpose; meanwhile, the school is spared the cost of supervising hours upon hours of detention. Seems like a win-win. Except for one thing:

It’s corporal punishment.

Whatever might be said for such a policy, there’s simply no getting around the following fact: it makes the violent depletion of a child’s bodily fluids into a state-sanctioned method of discipline. It lets students atone for their misbehavior — for, say, throwing a paper airplane across the classroom — through a procedure in which a needle punctures their skin, penetrates their vein, and forcibly pumps out blood by the pint.

True, students are not required to liquefy their detention hours in this way. It’s just an alternative to serving the time. But that doesn’t make it any less objectionable: a policy where students were given a choice between ten lashings or an hour’s detention wouldn’t pass legal or moral muster, notwithstanding the elective nature of the lashings.

But here’s the difference, some might say: giving blood promotes a social good, maybe saving lives. The school isn’t offering delinquent students a substitute punishment, but rather rewarding them for doing a good deed.

Of course, traditional corporal punishment also promotes a social good – the deterrence of mischief. Nevertheless, we refuse to tolerate it; we recognize that any state-directed invasion of a child’s bodily integrity is a categorical wrong, not something mildly unsavory that can be justified if there’s enough of an upside.

What’s more, the school’s policy sends a perverse message about charity and altruism – that service to one’s community is transactional, a quid pro quo, a way to “learn your lesson.” Any positive, edifying effect that might arise from the act of giving, then, will surely be overwhelmed by the negative context in which it is compelled. This negative association — between punishment and charity — will sound most loudly for three  groups of students.

First, “good” students will be deterred from giving, not wanting to put themselves in the company of mischief-makers and not wanting to partake in an activity that has been equated with detention. After all, they didn’t cause trouble in class, so why should they have to give blood? And for those who do voluntarily give, the feeling of pride that should rightfully be theirs may well be tarnished.

Second, the policy is particularly unfair for students who receive detention after they have already participated in the blood drive. By virtue of their earlier charitable act, they’ll be denied an option available to their less altruistic peers.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the blood-for-detention offer is primarily aimed at seniors, who are not allowed to graduate until they’ve wiped their detention slate clean. The message sent to these students has a troublingly coercive tenor: Give blood, or don’t graduate.

Teachers, too, are caught up in an uncomfortable moral haze. If giving blood really does save lives, should they be more quick to assign detention, knowing the great social good that will result? What if a terrorist attack or massive earthquake created a desperate need for blood — should they  then lower the threshold for potentially life-saving detention hours?

Self-sacrifice is admirable, even heroic. But compulsory self-sacrifice is at odds with our society’s commitment to personal autonomy. So strong is this commitment, in fact, that we think it cruel and unusual to invade the bodily integrity of those who rape and kill.

It is similarly cruel, and should be just as unusual, for those who smack their gum a little too loudly in math class.