Taiwanese government has officially rejected the CCP's offer of the pandas Tuantuan and Yuanyuan, under the pretense that island would be unable to provide proper care as required by animal protection laws and international agreements. This was, of course, a political response to the political can of worms acceptance would be opened (see March 29, 2006 post). As a supporter of the status-quo pending further democratic and human rights reforms in China, I am relieved by the decision. Unlike the Trojans, Taiwan has wisely turned down the CCP's pair of 'Trojan Pandas' - the ultimate diplomatic weapon.

Onto another topic: character warfare. I acknowledge that this news is a bit stale, however, it's probably something not many people noticed anyway. Last Thursday (3/23/06), the U.N. officially announced that it will cease to issue any material in traditional Chinese characters beginning 2008. Once again, the CCP has effectively hemmed in Taiwan's international prospects for recognition. Taiwan and Hong Kong are the only two places left in the world that continue to use traditional characters in their writing.

Deriving value through representation actions may explain why so many of the examples of preferences over comprehensive outcomes involve moral principles or rule-following. Principles and rules have the function of grouping actions together in categories. By adopting a principle, we make one action stand together with others and thereby change the utility or disutility of this particular action.

Principles are particularly well suited to creating representative relations. A single action comes to represent the entire class of actions. Thus even when the specific action is instrumentally negligible, the other actions it represents may have a much higher value. The symbolic relations created by principles, therefore, may make it rational to care about the "tendency" of a class actions, as opposed to the actual consequences of a single action. At a deeper level, being the type of person who acts on principles and conform to rules may itself be valued. If so, then actions that comply with a principle will represent not just the class of actions covered by the principle, but acting on principle itself.

Consider a pacifist who is deciding whether to participate in anti-war demonstration that is likely to raise the risk of a war breaking out. Being a pacifist, he presumably values the outcome of no war more highly than the outcome of a war. But given the choices between participating in the demonstration and increasing the likelihood of war and sitting at home, keeping the risk lower, it would seem that a principled pacifist may rationally prefer to participate because that action expresses or symbolizes his pacifist principle. His principles may commit him to fight war through vocal participation in anti-war efforts - a class of action that tends to make wars less likely even if this particular demonstration has the opposite effect. By instantiating this principle and representing the whole class of actions whose expected tendency is to promote peace, the act of demonstrating takes on sufficient value to outweigh the expected disvalue of making war more likely.

For a non-principled pacifist, on the other hand - one who simply prefers outcomes in which there less war, but is a pure instrumentalist when evaluating actions - such a preference over comprehensive outcomes would seem to be self-defeating, because the worse outcome resulting of his participation in the demonstration undermines any derivative value the choice act might at first have seemed to have.