Self-employment taxes

I believe this MarketWatch article about self-employment taxes -- for Social Security and Medicare -- could have a better title. Like the article says, the full-time self-employed are well aware of said tax. The article's purpose seems to be to inform readers -- especially those self-employed part-time or who do occasional work -- whether or not they are subject to said taxes. A title such as 'Is Work Income Subject To Social Security & Medicare Taxes?' better fits that purpose. 

Some more specific kinds of work that the article doesn't mention are:

- Driving for Uber or Lyft is subject to self-employment taxes. The state of California government based on Assembly Bill 5 tried to turn said drivers into Uber or Lyft employees instead of independent contractors. This attempt was defeated by Proposition 22 this month (link). If treated as employees, they would pay half and their employers pay the other half of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

- Income to poll workers (for voting) and door-to-door census workers presumably are not subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes, since the work does not qualify as a "regular trade or business."

This Motley Fool article implies that Social Security and Medicare taxes are owed on all gig work. “Gig work” is not defined, but there can be exceptions if the work does not qualify as a "regular trade or business."

When filing taxes, self-employment income is reported on Schedule C and line 3 of Form 1040 Schedule 1. Income to poll workers (for voting), to door-to-door census workers, and for jury duty are reported on line 8 of Schedule 1 and not on Schedule C. The Form 1040 Instructions, page 82 show more kinds of income that go on line 8. Many are non-work income.

A Metaphysics for Freedom #5

Following are quotes and paraphrases from Chapter 7 of A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward. She responds to three anticipated challenges to her arguments against the Challenges from Chance. The challenges are (1) matters of luck, (2) Frankfurt style examples, and (3) refrainment and robustness.  

Matters of Luck

Steward uses an example of Joe deciding whether or not to move in with his girlfriend and the ideas in of Alfred Mele’s book Free Will and Luck. Mele holds that the difference between the possible world in which Joe decides at time t to move in and the world in which he decides at time t to not move in as a ‘matter of luck.’ For Mele it seems that there is no complete explanation in terms of antecedent condition at time t why one outcome rather than the other occurs. Steward’s Agency Compatibilist position is it is not something about us that makes us act, but simply because we act that it is up to us what happens to our bodies. “There is simply no coherent way of understanding how Joe, gripped by the excitement and enthusiasm with which he is happily imagining his new life in his girlfriend’s beautiful flat [ ] , and lacking any thoughts, emotions, or motivations that might justify the decision to stay where he is, could nevertheless have made the decision at t not to move in at all.”

Mele would contend that we have to allow for the possibility that Joe might not have moved in at time t despite he did so at time t. Steward counters that it is rationally unintelligible there is an alien force that counters Joe’s wishes and reasons and hopes. Indeed, there are lots of alternative possibilities for which there is really no good explanation. There are, of course, cases in which a decision must be made at a given moment if an opportunity is not to be lost. However, the hypothetical alternative decision is a failure to act, not an action. It is important to Steward’s position that the power of agency is a power to settle, not merely a power to decide.

Frankfurt style examples

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt is the originator of a much-discussed variety of counterexamples to what he calls the Principal of Alternative Possibilities: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. It had been supposed to be a priori; Frankfurt argued it was false.

Such examples are very contrived. One is that Gunnar intensely dislikes Ridley and plans to shoot him. Cosser also dislikes Ridley and worries that Gunnar will not complete his plan. Cosser, a neurosurgeon, is able to implant a device in Gunnar’s brain that Cosser can activate if Gunnar loses his resolve. The point of the example is that Gunnar could not have done other than to shoot Ridley.

Since such examples are so contrived, have little bearing on Steward’s concept of agency, and pertain to moral questions, I will skip saying more.

Refrainment and robustness

Van Inwagen suggested that though Frankfurtian agents may not be able to avoid bringing about certain types of consequences (e.g. Ridley dies), they might nevertheless retain the power to prevent the particular consequences they in fact produce. Again, since such examples are so contrived, have little bearing on Steward’s concept of agency, and pertain to moral questions, I will skip saying more.

My first two JARS articles

My first two articles published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies can be read online free at JSTOR.org. Reading them requires being registered there, but registration is free. Reading newer articles requires payment somehow, but these articles are old enough to be read for free. (This is based on my personal experience. Somebody else's might differ.) 

Both articles are about epistemology, more specifically the nature of concepts.

Omissions and Measurement (2006)    https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560320
The Sim-Dif Model and Comparison (2011)   https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560412 

A Metaphysics for Freedom #4

Following are quotes and paraphrases from Chapters 5-6 of A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward.

It is essential to distinguish between the following:

P1: The question whether determinism is true can only be answered by physics.

P2: Whether determinism is true or false may some day be settled by physics.

P2 does not rule out a philosophical argument bearing on the issue. But some people say deciding if determinism is true or not is not a philosophical question.

In Steward view we make sense of agency daily when we use the concepts of agent, action, and psychology – the psychology of belief, desire, intention, etc., and even seeing, wanting, and trying to get.

She gives two arguments for libertarian free will as ultimately unintelligible. Chapters 6 and 7 address the first one. Chapter 8 addresses the second one. The first is that its denial of determinism merely introduces an unhelpful randomness to causality. She calls it the Challenge from Chance. If it is right to think that a genuine choice has to be something with intelligible roots in such things as an agent’s reasons and desires, libertarian free will not only saddles us with the Challenge from Chance. It looks incoherent, if it insists it was possible, at the moment of decision, that the agent could have made the opposite choice, even when the agent has no reason or desire for the opposite. Even if it were possible to make a choice unrelated to one’s desires, beliefs, or deliberations – perhaps from deep psychological causes – it’s hard to accept that such a cause provides a solid foundation for a coherent libertarian free will (p. 132). It suggests that outcomes are then at least partly a matter of luck. It is partly a matter of luck not merely in that the outcome is not completely determined by antecedent factors, it is a matter of luck to the decision maker. It is not freedom-enhancing. It is an obstacle to control and the operation of agency (p. 141). I skip Steward’s extensive examples to support this.

The concept of action she defends draws on terminology introduced by John Searle. He argues for three ‘gaps’ an explanation of action must take into account.

1. A gap between ones beliefs and desires and any actual decision made.

2. A gap between the decision and the action.

3. For actions extended in time, a gap between the initiation of the action and its completion. A constant voluntary effort is required.

Regarding 2, we often decide to do things and then fail to do them without changing our minds, but due to laziness, inertia, lack of resolve, cowardice, etc. Chapter 7 will deal with responses to the Challenges from Chance such a challenger could make to her claims.

A Metaphysics for Freedom #3

Following are quotes and paraphrases from Chapter 4, Animal Agency, of A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward.

Normal development starting in infancy “results in the eventual emergence of a mature concept of agency that has roughly the following features:

- and agent can move the whole, or at least some parts, of something we are inclined to think of as its body;
- an agent is a centre of some form of subjectivity;
- an agent is something to which at least some rudimentary types of intentional state (e.g. trying, wanting, perceiving) may be properly attributed;
- an agent is a settler of matters concerning certain kinds of the movements of its own body in roughly the sense described in Chapter 2, i.e. the actions by means of which those movements are effected cannot be regarded merely as the inevitable consequence of what has gone before” (p. 71-2).

“The most powerful motivation to compatibilism has always been the reflection that it is no easier to see how indeterministic processes of a psychological sort could possibly sustain agency than it is to see how deterministic ones might allow for it” (p. 74).

If one watches a large farm animal engaged in its normal activities, she suggest it is near impossible to avoid looking upon it as an agent. The animal determines the details of how, when, and where exactly these activities are to be carried out. It looks as though it involves such things as desires and perceptions and decisions on the part of the animal itself, and we have not the faintest idea of explaining these movements without such mentalistic concepts.

Human children acquire and adults use a framework which postulates not independent ment al ‘staes’ causally interacting, but rather a minded entity that possesses those states, and that acts in light of them. The agent, not her desires and beliefs, retain the power to produce, or not produce, bodily motions (p.77).

Watching a bird pecking for food or a cat stalking a mouse is utterly unlike, say, a tree blowing in the wind. Such animal is a moment-to-moment controller of its own body and its motivational states. It is a way of mental states and at the same time a way of seeing.

Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” including concepts like ’desire’, ‘intention’, and ‘belief’ goes hand in hand with agency, although Dennett rarely uses ‘agency.’ However, one aspect of Dennett’s view with which Steward doesn’t agree is his willingness to attribute consciousness to computers (p.103).

In the final section of Chapter 4, Steward tries answering which animals pass the test of being an agent. Where does agency end and mechanism begin? She considers the jumping spider, Portia. Observing the Portia’s apparent plans and strategies of catching prey, she finds it hard to conceive of the spider as not an agent. She doesn’t doubt that much of Portia’s behavior is instinct, but she also posits judgment and some form of thinking based on its variability and flexibility (p. 108).

She also considers earthworms, which Charles Darwin intensely studied and made the subject of his last work. “Darwin’s own conclusion appears to be that though the general types of purposive behavior he examined were undoubtedly instinctive in the earthworms, the precise manner of execution of the various tasks they undertook were too variable to be strictly instinctive” (p. 111).

An algorithmic or functionalist view of the earthworm’s behavior can only go so far. At that point she suggest “it is natural to have recourse to the idea that instead of a simple program-instantiating machine we had a different kind of system in our sights: an agent with a [ ] lowly form of consciousness making moment-to-moment decisions about what to do, guided no doubt by instinct, sometimes pre-empted in its operation by mere reflexes, tropisms, and other involuntary responses, but nevertheless deserving to be thought of as a low-level conscious controller of a body, responding to environmental factors in ways [ ] not open to exact prediction” (p. 112).

Earlier in the book Steward eliminated sponges and paramecia as animals no meeting the criteria of agency (p. 14). 

A Metaphysics for Freedom #2

Following are quotes and paraphrases from Chapters 2 and 3 of  A Metaphysics for Freedom by Helen Steward. The main concept is settling.

A compatibilist likely holds that certain things are up to us, but this does not bear upon the future being metaphysically open. The compatibilist can suppose that something’s being up to someone is a matter of that thing’s being causally dependent on such things as desires or choices or intentions. This brings no difficulty fitting within the confines of a perfectly deterministic world, according to which actions are the causal upshots of such prior mental events and states.

Van Inwagon’s Consequent Argument: If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequence of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.

Presumably, Van Inwagon takes it for granted such things as ‘our acts’ exist; his concern is whether or not theses acts are ‘up to us’ or not. Steward contends that his is the wrong way of looking at the matter. If nothing is up to us, then there are no such things as actions. There are merely reactions, a series of inevitably unfolding events.

Her concept of settling is central. “I want to insist that as I move through the world, performing the various activities of which my life consists, I am constantly settling the answers to a variety of questions whose answers are (therefore) not already settled long before the time at which my actions take place.” The moment of settling is when the agents decides and acts and hence settles the matter in a particular way (p. 39).

“I settle things not only by initiating motor activity but also by continuing it; by refraining, for example, from vetoing the original instruction or from altering it in any of the multifarious ways that are constantly open to me. Because these powers of refrainment and alteration are present throughout the whole duration of the action, I am constantly settling what happens from moment to moment, even if I do not in fact exercise those powers of refrainment and alteration” (p. 46).

Experiments conducted by Libet cast doubt on Steward’s contemporaneous settling, since such experiments suggest that how we shall move is sometimes settled by prior causes of which we have no knowledge. It might be thought that evidence of prior neural activity in advance of a conscious decision suggest the operation of a hidden neural variety of determinism. On Steward’s view, Libet’s evidence is of a readiness potential, a part of the action, but not the necessary cause of the entire action.

“All intentional bodily agency, I suggest, involves the interweaving of conscious systems of bodily control with more basic, effectively automated or partly automated systems. … An enormous amount of the settling that we do as agents is delegated, inevitably, to processes that are ill-described as the causing of motions by mental states, such as choosings, intendings, and the like. … An agent’s settling of things can be perfectly well be constituted by processes to which she pays no mind whatever” (p. 52).

She devotes several pages to the compatibalist Causal Theory of Action that I won't summarize.

A Metaphysics for Freedom #1

A Metaphysics for Freedom is the title of a 2014 book by Helen Steward, a lecturer at the University of Leeds in England. Her book offers a new perspective on free will, free choice, or volition based on the concept agency. Agency is not limited to human beings. It also exists to a lesser extent in many other, but not all, animal species. 

Quotes and paraphrases from Chapter 1 follow.

In traditional terms Seward is an incompatibalist [ref.: compatibalism], holding that anything worthy of calling ‘free agency” could not exist in a completely deterministic universe. She agrees with John Bishop, who claimed that the serious problem concerning debates about freedom and determinism has nothing to do with either, but with the possibility of accommodating actions within the natural universe. Determinism is falsified as much as what is natural to think about the meanderings of a goat as by the ethical agonizing and deliberate choices of humans. Yet in recent years there has been a tendency for the ‘freedom’ side of the debate to be conceived in more lofty and sophisticated terms. 

“The supposition that agency itself – the capacity to move oneself about the world in purposive ways, ways that are at least in some respects up to oneself – is unproblematic, and that it is only something rather more special, given, perhaps, the honorific appellation ‘free agency’ or ‘free will’, that creates potential difficulties, inevitably gives rise to the suspicion that the incompatibalist must mean to insist upon the operation, in connection solely with human powers, of types of causality or disruption in the natural unfolding of events not generally found elsewhere in the world, and it is reasonably supported by many that this cannot be acceptable.” [p. 4-5; Whew!]

“[W]hat I shall call animal agency, a collection of powers that are remarkable enough, despite the fact that they are not unique to humanity, and which might themselves be thought of as representative of a variety of freedom – albeit, admittedly, a far more lowly sort than we are used to encompassing with that term – which will be the main focus of my book” (p. 5).

“In order to exercise the forms of agency that we value so highly – moral choice, exercises of taste and skill, communication, self-disciplined attention to duties, personal development, creativity, etc. – we have to be able to move our bodies in such a way as to make them carry out plans of our own devising, in the service of our ends. My claim will be that these humble abilities, which are widely possess throughout the animal kingdom, are themselves incompatible with universal determinism” (p. 5).

Causal theories of rational action, according to which an agent’s strongest desire always prevails, provide further grist to the determinist’s mill, as does empirical evidence that root explanations in sub-personal phenomena such as hormones or neurally-based dispositions (p. 10).

Quantum indeterminacy, if granted, seems not to help very much with the free will problem (p. 10).

Her argument for the falsity of universal determinism is:

1. If universal determinism is true, the future is not open.
2. If there are self-moving animals, the future is open.
3. There are self-moving animals.
4. Therefore, universal determinism is not true (p. 12).

However, the concept of self-moving animal needed to support agency is hard to specify precisely. Sponges and paramecium are not good candidates (p. 16). A goal is required (p.17).

Settling is a key concept in her theory. It is not true that everything relating to the relevant set of movements and changes in the animal’s body is determinately settled by the universe prior to the time of the animal’s activity, for at least some things have to be settled by the animal at the time of its activity (p. 20).

Reference: Scope of Volition. This doesn’t try to explain volition in terms of physics. On the other hand, perceptual attention, motivation, and goals don’t fall within the scope of physics.

Addenda Nov. 8: When writing the above I didn’t include much from pages 9-12 in order to emphasize her argument for free will rather than her argument against determinism. So I will focus on the latter here.

No one supposes that the mere existence of quantum indeterminacy lead to the dissolution of the free will problem (p. 9).

The huge success of molecular biology provide evidence that some complex, higher-level phenomena of life are susceptible to reductive explanation by chemistry. She believes explaining what these are, how higher level phenomena relate to lower level phenomena, rather than any generalized commitment to determinism, that sustains compatibilism (Steward being an incompatibilist). It is not universal determinism per se which is problematic for agency, but a localized variant of determinism. She will say more about this in Chapters 6-8, and I will also in later posts in this series. 

The relation between agency and the microphysical is as much about supposing the way different levels of reality relate to one another as it is the idea that each momentary state of the universe inexorably necessitating the next.

Section 1.3 is titled ‘An Argument Against Universal Determinism.’ However, most of the section in my view is her case for her concept of agency.