prior probability

One of the minor irritations of living in Central Florida is the veritable orgy of annoying lawyer ads all over Orlando (#AdPorn). I always try to mentally block out these crass and ugly billboards whenever I am on the road, so I did not notice, as one newly arrived Floridian puts it, the “epidemic of bald men having billboards extended in order to fit their bald heads.” (Via Reddit: u/mnhaverland.)

For this installment of my Game-Theory Thursday series (here is the previous installment), I want to feature my 2012 paper “Modelling the Coase Theorem,” which is available here via SSRN. What is so special about this paper, you might ask? In a nutshell, it’s the first paper to apply the methods of game theory to Ronald Coase’s now-famous “farmer-rancher” dispute. By way of background, when Professor Coase published his landmark paper on “The Problem of Social Cost” in the early 1960s, Coase presented this bucolic example to illustrate an intriguing and counter-intuitive idea that has since become known among economists and lawyers as the Coase Theorem–an idea that has shaped my own view of the world and that I have blogged about many times before. But unlike most forms of modern economic analysis, Coase’s “theorem” is based on a verbal argument and is almost always proved arithmetically. That is to say, the so-called Coase Theorem is not really a “theorem” in the formal or mathematical sense of the word. My paper, however, attempts to remedy this deficiency by modelling Coase’s original farmer-rancher problem as a strategic game using the formal methods of game theory. Enjoy!

Check out this unique portrait of Winston Churchill by artist Kim Jackson. Look closely, for this collage is composed entirely of cigar labels! Also, check out Kim Jackson’s website here. (Hat tip to Mark, the friendly and expert proprietor of the Holy Smokes cigar shop in Palm Harbor, Florida.)

Kris (@KrisAbdelmessih) asks, and I paraphrase, “How is Twitter disrupting academia?” Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen), the world’s most prolific (and eclectic!) academic blogger, responds here. Tyler’s response, however, begs the following second-order question, Should serious academics (ha!) be on Twitter in the first place?

More details about composer Karl Jenkins and his Diamond Music album are available here. (Via YouTube: “Camille et Julie Berthollet avec l’orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo dirigé par Julien Masmondet.”)

Did Adam Smith know what it was like to be in love? AdamSmithWorks, a beautiful website devoted to all things Smith, has just published my “Adam Smith in Love” primer here. (By the way, one of my favorite parts of AdamSmithWorks is the series “What Adam Smith Ate,” containg recipes of Smith’s favorite meals, like Basque Cabbage Soup.) In my primer, I present the available evidence and let readers draw their own conclusions. For the full-length version of “Adam Smith in Love,” along with my own conjectures about Smith’s enigmatic loves, see here.

Note: We will be blogging much less frequently until Monday, June 7. Next month, we will turn our attention to the Zapruder film, Kurt Goedel’s “Leibniz Conspiracy,” and my friend Bob Sanger’s beautiful paper on Gettier cases.

This will be my 10th and last blog post devoted to the contested concept of self-ownership. In summary, I have presented the main arguments against self-ownership, and I have found those arguments to be overrated or woefully inadequate. At the same time, however, I agree with Ben Bryant, whose work I mentioned in my previous post, that self-ownership cannot be an absolute right, that self-owners owe limited duties toward others. But who are those others, and what do these limited duties consist of?

Before proceeding, I agree with Barbara Fried, who I introduced in another previous post, that there are many ways of answering those key questions. This is why even left-libertarians disagree among themselves about the practical implications of self-ownership. But at the same time, let’s not miss the larger and more amazing point here: that both left-libertarians and right-libertarians share the same paradigm or premise: the moral axiom of self-ownership! For my part, I now want to conclude this series by channeling my “inner Richard Epstein”, so to speak — by turning to our Anglo-American common law tradition for answers, a venerable tradition going back to King Henry II and to the immortal jurists of ancient Rome, instead of trying re-invent the philosophical wheel. Specifically, if we take a step back and begin to look at the common law as a whole — especially the law of torts, the law of property, and the law of contracts — something beautiful will begin to emerge, and that something is what I like to call “The Law of Self-Ownership.”

Simply stated, the law of self-ownership can be reduced to a secular Silver Rule for interactions among strangers, i.e. for interactions outside the family or outside other voluntary associations. Broadly speaking, this code contains two parts: (1) a default right, along with a corresponding duty, and (2) a default remedy. The first part consists of one’s default right to negative liberty. Absent a voluntary agreement between A and B, A can’t tell B what to do, and B can’t tell A what to do. (This default right to be left alone, in turn, generates a corresponding or Hohfeldian duty: absent an emergency, A is not allowed to injure or interfere with B’s person or property, and B is not allowed to injure A’s person or property.) The remedy part tells us what happens when the above rule is broken. A must compensate B if A does injure or interfere with B’s person or property, even in an emergency, and likewise, B must compensate A if B injures or interferes with A.

These two “simple rules” (to borrow Professor Epstein’s apt phrase) are, in a nutshell, what the Law of Self-Ownership is all about. We get to decide how to live our lives and how to raise our children, but at the same time, we also owe corresponding duties to others. Although most of these duties are voluntarily assumed by us via contract, some of them are imposed on us via the common law, such as the general duty of ordinary care and the duty to provide compensation for breaches of these voluntary and involuntary duties. What is wrong with this common law picture? I think it’s beautiful!

Can ordinary office supplies like the humble pencil be works of art? Why not? I will conclude my series on the theory of self-ownership in my next post before turning my attention to the Zapruder film, but in the meantime, check out the Instagram page of “Pencil & Correct” here, the source of the beautiful picture below. Hat tip: Kottke.

Alternative Title #1: The Paradigm of Self-Ownership (Part 2)

Alternative Title #2: Ben Bryant’s Middle-Way

In this post, I want to challenge the paradigm of self-ownership by presenting a competing paradigm, one that recognizes our collective obligations to society and to our fellow man. But I have a problem. Simply stated, the problem is this: From a theoretical perspective, isn’t the opposite of self-ownership “slavery”? If so, this has to be one of the most unattractive moral principles in the world! (As an aside, I can’t resist taking one last dig at the leading critics of self-ownership–scholars like Barbara Fried, David Sobel, and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen–who themselves are unable to propose a workable alternative to self-ownership.)

Nevertheless, despite the difficulty of imagining a workable alternative to the self-ownership paradigm–i.e. an alternative that does not involve the unpalatable extreme of slavery–I will do my best here to imagine a less extreme alternative. To do so, allow me to introduce you to Ben Bryant and to his beautiful 2017 paper titled “Duty-Sensitive Self-Ownership,” which is available here (via ProQuest) for your reference. To his credit, Professor Bryant does try to paint a workable alternative to self-ownership. Strictly speaking, Bryant himself does not reject self-ownership outright. (How could he, given the lack of alternatives?) Instead, Bryant presents a modified version of the self-ownership paradigm–a version he calls “duty-sensitive self-ownership.”

According to Bryant (2017, p. 265, emphasis added by me), “people have some limited but enforceable duties of assistance to one another.” Alas, the problem with Bryant’s “duty-sensitive” theory is that it has no real stopping point. Bryant (p. 278) himself concedes that “working out the details here will, of course, be tricky.” We could, however, try to rescue Bryant’s duty approach by strictly limiting the outer scope of these positive duties to one’s family and to the members of one’s political community. After all, no one chooses one’s family, just as no one chooses the political community you are born into, so perhaps it makes intuitive sense to limit our positive duties to these two domains (family and politics). But even in these two contexts, we still have to decide what the scope of these parental duties or community duties are–specifically, which family members and community members are entitled to support, and how much support are they entitled to?

Nevertheless, despite this fatal flaw, Bryant is on the right track. Why? Because he has found middle ground between absolute self-ownership on the one hand (in which I am not even allowed to blow smoke in your face or create minor risks) and absolute slavery on the other (which is even worse, in principle, than absolute self-ownership). Moreover, what is most attractive about Bryant’s middle-way is how it comports with our moral intuitions and with our Anglo-American legal traditions. The law of negligence, for example, imposes a general “duty of care” on all persons–one has a duty to take reasonable steps to avoid or reduce the risks of foreseeable harms. That is, even self-owners have a legal duty to avoid imposing unreasonable harms, or the risks of such harms, on third parties. But beyond this general common law duty of care, what other limited duties, if any, do self-owners owe each other?

I will explore that all-important question–and then conclude my self-ownership series–in my next post.

I will resume my series on self-ownership in my next post, but in the meantime, it has come to my attention (see here, hat tip: Kottke) that the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina was considering awarding Nikole Hannah-Jones a tenured position on their faculty but that the offer of academic tenure fell through because of “pressure from conservatives.” (The reason why this seemingly-minor incident is making the rounds is because Hannah-Jones is one of the contributors to the controversial “1619 Project.”)

Oh, the irony! My left-of-center friends and colleagues–most of whom are academics themselves–are always complaining about all the injustice and inequality in the world, and perhaps rightly so. But what about injustice and inequality in academia? Although tenure is usually defended on academic freedom grounds (see here, for example), I call bullshit. After all, why is it that only tenured academics get to enjoy such freedom? The supreme irony here is that tenure is one of the last remaining vestiges of the retrograde feudal system of the Middle Ages. If my colleagues were truly woke, they would call for the immediate abolishment of this academic caste system altogether, right?