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This is a guest post by Toby Napoletano, a philosophy PhD who is working on a politics and philosophy podcast that is the subject of this post.

I’ve taught quite a few introductory ethics courses to undergraduates over the past five years or so. During that time, I’ve had the good fortune of having lots of really good, thoughtful students who were fairly politically engaged—enough to at least be aware of some of the major moral and political issues that dominate political discussion.

But I’ve noticed a bit of a trend with these students that I think should be worrying to those who identify themselves as being broadly on the political left. Namely, for lots of the students who identify themselves as being generally “liberal”, the most salient political commentators for them tend to be quasi-intellectual right-wing libertarian types like Ben Shapiro. While they might disagree with him, they respect him as someone who uses “facts” and “logic”—i.e. who at least gives the appearance of trying to reason with them.

I don’t think this is an accident. What is distinctive about libertarians—even those like Ben Shapiro—is that they keep their deep philosophical commitments right out in the open, and they don’t hesitate to appeal to them. Why are minimum wage laws unjustified, according to the libertarian? Well, at bottom, because doing so would prevent people from entering into certain voluntary economic agreements with each other—i.e. ones where labor is exchanged for less than minimum wage. Such laws would infringe on the liberty of individuals to enter into those agreements, and government, as a rule, cannot do this. Government is meant to protect this sort of liberty, in addition to individuals’ basic rights to property and physical security.

There are plenty of ways to resist this argument, but doing so requires engaging with the underlying philosophical commitments. For instance, under what conditions is labor exchanged for a wage voluntarily in the relevant sense? Is it voluntary in the sense that counts if the alternatives are to work for a pittance or to starve, or to forego medical treatment, etc.? And further, what’s special about rights to physical security, property, and freedom of contract? Might there be other basic rights which governments have obligations to protect like a right to subsistence or essential medical care?

But my thoughtful students (and presumably plenty of thoughtful non-students) don’t see anybody on the left raising these questions or engaging with the issues on this level. Consequently, they don’t have good answers to the deeper philosophical challenges that might be raised against leftist positions, and some of them will conclude that there just aren’t good underlying justifications for those positions and abandon them altogether.

Consider the case of economic inequality. For folks on the left, the bulk of the conversation has been spent on the statistics illustrating the state of inequality in the U.S. And this is for good reason—the numbers are staggering. They then conclude that there is something basically immoral and unjust about this inequality. But then the response from those who are less concerned with inequality is just that the great inequalities in wealth and income simply reflect differences in merit, and so they do not reflect any basic injustice. The progressive left, they charge, is obsessed with the idea of everyone being economically equal. What justice requires (as they often put it) is not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity, citing the ideals espoused in the American Dream.

Interesting—an argument invoking the ideas of merit, opportunity, and justice. Of course, it happens to be a strawman—I don’t know of anyone who could charitably be interpreted as advocating for a completely equal distribution of wealth. Nevertheless, the argument suggests that we need to go a bit deeper, and wrestle with potentially difficult, philosophical questions. For instance: What’s the relation between opportunity and justice? What is the relation between economic inequality and opportunity? What is merit and how does it relate to economic outcome? Would meritocracy even be a good thing?

One of the reasons progressives care so much about economic inequality is that they agree that justice requires some semblance of equality of opportunity, but recognize the myriad ways in which extreme economic inequality undermines equal access to opportunity—both economic and educational. These disparities in access to opportunity then further entrench the economic inequalities (and expose the idea that the distribution of wealth in the U.S. is merit-based as being clearly false).

Putting the issue of opportunity aside, there is a basic human rights issue that the extreme inequality in the U.S. makes pressing. Namely, it’s not just that there are large gaps between the rich and poor, but that the poor are actually deeply impoverished, struggling and often unable to lead a decent life. The presence of extraordinary wealth amid this deprivation suggests a failure to protect basic rights, and a failure which could be easily prevented. Even if those who end up poor, by and large, did have the same opportunities as the wealthy (which they clearly do not), it still wouldn’t follow that the situation is a justifiable one.

Arguments like these are the kind that need to be made and understood with some clarity if one is going to be justified in believing that economic inequality (to take just one example)  is, in fact, a serious problem. These arguments are what fill in the gap between the statistics demonstrating the inequality and the moral conclusion that the inequality is unjust.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that there is real value to engaging with the philosophical dimensions of political issues. Not only is such engagement necessary to really understand some of the underlying disagreements, but there is strategic value to doing so as well. Commentators on the left do themselves and their positions a disservice by not engaging with the issues at greater depth, because there are plenty of good arguments in favor of those positions.

The aim of The Badlands Politics and Philosophy Podcast is to try to help fill this gap. On the podcast, a group of fellow philosophers (Michael Hughes, Hanna Gunn, Jared Henderson) and myself explore the philosophical dimensions of contemporary political issues. Along the way, we give a philosophical sketch and defense of a broadly “progressive” political outlook. If nothing else, we hope to help raise the standard of political discourse in some small way.

The podcast is aimed at a general audience and so isn’t meant to require any specialization in philosophy to enjoy. Early topics include money in politics, economic inequality and the myth of the American Dream, inequality of opportunity, the idea of American meritocracy, and issues concerning political discourse and political coverage in the media. In the near future, we plan to do episodes on the meaning of “capitalism”, the relationship between Milton Friedman and progressivism, the ethical implications of AI, the ethics of immigration, and lots more.

New episodes are released every Friday, and written pieces are posted regularly on BadlandsPhilosophy.com.

We are on Twitter at @TheBadlandsPod.

Hey my newest Bloomberg Opinion column is out:

Maybe This Financial System Can’t Be Fixed

Better risk management isn’t enough. We need a different paradigm.

For my other columns, go here.

My newest Bloomberg Opinion piece is out:

In a Way, Trump Is Right About Google’s Bias

For a list of all of my columns, go here.

My newest Bloomberg Opinion column on creepy but useful reputation scores is out:

Reputation Scores on Facebook? Bring Them On

For others I wrote, look here.

ALSO! My buddy Laura Strausfeld wrote a Bloomberg Opinion piece on access to tampons and what they’re made of:

Making Tampons Free Can Make Them Safer, Too

Go Laura!!

Hey my newest snarky Bloomberg Opinion piece is out!

Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth

For a longer list of all my Bloomberg columns, go here.

I wrote a Bloomberg View post about how the U.S. can regulate technology and algorithms which came out this morning:

How America Can Stop Being the Wild West of Data

It can’t follow Europe’s example. But Senator Mark Warner has some good ideas.

You can see the rest of my Bloomberg View posts here.

I wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times with Bart Schermer. It’s behind the paywall unfortunately, but hopefully some of you have subscriptions:

Audit the algorithms that are ruling our lives

I’ve got a new Bloomberg View column out about how I decided to become a mathematician:

How Dominoes Helped Make Me a Mathematician

Proofs can be empowering

My other Bloomberg columns are listed here.

The good folks at Science For The People are hosting an event to celebrate their first publication in a long while (see more about the history of SftP here):

Celebrate the return of Science for the People! Join us for the premiere viewing of the mini-documentary about SftP’s revitalization and readings from our first publication since 1989: a collection of essays about the science and politics of geoengineering.

Doors: 6:30pm
Showtime: 7:00pm
Address: Caveat NYC, 21A Clinton Street, New York NY 10002
Tickets: $15 adv / $20 door

I hope I see you there!

I’ve got a new Bloomberg View column out about the failure of the Gates Foundation’s Education Reform:

Here’s How Not to Improve Public Schools

My other Bloomberg columns are listed here.

I wrote a new Bloomberg View essay about two of my favorite things to hate, Google Glasses and airplane flights:

My other Bloomberg columns are listed here.

I wrote a new Bloomberg View essay about the Harvard admissions kerfuffle:

College Admissions Will Never Be Fair

My other Bloomberg columns are listed here.

I wrote a new Bloomberg View essay about the upcoming elections:

Let’s Send Facebook Some Election Observers

My other Bloomberg columns are listed here.

This is a guest post by Julia Evans, a programmer who blogs and tweets.

What’s a zine?

A zine is a short, usually self-published booklet. Most people who are familiar with zines probably know them from punk zines, art zines, literary zines, feminist zines, or anarchist zines. I love zines like that, but I’ve been doing something a little different — for the last 3 years, I’ve been writing zines about programming concepts!

To get an idea of what I’m talking about in this post: I have a bunch of zines you can read for free at https://jvns.ca/zines. If you love those you can buy my latest Linux zine at http://gum.co/bite-size-linux.

Here’s one page from the current zine I’m working on, which explains 18 important Linux command line tools in 24 pages. This is a quick introduction to grep.

The amazing thing to me about this comic, and other comics like it, is how many people told me that they learned new important facts about grep (you can grep with regular expressions! You can grep recursively!) by reading this tiny comic.

So suddenly comics aren’t just for fun– they’re a tool that you can use to teach new ideas!

Why use zines to teach programming ideas?

Zines and comics are fun, but more importantly I think they’re actually an incredibly efficient way to teach busy professionals new ideas. It turns out that most people don’t have time to read long programming books. And a lot of useful ideas can be explained really quickly!

Fun, accessible content works. People understand it. In the zine “Linux debugging tools you’ll love” (https://jvns.ca/debugging-zine.pdf), I explain netstat, netcat, ngrep, tcpdump, wireshark, strace, eBPF, dstat, and perf and a bunch of its subcommands. This is a lot of material, and it’s material that folks often find intimidating. But because it’s presented in an adorable illustrated 24-page zine people are like “oh how interesting and cute!” and don’t hesitate to pick it up, read it on their commute to work, and learn something.

What I end up finding is that people will read my zines who I wouldn’t expect. Even though they often have pretty advanced content, people will read them even if they’re new to programming or new to Linux! And they’ll often learn something and tell me “yeah, sure, I didn’t understand 100% of it but a lot of it made sense!” To me this is a HUGE WIN.

Printing out hundreds of zines is easy!

The other magical thing about zines is that because they’re so cheap to print (I can get 500 zines printed & stapled at my local print shop for about $300), you can distribute a lot of them easily. Every time I speak at a tech conference these days, I’ll ask the conference to print 500 to 2000 of my zines (usually related to the talk I’m giving) to give out to attendees.

This is amazing because it gives people something fun & useful that they can take home after the talk and give to their friends!

You don’t need to know how to draw to draw comics

If you think this format is cool and you’d like to draw comics to teach people, drawing skills aren’t that necessary! I’ve self-published 7 zines and printed and sold thousands of them, and these are literally all the things I know how to draw.

So you could do it too! When trying to teach, information content and organization is a lot more important than drawing skills.

Fast Company’s Katharine Schwab wrote up ORCAA and it’s seal of approval:

This logo is like an “organic” sticker for algorithms

The food we eat has quality certifications. Why shouldn’t the algorithms that shape our world?

Here’s the picture of the seal of approval, designed by our friends at GoodGoodWork:

I’ve got a new post up in Bloomberg Opinion, inspired by the New York Times analysis on pot arrests that came out recently:

Let’s Not Forget How Wrong Our Crime Data Are

When marijuana is legalized, we’ll lose our only reliable barometer of bias in arrests.

There’s no complete list right now of all my Bloomberg columns, because it’s transitioning from Bloomberg View to Bloomberg Opinion. It will be fixed in a manner of a few days or weeks.

MIT’s Technology Review has a feature called the “Download” and subtitled “What’s up in emerging technology” that featured my company, ORCAA last week:

This company audits algorithms to see how biased they are

This and the Wired piece last week have led to a bunch of inquiries for ORCAA, which is super exciting! Fingers crossed.

I’m psyched to announce that my algorithmic auditing company, ORCAA, has been written up in Wired by Jessi Hempel, in an article that talks about how we audited Rentlogic, our first customer. Take a look!

WANT TO PROVE YOUR BUSINESS IS FAIR? AUDIT YOUR ALGORITHM

Hey I was on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning talking with Laurel Wamsley about an alternative to Facebook:

Would We Be Better Off If We Didn’t Rely On 1 Social Network?