Perspectives on Coercion

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Libertarians dig the coercion leitmotif. We care about coercion, find it deeply offensive, and want to stamp it out–even if, some of us argue, this means stamping out the state along with it.

When we compare ourselves to progressives, we often do so within this coercion lens. The progressive or conservative votes for a policy to advance whatever good he desires–and then rubs his palms together gleefully at the thought of government goons forcing everyone else to comply. Or, more charitably, the progressive votes for a policy and then says, “Look, I’d love it if we didn’t have to use the power of law to make this happen, but we do live in a democracy and the people have spoken and compliance is necessary for the policy to work.” In this latter sense, he isn’t happy about coercion, but he thinks the benefits of the policy outweigh the harm to the coerced.

The libertarian response to both is to argue that coercion is bad and that we shouldn’t do it except to prevent the violation of rights. In this sense, we like to say that what separates us from progressives and conservatives is how much we care about the morality of the use of coercive force.

But this isn’t quite right. What I want to argue is that it is not the case that progressives and libertarians both see government acts as coercive and that libertarians, unlike progressives, see this as a moral wrong. Rather, progressives and libertarians have different and incompatible views on the nature of coercion itself.

Libertarians view coercion as the use of force or the threat of force to make someone do something he wouldn’t otherwise do and doesn’t want to do. Thus coercion violates the famous principle of non-aggression and is therefore a rights violation. Progressives, on the other hand, see coercion quite differently. Broadly speaking, progressives think about coercion by the state (i.e., the act of making and enforcing laws) in two categorically distinct ways. The first is best explained by analogizing to how a group of friends decide where to go for dinner. The second can be labeled, drawing upon Marx, the notion of false consciousness (which I’ll hit up in another post).

What Should We Eat?

You and five buddies have met up in the city for an evening of hanging out. One member of the group says, “Hey, I’m hungry. Let’s all go grab something to eat.” Another says, “Yeah, sounds good. But where?” Suggestions are passed around, a vote is taken, and the group decides to head to a local steakhouse. But you don’t want steak. You had steak last night, you’re tired of it, and you recently heard about this well-reviewed Thai place just one block over. You made your case to your five buddies–but failed to make it well enough, it seems.

What do you do? You could refuse to go to the steakhouse. You could tell your friends that you don’t want to eat there, that you’re going to the Thai place instead, and then just walk away. But you don’t. Few of us would. Why? Because acting that way is uncouth. You’d be seen by your friends as a spoilsport and anti-social. The six friends decided to get together as a group and go out to eat as a group–and being part of a group means you won’t always get your way.

Progressives view the state in these terms. They think of the United States, say, as a big group of friends who get together to make decisions. Votes are taken, most people get what they want, but some don’t. Refusing to go along with the group’s decision is anti-social. It’s uncouth. It’s libertarian.

The State as “Us” and the State as “Them”

This divide results from fundamentally different ways of characterizing the state. For progressives, the state is “us.” For libertarians, it’s “them.” If we get together and we decide, then it only makes sense that we go along with our decision. Doing otherwise is tactless and disrespectful. By being part of this “we,” each of us agreed to put up with its decisions. Coercion in this context means only forcing people to keep their promises (a notion libertarians are happy to get behind within the framework of contract law).

Libertarians view the state as “them.” The state is a group of people we may have some influence over (though in a nation as large as the United States, that influence is usually slight) but it is a group that more often acts to force its will upon us. Yes, some members of that group voted for the given policy, but we didn’t vote for it. And, furthermore, that group called “the state” lacks the moral (and often constitutional) authority to coercively make us do whatever it decided we should do.

Libertarians thus view the state as being fundamentally different from the group of friends deciding where to eat. Progressives may admit the same–but their attitude and common behavior suggest otherwise. If this distinction stands, then discussions of coercion between progressives and libertarians lack a common context.

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Traffic Light: A Short Thriller

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This isn’t strictly speaking “new” because it’s been out for a couple of weeks, but it’s new enough–and it truly is new for my blog readers, who’ve been waiting patiently for me to get the site relaunched. Enough preamble.

I’ve got a new short story available for purchase on the Kindle store. “Traffic Light: A Short Thriller” is exactly that. It’s an explosive tale about what happens when a simple carjacking turns out to be more than it seems. Written in harsh, punchy prose, “Traffic Light” is a gritty and violent crime thriller that runs 1100 words–or about four paperback pages.

And it’s just 99¢. Go grab it from Amazon.

(And my standard review policy applies: I’m happy to send anyone a complimentary copy of the story in exchange for a review–positive or negative–on Amazon. If you’re interested, shoot me an email.)

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The "Stupid and Evil" Fallacy in American Politics

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The GOP catches much flack for its “obstructionist politics” and for being the “party of no.” They vote against proposals from President Obama and congressional Democrats, proposals that the President and his party peers know are the only way to dig America out of its recession. Who wouldn’t want to end the recession and put people back to work? ask the Democrats. The GOP, of course. They think only of themselves, the next election cycle, and their corporate overlords.

Progressives parrot this line of thinking all over the Internet. Democrats in Congress articulate it explicitly when, like Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich, they say, “It is very clear that the Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail.” But Democrats and their progressive allies are falling prey to the “stupid and evil” fallacy, one that has unfortunately become dominant in American politics. While it is certainly true that sometimes politicians are stupid and/or evil and sometimes they vote against something they know is a good solution just because doing so will net them political gain, the sad fact is that the “stupid and evil” fallacy is often the first explanation partisans jump to, not the last. We would be better off granting our opponents the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not stupid or evil.

The “stupid and evil” fallacy looks like this:

X is a problem. Y is the solution to X. Therefore, anyone who rejects Y must either be stupid (because they don’t realize that Y is the solution to X) or evil (because they want X to continue and so don’t want to solve it by employing Y).

Of course, another reason for rejecting Y is not stupidity or evil (most people aren’t stupid and most people aren’t evil). Rather, it is possible–and, in fact, likely–that rejection of Y results from the belief that Y is not a solution–or, not a good solution–to X.

Taking the specific case of the U.S. economy, congressional Democrats have identified high unemployment as a problem. And they’ve said that government spending, both on jobs creation and extended unemployment benefits, is the solution. Therefore, anyone who would vote against more government spending is either stupid (they don’t know that government spending will increase employment) or evil (they want to see unemployment remain high, either out of spite or because of other, vile interests).

Again, though, it is more likely that those who vote against government spending do so because they don’t believe government spending is the best solution to unemployment. In other words, they reject this principle of Keynesianism. Instead, they adopt one of the many alternative schools of thought that say there are better, more effective, and less costly (both in the near- and long-term) ways to solve the problem of unemployment. You are free to disagree with them and assert that Keynes was right, but that’s an empirical and methodological debate, one that necessarily draws on complex micro and macro economic principles, data, and historical experience.

In other words, showing that Keynes was right and Hayek, say, was wrong (or the other way around) isn’t easy. It’s intellectually demanding work. What is easy is demonizing those who disagree with you and fixing their disagreement not in genuine differences of opinion on complex matters of economics but in personal failings of moral character. That is easy, but it accomplishes nothing and only makes the person doing it look like a fool.

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Laid-Back Productivity for the Already Rich

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What is it with rich Westerners thinking industriousness is the bane of all that’s good an pure?

Leo Babauta provides a good example in his “The Tao of Productivity,” a distillation of the broader “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy. Let me be clear that I am not arguing that those who don’t work themselves to the bone, striving every day to accomplish more and more, are failures. Far from it. Every one of us could do more, be more productive, and every one of us at some point draws the line, deciding that leisure is valuable, too, and that we want some amount of it in our lives. No, what I am objecting to is the argument that the people who do strive to such an extreme degree are somehow missing the point, that they have been duped by consumer culture or American ideals or the cult of productivity. Here’s Babauta:

Think of our culture’s obsession with productivity: with the need for “hard work” and working long hours to get things done, with the need to be busy busy busy all the time, with the need to make lists and check them off, with the need to juggle countless projects and make more revenue and accomplish more and more. But for what? What’s the point of all this obsession?

Babauta obviously thinks there is no point and, being thus pointless, we should all grow up and abandon “hard work.” But this is a profoundly myopic–and, in fact, ignorant–position to take. What is the point of hard work? Why, the things that come from hard work. And what are those things? They’re very nearly everything that makes Babauta’s life enjoyable enough that he doesn’t feel hard work is necessary.

The computer he writes his blog on is the product of people working very hard for very long hours. The medicine that keeps his six children healthy comes not from enlightened folks following the Tao of Productivity, but from driven researchers burning every bit of midnight oil they have to save lives (and perhaps turn a profit while doing so). A world where everyone gave up hard work and embraced Babauta’s philosophy would be a harsh and impoverished place, with high infant mortality, little entertainment, and life expectancies well below what any of us would find acceptable.

Keep the notion of an acceptable standard of living in mind when reading further in Babauta’s manifesto. He writes,

The old version of productivity was founded in the desire for more, to be greater, to accomplish more. But instead, let go of this desire, and realize you already have enough.

Already enough? What’s our baseline? Babauta is a bestselling author and runs several successful blogs. I don’t have specific data on his financial status, but I imagine it is a good deal better than the bulk of people he shares the planet with. Should the impoverished citizens of North Korea realize they “already have enough?” What would Babauta say to this North Korean teacher, who’s

monthly salary scarcely bought two pounds of rice. A university graduate, she pulled her own child out of the third grade in 1998, instead sending her to a neighbor to learn to sew.

Why doesn’t she realize two pounds of rice is plenty? Hasn’t she been reading her Lao Tzu?

This is deeply silly stuff. Someone who already has enough–whatever that means–is, of course, might be advised to stop striving for more if (and it’s a crucial if) doing so would levy on him more costs than it would create benefits. But Babauta tells us that all of us should abandon hard work for what really matters, which is recognizing that we already have it good and that trying to make things better is a fool’s game.

What he offers is a fun house mirror version of Rhonda Byrne’s execrable The Secret. Byrne tells us that the path to riches is to just imagine that we’re already rich and act accordingly. The universe will then take the necessary steps to assure that our delusions become reality. Babauta wants us to believe that we are already rich, so we needn’t even bother with the imagination step.

My point is this: Babauta’s Tao of Productivity isn’t a philosophy for living. It isn’t a method for approaching the world applicable to all. Rather it is a way for those who have taken advantage of the hard work of others to feel good about not putting in hard work themselves. It is productivity for people fortunate enough to already be rich.

To everyone else, to the billions toiling to improve their own lives and the billions toiling to improve the lives of others, it is an insult, and nothing more.

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The Frightening Permissiveness of Rosenkranz's "The Subjects of the Constitution"

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Professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz’s “The Subjects of the Constitution” is a hot, new law review article making the rounds and garnering some well-deserved attention. For those who haven’t read it, and who have even a passing interest in the United States Constitution and judicial review, I heartedly recommend it. Rosenkranz’s article is long, but, as these things go, it’s an easy read. His theory is intriguing and clear and powerful–but it’s also troubling in its permissiveness of broad government action, especially into areas we all agree the government should play no role. Most troubling, his proposed doctrine appears to grant the state the ability to eviscerate the First Amendment, provided Congress is crafty when drafting laws to do so.

Who violates the Constitution?

Rosenkranz’s argument is actually rather simple–and, he claims, simplifying. He sets it out in the paper’s abstract.

Two centuries after Marbury v. Madison, there remains a deep confusion about quite what a court is reviewing when it engages in judicial review. Conventional wisdom has it that judicial review is the review of certain legal objects: statutes, regulations. But strictly speaking, this is not quite right. The Constitution prohibits not objects but actions. Judicial review is the review of such actions. And actions require actors: verbs require subjects. So before judicial review focuses on verbs, let alone objects, it should begin at the beginning, with subjects. Every constitutional inquiry should begin with a basic question that has been almost universally overlooked. The fundamental question, from which all else follows, is the who question: who has violated the Constitution?

The First Amendment begins with “Congress shall make no law…” For Rosenkranz, this means that any First Amendment violation must happen when Congress makes a law. And, given that Congress makes laws before they are enforced, the constitutional violation must occur at the moment of enactment. The First Amendment does not prohibit the President from abridging speech. It is only a prohibition on lawmaking behavior by Congress (hence the active voice construction).

What this means (and Rosenkranz is happy to admit it means) is that the only laws that can violate the First Amendment are those that do so facially. In other words, they are laws that, when the text of them is placed next to the text of the Constitution, a clear violation is apparent. A law that does not abridge freedom of speech on its face, but later does when applied by the President, is not in violation of the First Amendment.

The end of the First Amendment?

This ought to be immediately concerning for those of us to think the courts have done too little to limit the powers of the state within the framework of the Constitution. Under the Rosenkranz doctrine, if Congress enacted a law saying, “Citizens are prohibited from engaging in the act of Holy Communion,” that law would be facially invalid as the text of the law at the time of enactment clearly abridges the free exercise of (the Catholic) religion.

But what if Congress were more subtle? What if it wrote a law that instead read, “Citizens are prohibited from ingesting wine on Sunday mornings, when gathered in groups of more than five and when the wine is ingested in one ounce or smaller amounts as provided by a leader within the group?” Because the law does not facially violate the constitution–it doesn’t mention free exercise of religion, or religion at all–a Catholic could not succeed in a challenge. If the court asking him Rosenkranz’s “who” question, he couldn’t say Congress (the law didn’t violate the constitution at the moment of enactment) and he couldn’t say the President (the First Amendment only prohibits Congress from acting).

Congress employs a lot of smart lawyers to draft its legislation. Should the Supreme Court adopt Rosenkranz’s new doctrine for judicial review, I see no reason why those smart lawyers couldn’t intentionally structure the language of bills to always make them immune to First Amendment challenge. And the problem doesn’t stop with the First Amendment. It cascades through the rest of the Constitution.

Who has rights?

In his refactoring of judicial review, Rosenkranz risks doing away with the very rights the Constitution was created to protect. If it is true that, by nature of being human, we have a right to free expression, then it shouldn’t matter how the government violates that right. Rather, what matters is that a violation occurred and that the violation was at the hands of the government. It seems absurd to think that religious freedom could be trampled and the state could respond with, “Well, sorry, but your right to free exercise only protects you from Congress, not the President’s goon squads.”

These problems exist for the current judicial review doctrine, true. But Rosenkranz’s theory, while potentially clarifying, makes these problems worse. What he has done is grant Congress philosophical grounding for making the type of argument a thug might make when charged with killing a rival. “Don’t look at me,” the thug says. “I didn’t kill that guy–the bullet did.”

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Making Fun of Religion is Not a Human Rights Violation

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Every time I criticize religious beliefs, I’m a human rights violator. “Defamation of religious is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” says the United Nations in an absurd and illiberal resolution passed by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The resolution was “proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions.” This travesty of religious stupidity raises many concerns. Most obviously, it exposes the silliness of thinking we can have a governing body that includes liberal societies embracing legitimate human rights such as freedom of speech and juvenile societies that haven’t yet figured out how to deal with getting their feelings hurt. The Human Rights Council demands–though non-bindingly–that member nations ”take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all religions and beliefs.” This gets it exactly backwards. It is up to the faithful to show why their views deserve tolerance and respect. From where I sit, it’s clear that religion should be tolerated where it does no harm, but that religious beliefs–like any other beliefs asserted without evidence–do not warrant prima facie respect. A religion that demands I cease pointing out this lack of evidence so as to protect its believers from feeling like fools is a religion that deserves anything but “tolerance and respect.”

But more profoundly, the resolution demonstrates the debasement of the very concept of rights that comes from thinking everything that’s desirable must be a fundamental human right. Keep in mind, for instance, this is the same United Nations that deemed paid vacation time to carry as much moral weight–the absolute weight that attaches to those things we call “rights”–as the right to own property and to not be raped. Rights, if they are to mean anything, must be circumscribed. If everything is a right, then nothing is. For, as this new resolution so aptly demonstrates, the infinite proliferation of “rights” leads inevitably to conflict. There is simply no way to embrace both the right to freedom of speech and the right to not have your shitty religion made fun of.

We need to take rights seriously. The United Nations clearly does not.

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Paul Krugman's Corrupt Confusion

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Paul Krugman has a slam dunk argument for why libertarianism doesn’t work–provided his readers don’t know a thing about libertarianism and aren’t inclined to think critically about Krugman’s argument. It begins by quoting Milton Friedman, who tells us, as Krugman puts it, “that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.” But, ah ha! say Paul. Friedman’s an idiot because of, well, this:

In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion.

Krugman thinks he has a cute syllogism here. 1) Milton Friedman says A. 2) The world is actually like B. 3) Therefore libertarianism is wrong.

“And don’t say that we just need better politicians,” Krugman says, cutting off what he sees as the libertarian’s only out. “If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.”

Did you catch the problems? First, a libertarian could respond, “Yeah, Paul, that’s why we shouldn’t grant members of the legislature the power to set arbitrary limits on tort damages.” The solution isn’t incorruptible politicians. Rather, it’s to have perfectly corruptible ones without the authority to exercise their corruption.

Second, and more troubling for Krugman, is his admission that all politicians are corruptible. If that’s true (and it almost certainly is), then what does it say about Krugman’s constant calls for granting those same corruptible folks more power over our lives? Surely if Murkowski is corrupt enough to protect BP from tort damages, she’s corrupt enough to rig safety regulations in BP’s favor.

Krugman can’t have it both ways. If politicians are corrupt, then they’ll screw up both libertarian and progressive policies. The progressives have no solution but to hope for incorruptible politicians. Libertarians, on the other hand, have a very simple solution: take away the corrupt politicians’ power to do harm.

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Greece and the Moral Failings of Social Justice

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The case of Greece and the riots there speak to a seeming paradox within the leftist dream. That dream is one of people seeing themselves as members of a larger community first and as individuals second, of the state supporting workers before entrepreneurs, and ensuring that everyone has high pay, plenty of vacation time, medical care, and generous pensions, by taxing and redistributing heavily. A society structured that way is supposed, we are told, to lead to an end of selfishness and greed and an end to poverty and inopportunity–a society where we care about each other and not just about ourselves.

What the Greeks have learned–and what the rest of Europe is quickly learning–is that such a system is terribly expensive, and that the money has to come from somewhere. Every person living entirely off of the state is a person not putting money into the pot from which the state makes its payments. It’s quite obvious that if your paycheck had to support my family in addition to your family, both our families would be broke. That simple math doesn’t go away when we scale up the number of people both producing and consuming tax revenue. The Greeks forgot this. Their politicians over promised and the system can no longer provide.

But the riots speak to a more tragic element than the basic economic problems of a massive redistributionist state, as well. They show that even the idea that, with the state providing for all, everyone will think of community first is fatally flawed. The rioting Greeks are not rioting and burning and killing because they have a sense of community. They are each, individually rioting and burning and killing because they don’t want to make the tiny sacrifice, to take the relatively small cut in pay, Greece needs to continue to function. The Greeks are behaving exactly the opposite of how the leftist dream says they should. They are thinking of themselves first and their community not at all.

Believing in social justice is only meaningful when you have to sacrifice for it. The Greeks, contrary to the dream, are behaving like the worst progressive caricature of a greedy capitalist: what’s theirs is theirs, fuck the consequences. The leftist dream has lead not to moral enlightenment, but to moral repugnance.

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The Dangers of Consequentialist Libertarianism

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Is libertarianism the necessary outcome of a recognition of fundamental human rights? Or is it simply the best way to arrive at the best results for us as individuals and as members of society? To a great degree, the answer seems to be “both,” but deciding which is the truest path to libertarianism–consequentialism or rights–isn’t without difficulty.

Harvard economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Miron, author of the new book, Libertarianism, from A to Z, was kind enough to blog about my recent post setting out the seven principles of libertarianism. His critique begins strong, but quickly wanders off in a direction that, I fear, undermines the values he wants to promote.

Miron’s first point, that my statement “Individuals have rights it is impermissible to violate” is too meaningless to be meaningful, I happily accept. My intent was to avoid a lengthy discussion of what rights are, where they come from, and the distinction between the negative from the positive variety–but I went too far. I’ll have to rethink my phrasing and revise.

It’s with his second point, however, that I have to respectfully disagree. In the consequentialist vs. rights debate, Miron comes down firmly on the side of the former. So firmly, in fact, that he is willing to assert,

what libertarians really mean when they say things like “individuals have inviolable rights” is that if a society respects particular individual rights (such as ownership of one’s property and person), then other good things happen. Powell’s point 1 is just a short-hand for this claim.

Sorry, but my point 1–”Individuals have rights it is impermissible to violate.”–is not a short hand for the claim that we only posit individual rights it is impermissible to violate because good things will happen. While it is true that a society that respects rights will be “better” in many or most ways, it is not true that rights only exist as a handy means for attaining desired consequences.

Miron takes his assumption to its logical conclusion by asking,

if the argument for libertarian policies is that some “rights” have better consequences than others, why not eliminate the middle man and just discuss consequences directly?

One reason why we don’t want to abandon rights is because consequences are slippery. It is not a priori true that Miron’s conception of “better” is best. Why must a society that is wealthier and freer (the consequences Miron argues libertarianism is best at achieving) be more desirable from a consequentialist perspective than one that is more pious, has less environmental impact, or is agrarian? Perhaps the best society, the one with the best outcome for all who live within it, was Afghanistan under the Taliban. Who are we to say? We certainly can’t settle the question by appealing to which has laws and institutions that better get us to a given best outcome, because it is what the best outcome is that we’re arguing about.

Miron might respond that the Taliban made life miserable for those who didn’t abide by its world view, that it was degrading and violent toward women, that it kept its people poor. But the Taliban leaders could reply, “True, but those things are good–and far better than a decadent society where individuals pursue their own gain.” Why are Miron’s desired consequences right and the Taliban’s not?

Miron can potentially escape from this trap by making libertarianism goal specific. In other words, he might argue that, in societies that desire the sorts of outcomes (Miron says) libertarianism creates, libertarianism is the correct choice (over progressivism or conservatism) because it is the surest and most effective path to those universally desired outcomes. This turns libertarianism from a categorical into a hypothetical imperative. If you want wealth and individual freedom, then you should practice libertarianism. (Tom G. Palmer greatly expands on this hypothetical/categorical imperative response to the consequentialists in his essay, “What’s not wrong with libertarianism.”)

And this may be fine. Libertarianism needn’t be a categorical imperative, after all. While some of us may desire to claim that, because human beings have certain rights, libertarianism is demanded, we might very well be wrong. A hypothetical imperative allows us, in a sense, to hedge our bets.

But it seems to have odd, well, consequences. For one, it appears to lead directly to the moral morass of cultural relativism. Whatever consequences a given society thinks are best are, in fact, best for that society, and outsiders (or even dissident insiders) have no right to judge them harshly. For a libertarian trying to spread liberty around the world, this is a disturbing conclusion.

Second, unless we can pin down and define our common desired outcomes with a high degree of precision–and get society to agree fully on them–it’s not even clear Miron’s consequentialism can be a slam dunk argument for libertarianism over other forms of government. We in the west may all say we want a system that maximizes wealth and liberty, but neither of those terms is exact in its meaning. Thus the progressive could counter’s Miron’s consequentialist path to libertarianism by saying that, sure, he wants wealth, but by wealth he means society coming together through the state to assure that everyone shares equally in economic growth. A conservative could argue that wealth is good and freedom is the supreme value, but that both of those must exist within a framework of traditional values enforced by the state or else both become impoverished.

There is a reason why rights-based arguments for libertarianism persist, and it’s not because rights theorists have failed to notice that they’re really consequentialists. It’s because an argument from rights is distinct from an argument from consequences.

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Of course video games are art. But are they good art?

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Roger Ebert stirred up quite the hornets’ nest with his pronouncement that “video games can never be art.” Hundreds of blog posts and thousands of comments later, the debate still rages, with “Is Art” and “Is Not Art” partisans lobbing slavos. The problem is, the question–”Are video games art?”–is, simply put, meaningless. And it’s not even what anyone, including Roger Ebert, is arguing about. No, this conversation continues not because of the ontological complexity of “art,” but because of the subjective nature of the real question being asked, “Are video games good art?”

“What is” and “what is good” are not the same

If you read Ebert’s essay carefully, you’ll see it’s littered with references to the lack of quality in video games. Everywhere he uses phrases like “superior artistry and imagination.” He may be right–it may be true that video games, even all video games, suck as artistic expression–but that’s resolutely not the question the thinks he’s debating. He’s not even interested in debating the question he thinks he’s debating. ”[W]e could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one,” Ebert tells us. So rather than solve the hard problem of ontology, he wants to subsume it into the less heady question of quality.

Ebert admits this is exactly what he’s doing when he writes,

But when I say [Cormac] McCarthy is “better” than [Nicholas] Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

See the trick he’s played on us? He admits that both McCarthy and Sparks are novelists–they are both engaged in the act of creating that thing we call “novels.” What makes one man’s novels “art,” however, is simply that they are “better.” And “better” is a distinction made “on the basis of my taste.” In Ebert’s world, one is not an artist unless one is a good artist, which is as silly as saying that a Ford Focus isn’t a car because it isn’t a fast car or that the St. Louis Rams aren’t a football team because they aren’t a winning football team.

Why dodge definitions?

Roger Ebert pulls this slight of hand because defining art is exceedingly difficult if the goal is a narrow definition. The solution is to break the definition in two, asking first “What is art?” and then “What is good art?”

This distinction was first brought to my attention during my undergraduate years by my fellow student and good friend, Trevor Burrus, when we were taking a course in the philosophy of art. I hadn’t thought about it in years, not until Ebert launched this ideological war.

I don’t want to knock Ebert for failing to advance a satisfying definition of art, one that would allow him to difinitely make the claim he does in the title of his piece. Deciding what is art isn’t easy, and not because art is a narrow and precise category. Rather, delineating art from non-art is hard for two reasons. First, art is an exceedingly broad category. A strong case can be made that nearly everything created by human hands can be, and likely is, art. Second, we’ve been trained to think of “art” as a value loaded term. Thus we’re torn in two directions. On the one hand, we recognize the broadness of the art category and so want to err on the side of inclusion. But on the other hand, calling something art is a sign of respect and we don’t want to spread our respect too thin, lest we lose the ability to be artistic elitists.

Duchamp's Fountain (1917)

The elitism of art leads us down the rabbit hole in another way, too. Once someone has been branded an artist by whatever community determines such things, we will bend over backwards to recognize all their future work as art based wholly on their say so. How else to explain Duchamp’s Fountain? This sculpture is nothing more than an off-the-shelf urinal with a fake signature. Yet it was chosen by 500 art experts to receive the Turner Prize and was called the “most influential work of modern art, ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse.” If Fountain is art, Roger, surely a video game can be, too?

So what is art, exactly?

This brings me to my definition of art, one that solves the demarcation problem by, in a sense, rendering it meaningless. Here goes:

Art is anything someone intended to be art when they thought it up, or anything any observer takes to be art upon encountering it.

Andy Warhol's "Empire" (1964)

The status “art” resides not in the created thing (the movie, the painting, the game) but in the conception of it as art. This solves apparent philosophical puzzles, like why it is that if leave my camcorder running by accident while I’m at work, capturing eight hours of footage out my front window, it’s not art. But if Andy Warhol does the same thing–though intentionally–we get the (awful) 1964 film, Empire. Which is art. (Note that Empire resides in that odd category of art that is better as a concept than as an actual work.)

Also solved by this expansive definition is the peculiar place of photography. A coffee mug left on a desk it not art. A photograph of that coffee mug, taken from a flat angle, with natural light, reproducing exactly what the eye sees, is art. One is two-dimensional, yes, and the other three-dimensional, but that can’t be what makes the mug not art and the photograph art. (And, again, keep in mind that the photograph being art does not mean it’s good art.) The reason the photography is art is because the photographer intended it to be. Likewise, the coffee mug could be art if an observer walked by and thought, “The arrangement of mug and desk is artistic.”

Ebert’s folly

Video games are art if either they were intended by their creators to be art or if any observer of the game takes them to be art. Clearly, both of these are the case for at least many video games, rendering Ebert’s assessment wrong.

Of course, Ebert could reply that my definition of art is too broad and that we must narrow it by appealing to his sense of taste, as he would have us do with Cormac McCarthy and Nicholas Sparks. But it seems profoundly weird to hand over the determination of ontological status to the tastes of a self-appointed elite. Something is either art or it is not art independently of Roger Ebert, just as something is either a car or a horse independently of the judgement of Nelson Mandela.

“Art” is a broad category, and we should get used to that. But accepting that “art” is broad does not mean “good art” can’t be narrow. Ebert has every right to dispute video games as good art, but he overshoots when he assumes that his judgement of what is good answers the question of what is.

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