Category Archives: morality

Why Must They Be Mutually Exclusive?

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section objected to an op-ed whose writer touted Federally mandated IVF insurance provided by private economy insurers as a means to elevate our nation’s too low birth rate.

The letter-writer proposed, instead, a tiered cash baby bonus: bigger for married women, smaller for unmarried women.

My question: why must it be one or the other? Why not both?

Follow-on question: why not consider the system of which these are just two components? If the Federal government, or at least the Republicans in the government, are going to work for increasing our birth rate and against the related universal and easily obtained abortion rate—and they should, on both—and on the underlying economic situation of the middle and lower class individuals and families, why not provide women—married or not—in parallel with a range of incentives to have more babies, with financial, educational, and medical support during their pregnancies and in the period surrounding birth, and in the first years (until kindergarten?) of the baby’s life, expanding that to include the baby/toddler/child in the support mechanisms?

If our government and us are going to be serious about birthrates and about right to life, government and we need to get serious about achieving those goals.

This is Naïve

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Perhaps it’s even disingenuous. Roland Fryer, of Harvard University, wants to bring algorithms into college/university admissions offices under the claim that it would help reduce endless, unproductive battles over race- and class-based affirmative action.

Of course, they would do no such thing. Algorithms are nothing more than software packages written by humans as tools to speed decision-making in narrowly defined areas in accordance with equally narrowly defined criteria. Inescapably, though, those decision-making software packages and their defined criteria have embedded within them the personal biases and world views of those human programmers, software testers, and their supervisors. The databases on which those algorithms are trained also are written by humans and so themselves contain human biases and world views. On a (slightly) higher level, there’s another layer of human bias and world view: it’s humans who select the databases to be used for algorithm training.

The presence of these biases and world views is inescapable and wholly independent of the intentions of the humans involved. Even those with the purest of intentions and the strongest efforts to control the impact of their biases and world views will have those leak into their algorithms and training databases. Even efforts to balance to net zero those biases and world views by using a political and social cross-section of humans in those production efforts are subject to the same shortcomings via the selection of those humans and the definitions of what constitutes a suitable cross-section.

That all of this still could lead to strong bias in the algorithms, despite the best of intentions, is amply demonstrated by Alphabet’s overtly racist Google Gemini AI package (which Alphabet claims has been corrected, but only after the fact, not before the AI was released and in use), Robby Starbuck’s suit against Meta over that company’s AI smearing him as involved with the J6 riot and an extremist organization, and Mark Walter’s suit against OpenAI over its ChatGPT smear accusing him of embezzlement.

Colleges and universities, despite Supreme Court rulings banning consideration of race in their admissions decisions, still do that under other names and rationalizations. Using these human-written and so too-likely biased algorithms in their admissions decisions would merely give those institutions another way to disguise their admissions misbehaviors.

More than that

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President Donald Trump (R) fired Progressive-Democrat EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels over her refusal to follow Trump’s instructions and EOs, among other things, rescinding the Biden administration’s EEOC rules requiring employers to pay for, or to pay insurance coverage for, employee hormone and surgical treatments to resemble the opposite sex, in violation of their [employers’] religious beliefs.

Naturally, Samuels is suing over the effrontery of firing her. Her lawyers are making this argument in court:

Because the Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions, these restrictions on the president’s removal authority are constitutional[.]

On the contrary. Because Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions from inside the Executive Branch, they’re violating bedrock Constitutional separation of powers requirements. Those requirements are articulated in so many words in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, which mandates legislative functions can occur only within the Legislative Branch, and again in so many words by our Constitution’s Article III, Section 1, which mandates that judicial functions can occur only within the Judicial Branch.

It really is that straightforward. Those broad authorities claimed by the EEOC are themselves wholly unconstitutional.

Harvard’s Professoriate…

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…according to a supposedly conservative professor. James Hankins, a Harvard history professor, had some thoughts on how to cure Harvard of its wokeness. I have some thoughts on his thoughts.

Hankins’ basic idea is that Harvard should reduce its acceptance rate of Federal dollars and rely more on private funds from Harvard alumni.

[W]e should strengthen ties with loyal alumni who know and love Harvard. Alumni are loyal in part because they remember with gratitude the teaching they received as undergraduates. That makes them more closely aligned with the university’s real mission: to teach and to produce high-quality, unpoliticized research. Empowering alumni would carry its own risks, no doubt, but in my experience, they have a much sounder sense than politicians and government bureaucrats of what Harvard should be doing to help the country and itself.

This is naïve, and it misstates Harvard’s—any college’s or university’s—mission. That mission is to teach, full stop. They’re also ideal places to do research, including basic research, but even in an ideal world, research would come second to teaching, not be placed on par with it.

Withal, Hankins exposed the core of his error in a couple of ways.

My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is “this is not what the left used to stand for.”

That silence, that refusal to say out loud what they’ll say sotto voce, however fearfully, is the professors’ cowardice. These cannot be trusted to do any sort of unpoliticized research. They’ll bend to whatever their woke liberal masters tell them to do with whatever dollars come their way.

And this:

Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work. They have books to write and papers to publish. … They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.

Faculty at Harvard openly favor their personal careers over doing a right thing. They resent having their quiet careers interfered with, but not enough to stand up and object out loud. This is the cowardice of immorality. This sort cannot be trusted, either, not with their writing, certainly not with teaching our children.

Hankins has successfully identified his colleagues as perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines, if not all the way up on their porches, in what they see as safety instead of taking a stand, doing a right thing.

Don’t take the Federal government’s—us taxpayers’—money? The question has another direction, also: the Federal government shouldn’t be sending our tax money to an institution like this in the first place.

Another Blow against the Bigotry of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

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President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order last Wednesday, news of which the press is busily trying to spike. Titled RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY, the EO gets right to the heart of the matter.

Section 1. Purpose. A bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law. This principle guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes. It promises that people are treated as individuals, not components of a particular race or group. It encourages meritocracy and a colorblind society, not race- or sex-based favoritism. Adherence to this principle is essential to creating opportunity, encouraging achievement, and sustaining the American Dream.
But a pernicious movement endangers this foundational principle, seeking to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement. A key tool of this movement is disparate-impact liability, which holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability. It not only undermines our national values, but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.
… As the Supreme Court put it, “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Disparate-impact liability is wholly inconsistent with the Constitution and threatens the commitment to merit and equality of opportunity that forms the foundation of the American Dream. Under my Administration, citizens will be treated equally before the law and as individuals, not consigned to a certain fate based on their immutable characteristics.
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals.

The EO proceeds from there, including removal of the LBJ administration’s approval of regulations implementing “disparate impact” and direction to the Attorney General to begin removal of related regulations implementing—Trump generously calls them pernicious, I say openly racist—Civil Rights Act of 1966 Title VI. Additionally, the EO instructs the EEOC, HUD, CFPB, FTC, and “other agencies” to take actions necessary to end the use of disparate impact in enforcement actions both ongoing and contemplated.

The EO can be read in its entirety here.