Rust Belt Philosophy

As much as I like and respect academia, the borderline fetishism with which that system regards published material can perhaps too easily lead to problems. Beside the usual "I don't want to publish, but my contract says I have to" stories from various levels of professors and TAs, it also appears to make some people believe that, just because they published a book this one time, everything in the world relates back to said book, which, furthermore, gives its writer forevermore an invincible aura of legitimacy and expertise. One such person is the execrable Dinesh D'Souza, whose reaction to Obama's election is a variation on the conservative begrudging-historical-appreciation gambit: he believes that the reality of President Obama "shows that it is individual conduct and demeanor that is decisive here, not skin color." More to the point, it lets D'Souza lay claim to "a sense of vindication" regarding his "controversial book The End of Racism." Aside from letting him relive his glory years, though - D'Souza also includes an obligatory rehash of his debate with Jesse Jackson - the Obama phenomenon doesn't help D'Souza one bit.

The main problem with his article (and, presumably, his book - he told you about his book, right?) is that no amount of black success would outweigh the gargantuan wrongness of D'Souza's theory of race relations. Despite the intervening fourteen years since the publication of The End of Racism and the publication of his most recent article, D'Souza has apparently failed to come up with a single new idea, let alone one that would help to fix his theory that "[t]he old civil rights model held that groups at the top of society got there through [continual] discrimination." Although the popular sociological theories regarding race do in fact hold that discrimination affects races differently, they certainly don't pretend that all (or even most, or many) successful white people actively use their social status to oppress people of color. Indeed, one could easily construct a different working theory of racism given a basic understanding of economics or of psychology (especially developmental) or of politics or even just of recent history - or one could do what modern sociologists of race do and include all of those. So while D'Souza successfully debated Jesse Jackson this one time - which I will readily admit, as Jackson evidently relied on a flagrant argument from ignorance* - and while he wrote a book this other time, these fleeting victories excuse neither D'Souza's original straw man nor his persistent ignorance of evidence that might contravene it. The bad news here is that, despite these faults, D'Souza will probably still sell a few more copies of his book; the worse news is that those copies will almost certainly succeed in duping their buyers into contributing to the exact same racism that D'Souza thinks vanished decades ago.

*"...he said that precisely the absence of evidence is what worried him the most." In other words, "I don't know what's going wrong or how, but something must be wrong."

That is like calling something "Star Trek" that is not science fiction - you may well use the terms correctly in a denotative sense but the inaptness of your connotation is just going to destroy you. Or, if you are reading this post and you are Linda Chavez, the glaring flaw in your argument and the inaptness of your connotation are going to destroy you. In fairness to Chavez, though, this error hardly originates in her work, and other writers have even said the same thing about the same topic. Just like everybody else seemingly on the planet, Chavez thinks that "it's unlikely [that the stimulus] will shorten the current recession or keep people from losing their jobs," and damned if she isn't the one who knows how to fix it. Surprisingly, her answer has nothing at all to do with tax cuts, and even flies in the face of a common Republican criticism of the package. She wants to give everyone - "every man, woman, and child" - three grand.

There are more details to her plan - for instance, people must spend the money within 18 months and can only use a certain, small percent to pay down debt - but the gist of it is that the "people would get to decide for themselves" how to spend the money. Logistical flaws in this plan abound, like her suggestion that the government somehow distribute "debit cards linked to the individual's Social Security number," but Chavez's fatal error comes when she tries again to explain why her idea would work. "The virtue of this plan," she says, "would be that the market would allocate the money far more efficiently than any scheme government bureaucrats could come up with." That may sound convincing, or if not, it certainly sounds like standard conservative rhetoric, but take another look: earlier, she claimed that people would decide how to spend the money, not the market. This may seem like a distinction without a difference - after all, a market is supposedly just made up of people. But there are two problems with this answer. First, Chavez's suggestion wouldn't actually let either the people or the market direct the money, unless one assumes that neither group would be interested in paying down debt. Second, and more importantly, "the market," as used in arguments like these, is a theoretical abstraction based on a centuries-old model of human behavior. Even more recent, more accurate models often err and err badly - they must, or else we would never have dug ourselves into this hole. So when Chavez invokes classic economic theory, she makes the mistake of confusing the actual market (i.e., the one made up of actual people with actual misunderstandings about how to manage their finances) with the theoretical market, which is full of people who always follow conveniently self-correcting, statistically predictable behavior patterns.

Of particular relevance to the current situation, this means arguing for a volatile, risky solution (the actual market) under the guise of a trustworthy, reliable solution (the theoretical market) - think taking weight-loss pills instead of starting an exercise regimen. In fact, it may be worse still than that, because Chavez would encourage Americans to solve their debt-fueled crisis by accumulating more debt - she says we should use her suggested funds as "a down payment on a home or a new car." If this seems like a bewildering proposition, then you've already fallen for her bait-and-switch: especially in a country where SUV sales are consistently inversely proportional to the price of gas, it's patently absurd to expect The People to display the same learning curve as The Market. It may seem incredible that a conservative writer would put forward a plan that would generate literally no wealth as a way to escape a recession (calls for tax cuts fall in this category, too), but it should also serve as a stark and unmistakable reminder that the people who make up markets can nonetheless never be The Market, because there will always be a vast portion who write and act seriously in a way that should only ever be satire.

First thing first - this deserves some play, so I'll do the internet thing and link it.

Next, I know I'm a bit late to the party when it comes to the Vatican's continuing war on logic, but Ophelia Benson caught it pretty much right on time. Especially bizarre in this particular instance is their assertion that people who take a pro-choice position on abortion "believe they can decide of life and death" - I could've sworn that the idea behind being pro-choice is that no one person can decide for everyone. Particularly in the case of the Vatican's target, Barack Obama, no deciding of life and death is happening at all: Obama can't have an abortion, or perform one. Either way, though, I agree with Benson. If a person in a position of power ought not make decisions that would affect the idea of life or death, the Vatican ought to be out of business.

Fair warning: I'm about to agree with something John Stossel says, specifically about college. I wouldn't go so far as to label the college system a scam, as he does, and indeed I'll also disagree with much that he says, but he does have at least one thing right. When "[c]olleges and politicians tell students, 'Your life will be much better if you go to college. On average during your lifetime you will earn a million dollars more if you get a bachelor's degree,'" they aren't using good logic, and Stossel's correct to complain about that (though the quote he offers from Obama is not at all relevant to this idea). Richer and happier are different concepts, and when people argue as though they're the same - see e.g. here - they're being misleading, although perhaps not intentionally. Stossel uses this one failure, along with some statistical juggling, to argue that "college presidents and politicians should drop the scam" and stop advertising higher education as the ideal goal. Despite starting off well, though, his argument gets worse and worse the more he writes.

His diatribe against colleges begins in earnest when he cites a typical student-loan sob story, a woman who'd borrowed upwards of twenty thousand dollars to earn a degree that she isn't even using and who, as a result, now owes something like eighty-five grand. Her story, Stossel says, represents one reason to be "critical of that often-cited million-dollar bonus. ... It [also] includes billionaire super-earners who skew the average," doesn't take into account students who said they wouldn't "go to [their] college again," and generally defines success as a specific dollar level. To reiterate, I think this last concern is valid, though Stossel slips a bit when he makes the wider complaint that only a "degree from a four-year college is considered first class": this confuses an economic consideration (with respect to which a college degree serves as a means to an end) with something like a moral one (with respect to which a college degree repersents an end-unto-itself, namely, knowledge). As for the "super-earners" complaint, that misses the point. In order to be an accurate statistic, it has to include outliers, and anyway, the non-college numbers include super-earners, too (LeBron James, etc.), so that argument is doubly flawed. Nor does his cited study about student satisfaction help, because - as the authors of the study admit (warning: pdf) - there are too many confounding variables. He makes things even worse for himself when he recommends that, instead of attending college, students might want to consider "acquir[ing] specific marketable skills at a community college or technical school." Word has not yet come in on how, exactly, one can go to a community college without going to a college. But what does all of this mean for his overall point, that people (especially politicians) overhype colleges?

I've said already that "success" means different things for different people, and I'll admit freely that lots of people can achieve their desired level of success without a college degree. Further, I agree that badly managed student loans can totally scuttle a person's chances of making it big, although it seems unfair to place all the blame for those situations on the colleges themselves, especially when Stossel subscribes to a theory of economic self-determination. But his other objections fail pretty much entirely. Maybe, then, we should split the difference and conclude that colleges and politicians ought to pimp the higher education experience a bit less but not as little as Stossel advises. I think even that would be too hasty, though, because Stossel's discussion explicitly identifies the benefits of college as being only one-dimensional: they either make a person's life better in the long run, or they don't. As far as I can tell, though, when people (especially politicians) advertise the college experience, they do so for more than just this one reason. In particular, establishing and reinforcing a system of institutional learning allows for sea changes in a society, from the technical and the mechanical (medicine, computers, etc.) to the social and cultural (economics, arts). Particularly for someone whose concern is the long-term wellbeing of an entire constituency - i.e., a politician - sacrificing a relatively small percentage of people in order to increase the odds of a paradigm shift might well be the right decision, but Stossel either refuses or is unable to think at this level. Insofar as people argue for college by reducing well-being to earnings, then, Stossel's got a point; insofar as they do anything else, his arguments here don't apply.

(FYI. I'm no Digital Cuttlefish, but here goes...)

There once was a man named Rich Cohen
Who claims over here to be showin'
That torture's okay
If certain folks say
It's a line we ought to be toein'.

A waterboard's sure to cause woe, an'
"Enhanced techniques" mean quid pro quo-in'
But Dubya decreed
And Congress agreed
Safety first: commence the Gitmo-in'!

As hist'ry, this story is glowin'
But logic and ethics are owin':
The people's consent
Is irrelevant
In matters of value-based knowin'.

In what presumably counts as an attempt at humor, Mike Adams writes today that, so as "to align our class policies with some of the policies [Obama] will be implementing over the next four years," he will implement a policy "of grade redistribution." In between the obvious misrepresentations of Obama's actual tax plan,* Adams manages to scrape together something like an argument via analogy about why we should fret about the upcoming economic changes. This series of claims - the canonical money:taxation::grades:grading argument - operates on only a few intuitions, none of which actually carry over from the one area to the other.

First, it tries to establish in us the feeling that progressive taxation undermines the point of the economy. In Adams's article, for instance, he talks about "eliminat[ing] the possibility of failure," which, for an academic class, would obviously defeat the point. Grading, however, hopes to establish one, and only one, relatively well-defined thing: an individual's mastery of the subject. In contrast, economic success measures - if it measures anything at all - any number of different things, many of which (see e.g. race, gender, one's parents' socioeconomic class, attractiveness, and luck) are supposedly excluded from the invisible brain of the free market. Even assuming that we know exactly which thing the market measures and that progressive taxation hinders its ability to measure that thing, though, a disanalogy remains. When grading fails to do achieve its goal, teachers and administrators make changes to the grading system so as to make it more accurate - by giving different kinds of homework or tests, say. If the school/economy comparison were accurate, then, we should actually expect the administrators of the economy - i.e., the government - to take action when the market's measurements prove to be inaccurate. This, though, is precisely what Adams says we shouldn't do, thus violating his own comparison.

As with many popular arguments about the economy, this one suffers from severe underdevelopment. We've already seen how an incomplete understanding of economic reality harmed Adams's argument. Proponents of this line of reasoning also often say - though Adams doesn't, in this article - that progressive taxation discourages hard work and thus ultimately harms people. This, however, is not a fully-formed theory: it just says that, at some level of taxation, some people will decrease their contribution to the economy by some degree. Without having data with which to fill in those somes, that claim can't be rationally applied to any real-life situation. The holes in this argument leave Adams in a tough spot, though, because he's got a word count to meet, and, as we've seen, there's simply not that much to say here. Most people simply repeat themselves in different ways, but Adams takes a different route, instead listing falsehoods and irrelevancies. His grading policies, he says, will be "not unlike the [response to the] failing banks and automakers," and will originate from "a former presidential candidate named George McGovern." But the bailout was Bush's creation (in more senses than one), and a theory can be true or false no matter who first proposed it. Far from hiding the failure of his earlier analogy, these last-ditch efforts only highlight the extent to which Adams has nothing to go on. If progressive taxation really is as bad as Adams and others say it is, they'll have to prove it using actual facts about the actual market, not a mere sketch of an argument like the one he provides here.

*For instance: "By the end of the semester I will abandon any formal guidelines and just redistribute points in a way that seems just, or fair, to me."

As ontologically advanced as western society has become, a major source of static is still death - what exactly qualifies as death, how to treat the dead,* what happens to a person at and after their death, and whether death is ultimately a good or a bad thing. Amidst these and other legitimate or mostly legitimate concerns rests other, less reasonable questions, such as how seriously we ought to take near-death experiences. At the latest reincarnation (no pun intended) of his incredibly badly reasoned blog, Bill Vallicella argues that "nothing can be proven on this topic one way or another, and the opposing positions are both reasonable." He begins by quoting at length an account of such an experience, which I would normally let pass without comment, because citing such examples is typical in philosophical argumentation. However, the degree to which this piece of text stands as a case in point of the argument I'm about to make is such that I feel compelled to at least touch on it. The account comes from Richard Neuhaus who awoke one night "into an utterly lucid state of awareness" only to find "a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery" next to which "were two 'presences.'" These "presences" (his scare-quotes, remember, not mine) then told him, "Everything is ready now," hung around for a few minutes not doing anything, and then left. From only this information, Neuhaus concluded that they were angels, that he was supposed to go with them, and that - contrary to the actual message they had sent - he wasn't ready to meet God. There are thus two levels of doubt regarding near-death experiences: first, that they represent anything more than simple hallucination, and second, that they're reliably interpretable. The latter concern is, from a certain perspective, even greater than the former (I mean, look at how wildly Neuhaus's interpretation veered away from his actual experience), but Vallicella's argument only addresses the first concern. Even if he succeeds, then, he's missing half the point of skepticism about near-death experiences.

Vallicella's argument begins in earnest by offering almost a parody of the skeptical position, which he then proceeds to rebut. For him, the problem lies in skepticism itself: "A consistent skepticism," he says, "calls into question everything including the power of reason that the skeptic himself must employ." To trust reason, Vallicella claims, is "dogmatic" and thus equally unreasonable as doubting reason. This argument could hardly be more wrong. The entire point of skepticism is its reliance on rationality and applying the same standards (evidential support, logical consistency, etc.) to every non-axiomatic claim. Calling reason - an axiomatic set of claims - into question because that's the consistent thing to do is self-defeating, because one can only expect consistency if one has a system capable of ensuring that all true ideas are mutually consistent, and the only system that fits the description is reason. Thinking about it another way, to be a "consistent skeptic" in Vallicella's terminology would not only require doubting one's doubts but also doubting one's doubts about one's doubts, and so on forever. If I had to pick one mischaracterization of the view to be the canonical straw skeptic, that'd be it: the neurotic skeptic who, due to a fit of inductive meta-skepticism, believes finally in nothing at all.

The rest of Vallicella's argument proceeds along typically laughable lines. Skeptics ought not question near-death experiences because they "are too much alive" and "full of the pride of life," he says; possibly, "the ego-weakening and loss of control that the approach of death brings about first makes possible certain glimpses of reality that cannot be had by those whose egos are in the full bloom of their worldly vitality." But here we run into the fundamental problem with near-death experiences: what are they? Given how relatively little we understand about the process of dying, it seems absurd to label any experience as near death. Even the phrase itself seems to have little to no meaning: sometimes, one is near death when one is moments away from actually dying; sometimes, one is near death when one is very sick but will eventually recover; sometimes, one is near death when one narrowly avoids some massive physical harm (like getting shot, say); sometimes, so-called near-death experiences can apparently happen when one isn't actually near death in any sense at all but still feels as though one is. This confusion, together with the general lack of coherence or congruity in reported near-death experiences, forms the major objection to credulity in this case, namely, that we simply don't know what near-death experiences are. Very little actual research has been done on the subject, but none of it gives convincing evidence that near-death experiences are anything more than conveniently death-contextualized hallucinations. Further research may or may not reveal something more conclusive, but certainly Vallicella's defense of near-death agnosticism leaves much to be desired.

*Bury them? Burn them? Dismantle them for research and/or medicinal purposes? Flay their bodies, pump them full of chemicals, and display them in museums the world over? Preemptively decapitate them so as to prevent the possibility of a zombie outbreak? Who knows!

In my previous post, I took a shot at a fellow blogger who questioned me for specifically targeting those he called weak of mind. What I took a long time to say - justifiably, I think - was essentially that, as a rule, urging temperance when it comes to confronting stupid people is an action one can condone only from way high up in an ivory tower. On the ground, we have to deal with people like Edward Feser, who perfectly exemplifies the conclusion of said previous post (well, maybe almost perfectly - I have no information one way or the other about whether Feser likes baseball). Feser "write[s] on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective" - he is, in other words, firmly ensconced in the leftmost area of the strong-mindedness bell curve. (For the mathematically disinclined: that's a bad thing.) But Feser's problems don't stop with these theories; rather, they begin there.

If Feser weren't beholden to conservatism and accustomed to operating in a strictly hierarchical system, it would have been much more of a surprise to see him defending Bush in the way he does in that linked post. If you can manage it, skip past the parts where Feser totally misconstrues the liberal (and conservative!) case against Bush, the part where he calls the plainly ineffective Bush tax cuts a "real good," and the part where he arbitrarily declares that the U.S. need not take seriously the opinions of its political and military allies; while you're at it, pretend that Feser doesn't omit altogether the number Bush did on the Constitution, or on science, or on the very idea of a government's accountability to its people - those things, though jaw-dropping in their bilious, chest-thumping idiocy, pale in comparison to what comes about two-thirds of the way through Feser's piece.

To paint Bush "as a promoter of 'torture'" - note the scare-quotes - is "disgraceful," Feser says, "resting entirely on a refusal to use language carefully or report facts honestly." He backs up this claim with a selection of very, very, very bad arguments. First: waterboarding, for Feser, is not "remotely on a moral par with the sort of thing Saddam’s regime inflicted on innocents." Second: some waterboardees, "like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [were] known to be guilty of mass murder and thus [merited] the death penalty." Third: Bush's critics don't "deal honestly in implying that the harshest methods were employed at all frequently," he claims. In order: red herring; missing the point; red herring and straw man. Or, more quickly: bullshit. Oh, but you might say, surely Feser is just some random schmuck you found on the internet, these views cannot really be held by mainstream conservatives. You, oh hypothetical objector, are only partially right: Feser is just some random schmuck I found on the internet, but these and even less credible views are very much held by mainstream conservatives. Debra Saunders thinks waterboarding isn't torture because it's "not the sort of brutal punishment meted out by Saddam Hussein"; Rachel Alexander thinks that we can't say anything at all about torture, because "[t]orture has only become broadly defined in recent years"; and Rich Galen honestly seems to think that actually waterboarding is somehow morally on par with using the phrase "hold his feet to the fire." These, moreover, are three of the many - many - search results from just one website that demonstrate bullshit defenses of torture, from which I purposefully screened out the true lunatics like O'Reilly and Malkin and Coulter.

Waterboarding is torture, if torture has any meaningful, consistent definition. That Bush defended its use consistently, made clear efforts to obfuscate the question, and may even have explicitly condoned or ordered people to use it makes him in every sense a supporter of torture. Are Feser, Saunders, Alexander, and Galen speaking in some kind of stupid-person code when they defend this? I don't know, and quite frankly, I don't care a bit: their defenses are, this merits saying again, bullshit. More precisely, their defenses are exactly the sort of obfuscatory, language-bending, shape-shifting, cognitive-dissonance-inducing bullshit that Bush himself promotes, and that is required of his supporters. This is the result of allowing the intellectually blind to lead the intellectually blind; of ignoring or excusing stupid people their stupidity because one is more focused on trivia or enforcing a naive and artificial version of fairness; of, to put a fine point on it, putting the definition torture below the question of how much feminism is enough feminism or whether more colleges ought to let the armed forces recruit on their campuses. Yes, some illogic exists on both sides of the political aisle (indeed, in every quadrant of the political plane, every sector of the political sphere), but the pretense of equating "the U.S. does not torture" to any mainstream liberal position is at once deeply dishonest and worryingly in line with the failing, but not yet failed, Bush strategy. Getting the unwashed masses to play along is, as ever, the easy part: it's when a majority of those in the ivory towers are convinced to abandon their moral priorities in order to adopt the bloodless curiosity of the emotionally detached that Bush's mission really will be accomplished. Contribute to that if you like, Alrenous, but I'd rather play by my rules than his.

Who, you ask? Me, of course! I'm also apparently an "uncharitable, left-leaning fanatic and intellectual bully," and the victim of "a tragic, incurable infection." Taking a page from Chuck Palahniuk, the author - Alrenous, who actually commented here before and seems to generally like the blog - identifies me as just one example of "whole armies of fine minds going to waste. Absent this corruption, what would they have accomplished? What heights could they achieve?" But what, you are hopefully asking yourself, is my crime? It is, apparently, that I wrote this post about an argument by Phyllis Schlafly, in which I not only pretty much demolished her argument but also took some time to attack her personally - not, of course, so as to demonstrate the wrongness of her position, but just for fun. In Alrenous's response to my post, he not only defends Schlafly(!) but calls me to a higher purpose, claiming that he "expect[s], nay, demand[s] better" of me than attacking the weak of mind. Allow me, then, to defend myself against these charges.

Am I an uncharitable, left-leaning fanatic? Absolutely not: "fanatic" is easily too strong a word. And certainly, when it comes to attacking people like Schlafly, I hardly consider myself to be a bully - they do this for a living, and they've had way more time to get good at it than I have. Sure, most if not all of the subjects of this blog are less intelligent than I am, but it would be absurd to ask this of a superior opponent in any other arena, unless one reads Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" as a utopia. Charity, too, is hardly a concept that applies here. Reality doesn't round itself down to anybody's low IQ, nor does it grant do-overs. To take a perfect example, it matters not one bit if - as Alrenous says - Schlafly was talking in some kind of code that even she probably didn't understand where in "anyone she doesn't like will be labelled 'un-Christian' and therefore 'dangerous.'" Even if she was, it was a stupid code and a code that utterly fails to correspond to reality, and if Alrenous thinks I'm being pedantic to point this out, he ought to read the comments to Schlafly's original article (those people's votes count just as much as yours, buddy). Attacking the weak-minded is the only way to catch out errors like this - the strong-minded won't make them as often and won't insist on keeping them. More importantly, though, what the hell does any of this have to do with the "heights" I'm achieving? Let me point out, Alrenous, that you've got no goddamn idea what I do with my time, nor how I write these posts: my wording is anything but reflexive, and the longest I've ever spent on a single piece is about an hour. And while we're on the subject, how much did you accomplish by 23?

I've read that rambling, mostly irrelevant letter you think I should read, and let me tell you, I'm not impressed. Is progressivism a meme, or, more accurately, a type of meme? Yes - duh. Have I ever questioned it? Yep - in fact, I continue to question it, that's what I do. No view is perfect, and I have no desire to settle for an imperfect view, ever. Don't I realize that the political system in the U.S. is at least partially designed to keep debate within relatively strict limits? Sure, even though I don't go so far as to buy into the conspiracy-theory-type stuff you apparently think I ought to. So, already having in mind all the things you think I'm not aware of, why don't I behave in the way you think I should? The short answer is, because I don't bloody well want to. The reason I take so many neoconservative authors to the woodshed without doing the same to neoliberals is the same reason I consistently attack religious authors over atheist ones and authors who like baseball over sane people: I think neoconservatives, very religious people, and baseball fans are wrong, and wrong in a way that demands to be answered (except for baseball fans, I mean - they're just for kicks). If you're out there, Alrenous, and you think I'm wrong, here's your chance to tell me why. I'd happily debate you - civilly, even, if you want - about the relative harm of liberal thought vs. conservative thought (as understood, of course, in this geographical and temporal context). But if you don't want to debate, then I hope you can at least answer this question: if this blog is only a very-part-time diversion for me, why should I give token attention to the lesser of two evils when the moral benefit of doing so is far outweighed by the harm that the greater evil continues to do? Because the weak of mind - who I claim are disproportionately religious, disproportionately conservative (and disproportionately baseball fans? maybe!) - are the real disease, and it makes no sense to respond to a picture of the tumor in your brain by popping a few Aspirins for the headache.

Earlier this week, we looked at a frankly embarrassing attempt by a friend of William Craig's to answer questions about hermaphroditism, and I said that, despite the relative awfulness of the arguments presented therein, Craig's friend actually said something rather salient with respect to the question of sexual ethics. In particular, he observed that hermaphrodites by definition possess both male and female sex organs. While at first this might seem like a pretty benign observation, actually it carries a great deal of weight when brought to bear on a certain pattern of thinking. Made famous, if not also invented, by Aristotle, this pattern suggests that ethics is simply a study of proper (i.e., intended or designed) function: just like a good stapler staples things smoothly and reliably, a good human will fulfill the proper (intended or designed) function of a human. Of course, even within this school there are a great many departments, because few people fully agree on what the proper function of a human is, if anything. Setting aside that general question, though, if one likes the general idea of end-based ethics, one can apply it to anything - in particular, one can apply it to sex.

We've seen this kind of sexual ethic before in a religious context, but it need not rely on religion as such. Generally, the tendency among such theories is to limit ethical sex to reproductive sex by classifying sex organs as those properly designed towards the end of reproduction. An adaptation of the argument presented at the above link, for instance, might look something like this:

1. In order to use or treat a thing in a morally right way, one must do so in a way that follows that thing's proper function. (i.e., if one uses or treats a thing in a way that doesn't follow that things proper function, that use or treatment is not morally right)
2. The proper function of all human sex organs is reproduction.
3. Therefore, in order to use or treat human sex organs in a morally right way, one must do so in a way that follows the process of reproduction.

Often - as in the above article - this connection is then used to attack homosexuality, in a manner like the following:

4. Homosexual sex uses (or treat) human sex organs in a way that doesn't follow the process of reproduction.
5. Therefore, homosexual sex is not morally right.

A major problem arises, though, when we try to analyze what it means to use a sex organ in a way that follows the process of reproduction. In the above-linked article, the author casts this question as one of a cooperative striving that may or may not be intentional, but even this leaves the question open: what about those people with both male and female reproductives organs?

Given the wide variety of hermaphroditic or intersexual conditions, one cannot simply dismiss the question. Rather, one must take a stance on whether intersexed people actually are male or female (individually, I mean, not as a general statement). If so, then any blanket prohibition against homosexual sex as in (5) above is inaccurate: really, so long as one person involved in the sex act uses male sex organs and one person involved uses female sex organs, (5) no longer applies. On the other hand, one could always try to deny that intersexed people can rightly be called male or female, but in that case one would have to present a reason why not. It will be difficult to do this while maintaining the spirit of the above argument, though, because the belief that the sex organs' only proper function is reproduction is very much rooted in a sex binary - in other words, in a system where humans can be male, female, and other, one cannot rightly infer the purpose of sex organs in general from just the way they work in males and females. Assuming this problem can be solved, though, a larger one looms: what if medical science could install functional (or even partially functional) sex organs on demand?

I doubt that this error is totally fatal to arguments like the one above - among other things, it only provides for an objection that's rather limited in scope - but it does demand that they be couched in a theory that's capable of explaining nonstandard cases. The linked author tries to do this (unsuccessfully, I think) with Christianity, but one could imagine other attempts. I, of course, think that the easiest solution to this problem is to reject the Aristotelian version of ethics altogether, but certainly at the very least a proponent of the above argument would have to reconsider the intuitions that led to it: without a clear and somewhat uncontroversial way to determine a thing's purpose and a similar way to classify unambiguously how a thing is used or treated by a certain action, this kind of argument will always leave itself open to objections from the atypical case.

A good deal of what makes up philosophy is narrowing things down. We saw a few posts back how Alex Pruss started one of his arguments with a seemingly over-permissive premise - Samkara's principle about seeming and being - before refining it into a usable and plausible idea: this is exactly that process of narrowing down. Probably the commonality of this process comes from the need to tighten up the natural looseness of language so that philosophers can talk and write clearly (to each other, if not to the general public), but whatever the cause, the narrowing of broad premises is just as important in philosophy as it is for engineers, who must take general instructions ("build a bridge") and turn them into concrete reality. When philosophical arguments neglect to do this, they often collapse into incoherence. As a case study in this phenomenon, take this post by Sophie on the Christian notion of interior or inward truth.

In it, she lays out her case for why "the only convincing proof of Christ is not logical proofs or historical evidence but an encounter with Christ himself." But this encounter is not just any old encounter: in order for it to work, God must "reveal Himself to people...[i]n Life." This would be a good place for Sophie to have practiced her narrowing-down skills, but she doesn't do so, leaving her readers to guess whether she means Life the cereal, Life the board game, Life the TV show, or any of the other various Lifes. All kidding aside, though, Sophie's argument really does suffer from an almost total lack of clarity. For her, "interior truth does not consist of some power behind manifestation, but it is manifestation itself. It is concerns not with what shows itself, but the act of self-showing." She further asserts that God "is a substance whose whole essence is to appear," that Jesus is, in her earlier words, "manifestation itself." Even better, Sophie claims that we cannot measure or track these appearances because objective verification of facts "presupposes the distancing of what is to be seen from the seer" whereas God, again, does things internally. Indeed, Sophie believes we cannot even rightly discuss these matters due to "the incredible cultural bias toward objectivity [that] has left us with few words in our language to speak of the [concept of] interior truth." The only proper response to an argument like this is: what?!

Nothing here makes even begins to make sense. Without being able to point to objectively comparable experiences, or at least discuss objectively comparable experiences, Sophie has no idea whether the things she's discussing have any relationship at all to things that other people have experienced - more to the point, without those things, she has no idea whether the things she's discussing have any relationship at all to reality. Can "inward truth" be measured with the so-called God spot? Can it be reliably produced via external stimuli? Can it be distinguished from other, similar experiences (specifically, ones that aren't compatible with Christianity)? Can God sensibly be both "manifestation itself" and a personal entity? Can we make a consistent case for why God self-reveals to some people but not others? All of these are basic questions that Sophie's account doesn't even hint at answering. All we know is that she experiences something, with some content or other, sometimes, that relates to Christianity somehow, but she can't tell us any of those things because we aren't true believers. This new-agey brand of Christianity says - literally - nothing. Without the key step of narrowing down her premises, all Sophie has is a garbled mess: I feel some stuff that makes me like Jesus, so Jesus must be feeling stuff that makes me like Jesus, which then must be feeling stuff that makes me like feeling stuff that makes me like...and well, whatever it is, if you don't feel it too, then you're just wrong! She'll have to forgive me if I'm not impressed.

Reporting from the Department of Sore Losers in snowy Washington D.C., Bill Murchison has good news for all you conservatives out there. It might seem like Obama winning the election is a really big deal, but Murchison has other ideas. He urges his readers to note "the comparative insignificance of electoral politics in daily life," but totally not because he's jealous or anything. It takes some work to parse Murchison's argument, as he never fully lays out his reasoning. With a bit of reading between the lines, though, we'll see that he bases this conclusion on a half-blind vision of the way that political decisions interact with the quotidian ones that he says form the backbone of societies.

On Murchison's view, politics only explicitly concerns itself "with the organization of human affairs: arrangements of one sort or the other concerning the ways humans live and work together, the means by which they cooperate to keep from killing each other." Specifically, holding an executive leadership role in government - as Obama will do - "is about policy choices that a majority inevitability inflicts on a minority" using "raw power, acquired during bitter, head-counting contests for supremacy," says Murchison. "To make [people] love and admire and respect one another," he says by way of making a distinction, requires non-political action. For things like "the upbuilding of community values, the nurturing and spread of shared norms, the cultivation of the spirit, [and] the training of the heart," he continues, one should "[g]o to church, get married, or join a club." Probably some objections could be proffered with respect to this highly pessimistic view of politics, but I want to take it as axiomatic for the sake of argument. The key for Murchison's reasoning will be its ability to connect this difference in function to a difference in value such that politics comes out on the losing end. As I said earlier, though, he leaves this connection unstated, so we'll have to fill in the blanks for him.

For philosophers, this task will be somewhat easier, thanks to the traditional western style of analytic argumentation. Among the things that one learns in an introductory philosophy class are the complementary notions of necessity and sufficiency. If a state of affairs cannot be brought about without some x, we say that x is necessary for that state of affairs; if some x ensures that a state of affairs comes about, we say that x is sufficient for that state of affairs. To take a timely example, in order to play in this year's Super Bowl it's necessary, but not sufficient, to be either a Steeler or a Cardinal: the third-string quarterbacks, for instance, probably won't see any time on the field. Similarly, in order to play in this year's Super Bowl, it suffices, but isn't necessary, to be Kurt Warner: if you're Kurt Warner, you'll play, but you don't need to be Kurt Warner to play. To apply these ideas to Murchison's argument, it seems as though he means to say that non-political actions are sufficient for community-values-upbuilding and so on whereas political actions aren't sufficient for that same purpose. Since community-values-upbuilding-etc. is what Murchison (apparently) views as ultimately important, he concludes that politics is strictly less important than non-politics. But this ignores necessity: sure, having a block party probably will make people like each other better and, as a result, treat each other better, but having a block party would be a practical impossibility without the kind of governmental infrastructure that allows for things like blocks and parties. If Murchison wants to evaluate things based on whether or not they contribute to increasing the quality of life - which seems very much to be his argument here - then politics is just as valuable as the rec leagues at your local JCC. Taking only the last eight years as your example would certainly not help to understand this, but that doesn't make Murchison's logic any less wrong.

Traditionally, Christian sexual ethics revolve around a binary system of male and female. Either because of a disproportionate interest in sex or just generally because early Christian writers liked binaries, this system even extends via metaphor to plainly nonsexual areas: the church is Jesus's bride, for instance. But, as with most traditional Christian tenets, this does a somewhat bad job of describing the world, at least on first glance. In an attempt to resolve the confusion brought on by this theory's apparent inability to account for basic facts, someone named Daniel wrote to William "Penny" Lane Craig asking about "those born with both male and female reproductive organs."* Amazingly, Craig admits right off the bat that he "know[s] nothing" about the issue, which compels him to hand the question to one of his volunteers who, as is only appropriate in cases like this, knows even less.

The volunteer, who only identifies himself as "S," begins "by making the distinction between gender and sex." So far, so good: gender defines manly and womanly (and, sometimes, other-ly) actions so as to establish working social norms, whereas "sex is determined biologically" by...well, by something or other. S only mentions chromosomal analysis as a way of sexing a human, but he then goes on to reference cases "where even the chromosomal identity is unclear." Whatever answer S comes up with, then, will only cover some cases - specifically, the easiest cases. S, though, never restricts his argumentation to the easy cases, so immediately we know that his argument - regardless of what form it takes - wrongly generalizes from a part to the whole. In these easiest of cases, a hermaphrodite "must date the [sic] person who has the opposite sex as them." To the extent that this jives with traditional Christian teaching, S is still more or less on track. Things go downhill for him quickly, though, when he tries to get fancy.

We've seen already that S, unlike some people, actually understands the difference between sex and gender, or at least understands that such a difference exists. But religious teachings have a strong hold indeed over weak minds, and S clearly falls into that category. Asking himself whether a hermaphrodite can ever "choose which gender to date," S simply says, "No." This response is very reminiscent of George Saunders's "My Amendment," a version of which was published in The New Yorker: even having in mind the separate concepts of sex and gender, S manages to mix them up in this answer. Progressing to a much more difficult question - whether or not hermaphrodites can reliably intuit "their true sexual identity" - S again slips back into gender, this time pressing seeming out of nowhere for the conclusion that "[h]ow one feels about one's gender doesn't determine [one's] gender." To prove this, he then proceeds to give maybe the two worst analogies for gender ever presented: "If I wake up feeling like I can fly, am I a bird?" and "If I wake up feeling like the President of the U.S., am I he?" Strangely, S even admits that the first analogy fails, but he thinks that he can save the second one. The point, according to S, is that "the property of being the President of the U.S. is a socially constructed property—e.g., it's not that some and not others are born with the attribute/property of 'being a future President of the U.S. ' [sic]." This argument equivocates between two meanings of "socially constructed," though. In the case of being a president, the society constructs an objective, invariable fact about a person, whereas in the case of gender, the society constructs a context-dependent, variable fact about a person. Put another way, Obama will still be just as much the president of the United States when he visits other countries, but he will fit more or less snugly into those countries' definitions of manliness. In between mistaking sex for gender, wrongly comparing gender to species, and misunderstanding the idea of social construction, it's safe to say that S's argument fails pretty much entirely.

As with any unaccounted-for fact, the presence of hermaphrodites causes major problems for traditional Christianity. It challenges the notion of a fundamental duality in human nature and in the nature of the universe, it leads to very difficult ethical quandaries, it forces the Christian to admit the inferiority of Christian faith as a fact-finding methodology, and it opens a veritable Pandora's box of modern, secular theories that fundamentalist ideologies (Christian or otherwise) simply can't compete with. Generally, these problems are avoided simply by refusing to acknowledge inconvenient features of reality - evolution? carbon dating? the existence of gratuitous evil? whatever! - but one side-effect of Craig's fame is evidently that he feels invulnerable to these problems. If he really believed this before posting this Q&A, S's response should have cleared that misconception right up, because his treatment of hermaphroditism is a disgrace and a sham.

*This phrasing, while pretty damn awkward, actually can be viewed as pointing to a valuable philosophical insight (other, of course, than the ones I'll be talking about in the main body of this post). Someone should remind me about this if I haven't written about it in a few days, because I think it's worthy of its own post.

At The Onion, one of the writers' favorite tricks is to introduce their parody news with parody headlines: Area Man Thanked For Playing, for instance, or Nation's Dogs Dangerously Underpetted, Say Dogs. The idea traces its roots to a comic standby, the art of juxtaposing a suffocatingly familiar notion (in this case, the usual format of newspaper headlines) with a silly or bizarre one (that a reporter would actually ask dogs about how petted they are, or that a paper would bother to report on the results of an under-the-cap contest). George Bush's last speech as president, though it simply begs to be Onionized, only fulfills one of those criteria, so I wouldn't expect to see them use this particular technique with it - "President Bush Leaves Presidency As He Entered It: Half-Illiterate and Wholly Delusional" would, I think, be far too depressingly accurate to be funny. Let it suffice, then, for me to tackle the suffocatingly familiar notion of a patented Bush argument.

Predictably, Bush spends much more time on his successes - or claimed successes, more accurately - than his failures, which he can't even muster enough energy to dodge artfully. First and foremost comes the argument from safety, the last remaining refuge for Bush and his supporters. Since you-know-when, "a new Department of Homeland Security has been created. The military, the intelligence community, and the FBI have been transformed. Our nation is equipped with new tools to monitor the terrorists’ movements, freeze their finances, and break up their plots. ... Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States." Wearily filing all the flaws with these various programs as subjects for "legitimate debate," Bush quickly moves on to his point: "there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil." Deferring "legitimate debate" about these topics would be one thing, but this claim lumps together everything he listed - the legal, and the illegal; the effective actions, and Iraq - as an integral part of this nation's self-defense. While he's there, Bush might also want to throw in the Giants beating the Pats last year, because who knows how mad the terrorists would've been if New England had gone undefeated.

But Bush has more yet to say about his war on terror. Just in case we've forgotten who's participating in said war, he reminds us, or tries. On one side, according to Bush, seethes "a small band of fanatics [that] demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace." Both of these descriptions are, to be concise, wrong. One of the key facts about the war on terror, and a fact that our military has had to learn the hard way, is that our opponent is no "small band of fanatics." At the political level, Bush's list of enemies in the war on terror encompasses entire countries, thus totally demolishing this claim. Even on a purely militaristic, strategic understanding of the war, though, the success of any terrorist strategy relies on having at least the tacit support of the locals. On the other side of the coin, Bush also gets his own country's motivations wrong. Many, if not most, U.S. citizens take freedom to be an intrinsic good, not one that receives its value from having been gifted from a god. Additionally, at least some significant bloc of Americans (including, I'm certain, several government higher-ups) holds that the connection between peace and liberty/justice goes both ways, and while Bush himself obviously disbelieves this, it borders on caricature to oversimplify social interactions to the extent that he does.

For all of his overweening optimism in discussing his pet project, and for all the Orwell-worthy codes he uses throughout his oratory,* the worst logical errors in Bush's speech unquestionably come when he stops talking in the context of terrorism. Skipping ahead past his perplexing self-congratulation for taking "decisive measures to safeguard our economy," Bush takes a step back to look at the big picture and discuss, with a sickening and predictable lack of subtlety, "our moral clarity." He begins this ethical lark with a reminder that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise." In that spirit, let the not-compromising begin. "Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right. This nation must continue to speak out for justice and truth. We must always be willing to act in their defense and to advance the cause of peace." You see, this is precisely why, under the Bush administration, no innocents have been murdered to advance an ideology, no people have been oppressed to the point of despair, no untruths or injustices have been spoken out for, and no opportunity to advance the cause of peace has been missed.

In a way, Bush's last speech succeeds beyond any reasonable expectations: it perfectly embodies his presidency. Just like the actual time he spent in office, when you remove from his speech the moralizing smack talk, the military fetishism, the awkwardly intrusive presence of fundamentalist Christianity, the confusing and/or mangled English, and the sunny sense of self-satisfaction that can only come from having extremely low standards, there's nothing left. On second thought, that's not quite right - I've overlooked something. When you remove those things, there's nothing left but wreckage. So long, Mr. Bush, and don't let the country's pent-up rage hit you on the way out.

*To take but one example, Bush touts the notion that "[v]ulnerable human life is better protected" now than it was when his administration began. Any guesses as to which life he's referring to? Here's a hint: it's not New Orleanians.

Today is apparently "make it too easy" day. We had the standard skeptical argument from snow against global warming earlier, and now I get to talk about the incredibly lunacy that is the Vatican. It turns out that, a few days back, one of their many hush-hush sub-organizations decided to have a conference, at which it would make "an effort to present a more transparent image and to encourage more people to make confessions." In typical Catholic fashion, this effort almost certainly appeals exclusively to Catholics, and as for the rest of us, who knows. I mean, when we non-Catholics think of what might be worse than "murder or even genocide," we wouldn't come up with things like "attempting to assassinate the Pope, a priest abusing the confidentiality of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who admitted to it, or a priest who has sex with someone and then offers forgiveness for the act," so probably we're all bound for hell.* But what does an actual Catholic have to say about this categorization?

To find out, I went to - who else? - Alex Pruss, who began his objection from a position of relative weakness, denying that the Vatican ever actually said that stuff: "I think the claim that these sins are more heinous than others is not a claim that the Vatican makes," he says, "but a claim of the article's authors." As it turns out, this is wrong, although he can be excused for looking for the easy out. Another article, which I should really have found first, quotes Vatican officials as saying precisely that those sins are more heinous. Still, it's worth examining his other explanations. Not scaling the punishment to the moral awfulness of the crime can be reasonable, according to Pruss, "if the lesser offense is more common, or easier to get away with, or not punished by other laws, etc. For instance, we do not punish certain kinds of betrayals of a friend's confidence at all, but we punish theft of very small amounts, even though the former may well be a greater offense." I'll take each of these individually.

Recall that here, the "lesser offense" is something like murder or genocide, and the "greater offense" is something like attempted Pope-icide. I honestly have no idea how often the latter supposedly happens, but I find it pretty hard to believe that it happens more often than murder or even genocide (especially since pope-assassination is murder), so that's out. Is pope-assassination easier to get away with than murder? Again, that's impossible: every instance of pope-assassination is an instance of murder, and history clearly gives better odds of escape to the everyday murderer than the papal one. What about it not being punished by other laws? While there are laws, religious and secular, against murder, there is no other law specifically for pope-murder. Plus, from a certain point of view, pope-murder is objectively worse than generic murder, so it's beginning to seem like this might be a reasonable - if guessed-at - explanation. But not everything in the worse-even-than-genocide category fits this mold: desecrating the eucharist, for instance, isn't a more egregious version of any particular crime (nor, of course, does it fit into any of the other categories). This leaves us with "etc." - not the most persuasive of arguments - and Pruss's analogy to social betrayal. That the analogy fails is a banal fact, but the way in which it fails reveals something very interesting indeed: even if his objections had been capable of giving a legalistic gloss to the Vatican's position, they wouldn't have saved it.

An important and basic quality of the philosophy of law is that legal exhorations and proscriptions cannot be exactly the same as moral ones - some moral edicts will exist that can't effectively be codified in a law, and some laws will exist that don't accurately reflect their underlying moral principle. The reason, then, that we punish even small thefts by law but refuse to make massive personal betrayals illegal is that we believe (rightly or wrongly) that theft, no matter its size, is the kind of thing that falls under the law's purview whereas personal betrayals, no matter their size, are not. In short, we think that policing social interaction would be a category error. This is the force that drives Pruss's objections. When we adapt laws to match the commonality of a crime or of a specific variant of a crime, for example, we do so in an attempt to correct the way in which it corresponds to morality. First-degree murder is punished more severely than lower degrees of murder because we believe that the law would operate less effectively if it didn't discriminate between those kinds of killing; stealing mp3s online was punished more severely than stealing actual CDs because we believed (or some of us did, anyway) that the law could effectively deter online piracy, even though online and offline piracy are equally morally bad. The way that these two categories - the legal and the moral - interweave or separate from each other is what gives Pruss's list of objections its seeming relevance. But in the case of the Vatican, what's the second category? It seems very much as though they only monitor one thing: morality (or, more accurately, their version thereof). One might attempt to use their terminology to avoid this problem - distinguishing, for example, between venial or mortal sins - but those will only give new names to the original problem, because ultimately they all reduce to ways to classify which things are morally worse than others. So far as I can tell, therefore, Pruss's objections all rely on wrongly equating a one- and a two-category system. Of course, all of this has just been an exercise in abstract thought (duh: philosophy), because the Vatican did in fact say that genocide is not as bad as killing one person or even spitting out a cracker. Let this stand, then, as an object lesson in what happens when one defends stupid ideas.

*Where, presumably, we'll be subjected to hearing the people who are now global warming deniers warn us that hell, because it's so hot, must be getting hotter all the time, and that our theory of Hellish Temperature Stability is just a political ploy.

[Added: here are two more ideas from the great, wide expanse of the internet: it's about protecting the Vatican's own authority or punishing crimes specifically against the church. Needless to say, these also fall prey to the two-category flaw. Unless protecting the church or avenging crimes against it has some importance other than moral importance - highly doubtful - this is just another covert way of saying that, in the end, crackers really are more important than people. Similarly, this article makes a play at filing these under "matters related to the conscience of individual Catholics"...but then fails to explain why e.g. murder doesn't qualify, and, helpfully, reiterates a few times that those sins really are the "most serious" ones. This is a losing battle, Catholics - give it up.]

I wish I could stop writing about this argument, but people keep making it, so: everyone, shut up about how cold it is. Yeah, it sucks to go outside. Yeah, the Cardinals and Eagles will be laughing their stupid heads off from inside their cushy dome while the Steelers and Ravens play outside like real men. And yeah, "the National Weather Service issued a warning for Chicago about the wind chill index being somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 40 below zero. In Maine, citizens expected temperatures to be about 40 below zero. And Iowans were warned that it could drop to 27 degrees below zero." But you know what, David Harsanyi? For one thing, you have a weird name. More importantly, though, that doesn't mean a damn thing about global warming. The phenomenon Harsanyi's talking about is an essentially singular one: for one day, or a few days, the temperature was super-low. Global warming (or climate change, whatever), on the other hand, describes an average, an aggregation of data over the long term. The current suffering of Chicagoans and Mainers (Iowans always suffer - they live in Iowa) no more disproves global warming than last December 27th - which set the record high in Pittsburgh at 33 degrees above the average and was so warm yours truly played basketball outside for three-and-a-half hours - proves global warming. There is no global warming thermostat, creeping ever upward, that promises to heat the planet evenly and steadily, contrary to the incessant bleating cries of conservatives the world over. But if Harsanyi and his buddies can shrug their shoulders at Pittsburgh's 70-degree day in late December, I can certainly shrug right back when the midwest freezes its balls off for a few days in mid-January.

Prop 8, as I'm sure all my readers know, is currently being challenged in any number of interesting and probably futile legal ways. For the truly pedantic, like George Will, this futility doesn't suffice to leave these challenges alone, or so his latest column would indicate. In it, Will calls one of these challenges "a viscous soup of natural-law and natural- rights philosophizing" and gives reasons to reject it. Most of these reasons are the usual attempts to avoid the question altogether - he offers the always-entertaining "ancient and nearly universal definition of marriage" argument-from-outright-lies, for instance, and says we shouldn't worry about whether or not prop 8 was technically legal or not because "minds are moving toward toleration of same-sex marriage," so in the long term it'll work out either way. But I want to look at another of his claims, the idea that "judges" shouldn't be able to "declare unconstitutional any constitutional amendment revising" fundamental rights.

Partly, I think this argument rests on Will's understanding of the checks and balances system. While he never says as much, he implies very strongly that the role of the judiciary is to be as subservient as possible to the people's will and, in that capacity, to do as much as they can to combine the raw materials supplied by the voters (i.e., ballot initiatives and other laws) into a coherent whole. I feel as though this paints too rosy a picture, because not all sets of laws can be massaged into logical consistency - if nothing else, the voters could pass an amendment literally contradicting another part of the constitution, at which point the judges would have no choice but to make - if you'll excuse the phrase - a judgment call. Still, as little as I know about the details of this argument and as much as I'm reading it into Will's writing, I'm hesitant to make any solid conclusions about it. Maybe I'll get really lucky and one of my readers will be able to tell me more about it. There is, however, a part of Will's argument about which I know exactly what to think.

Perhaps feeling the pressure of writing a dry legal piece on a topic as vital and personal as gay marriage, Will seems to offer a meta-legal addition to his main argument. Returning to a more philosophical perspective, he asks, "What is natural justice? Learned and honorable people disagree." Typically, this kind of combination rhetorical-question/non-answer leads immediately to a bad conclusion - say, that natural justice is an essentially unknowable entity. While Will actually avoids that trap, he does so only to land in a much subtler one. This disagreement, he says, "is why such consensus as can be reached is codified in a constitution," an effort that would be undermined if "California's Constitution [were] subordinate to judges' flights of fancy regarding natural justice." With this argument, he hopes to establish a sort of ethical claim about law-making: constitutions (or legal documents in general) ought to reflect the current consensus among learned, honorable people, not the flights of fancy of a tiny minority of the population. There's some obvious tension between these ideas, though. From the perspective of history, and even today, "learned and honorable people" are a tiny minority of the population, and their opinions vary just as wildly as anyone else's. Furthermore, one can hardly characterize judicial deliberations as "flights of fancy." Or so one would think, but perhaps Will disagrees. Whether or not he does, it's precisely this room for disagreement, though, that hamstrings the argument.

Will never says which learned and honorable people ought to write the laws (honorable boxers? learned theologians? honorable and learned Liberians?) or how they ought to make their voices heard (starting a referendum? running a campaign? becoming judges?), so there's no real way to make sure that prop 8 - which was passed by a majority of common voters, not some mysterious cabal of learned, honorable, flight-of-fancy-free people - fits the bill. More damaging still, there's no way to make sure that the judges themselves aren't exactly the consistent, level-headed, knowledgeable, moral people stipulated by Will's meta-legal premise. (After all, as Will himself admits, Cali's judiciary has held a consistent stance on gay marriage since at least 2000, whereas the voters seem very much to be changing their minds on a year-to-year basis.) Regardless of the strength of his implied, legal argument, the fact that this explicit, meta-legal argument is only slightly less vague than a fortune cookie means that it fails as a way of establishing any kind of philosophical precept about politics.

Rarely have two letters, repeated over and over, so succinctly encapsulated my response to a piece of news; more rarely still have they done the same for someone else. It must be my lucky day, then, because Ophelia Benson and I agree completely on the appropriate reaction to the Vatican's announcement that it's going to start up an effort to "distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata (the appearances of the five wounds of Christ), weeping and bleeding statues and Eucharistic miracles." Read her post, of course, but also take some time to consider why the Catholic church now feels as though "court[ing] publicity over" supernatural Christian "claims ... will be taken as a sign that [those] claims are false," because it used to be that courting publicity over supernatural Christian claims would be taken as a sign that those claims are Catholic.

Although he almost certainly didn't intend it in this sense, John McCain's "I know how to get bin Laden, I just won't tell you how" bit in the past election actually echoed a statement from one of the most famous (and infamous) living philosophers of religion: as wiki reports, Alvin Plantinga, Christian apologist, "does not think [his own] modal ontological argument is always a good proof of the existence of God," although he, too, cannot quite say why. (A good proof, after all, is a good proof all the time, by definition; Plantinga doesn't come close to explaining away this apparent contradiction in terms.) Nonetheless, other philosophers take his argument rather seriously, and as far as modern incarnations of old arguments go, it could be much worse. More or less, it says the following (again, quoted from wiki):

1. It is proposed that a being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good in W; and
2. It is proposed that a being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3. Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. That is, it is possible that there be a being that has maximal greatness. (Premise)
4. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.
5. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By S5)
6. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.

Premises 1 and 2 are simply definitions, so it will be most difficult to object to those. If the argument operates in the modal sense that Plantinga thinks it does, it's logically valid. Regular readers of my blog will be unsurprised to learn that I think it equivocates on "possible" between an epistemic and a modal sense, a fallacy I've termed appeal to the merely possible. But this equivocation might not be clear to some readers, and others might understand the idea but object to to the idea that there is a real difference between epistemic and modal possibility (more on this response later). So I want to offer a slightly different explanation as to why we might think Plantinga's argument is bad all the time.

The objection I'll use isn't original to me, though: Gaunilo of Marmoutiers first proposed it centuries ago. Known as Gaunilo's Island, the objection is a reductio ad absurdum of Anselm's original ontological argument that runs as follows:

1. The Lost Island is that than which no greater can be conceived.
2. It is greater to exist in reality than merely as an idea.
3. If the Lost Island does not exist, one can conceive of an even greater island, id est one that does exist.
4. Therefore, the Lost Island exists in reality.

(And no - this is not the LOST Island, just a Lost Island.)

Though the form of Gaunilo's objection technically only matches Anselm's argument, it can be easily made to match Plantinga's:

1. It is proposed that an island has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it has properties x1, x2, ..., xn in W; and
2. It is proposed that an island has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3. Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified by some island. That is, it is possible that there be an island that has maximal greatness. (Premise)
4. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an island with properties x1, x2, ..., xn exists.
5. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an island with properties x1, x2, ..., xn exists. (By S5)
6. Therefore, an island with properties x1, x2, ..., xn exists.

I have left the properties purposefully vague to illustrate a point: as with any reductio, one must either give a reason to believe that the linguistic substitution doesn't work (that is, in this case, that one can't replace "being" and the original properties of maximal excellence with "island" and properties x1 through xn) or abandon the argument. Of course, Plantinga will prefer to try for the first option. Again according to wiki (which I can at least corroborate with my own experience), this kind of attempt only takes on two forms. I'll deal with the more philosophical of these first, the one that wiki attributes to both Plantinga and to William Rowe. Both men say that Gaunilo's island is unfair to the ontological argument because "it is applicable to God." Plantinga's explanation of this idea is more stubborn than subtle, and Rowe's more pedantic than pertinent, but what they have in common is that neither man can back up this mysterious remark with anything more than hand-waving. Without specific, coherent ideas of why only God is a fit subject for an ontological argument, this attempt to avoid Gaunilo's island basically reduces to, "Because I said so."

The less philosophical attempt tries to bring into focus the properties I left variable above, x1 through xn. Put generally, this objection says that the kind of qualities that make for excellence in an island are substantively different from the kind of qualities that make for excellence in a being (keep this last idea in mind - I'll return to it after this paragraph). For instance, the objection goes, we like trees on islands, so we might want to say that one of the properties of Gaunilo's island is that it has lots of trees. But how many should it have? Presumably, the more trees there are the better, but if so, there can be no best island - after all, no island could possibly have infinitely many trees. I think this objection fails in two ways. First, insofar as we can tell, we simply don't judge islands that way: nobody would say, for instance, that an island with twenty billion trees is definitely better than an island with only ten billion trees. Second, and more generally, that's not usually the way we measure the excellence of anything. Assume that a standard hairbrush, for instance, has a thousand bristles - would it be more excellent if it had, say, four trillion? Ballpoint pens typically contain about 7 ml of ink (or so my brief research would indicate) - would they be more excellent if they contained a googol liters of ink? Even in the original ontological argument, God's greatness didn't come from having a large number of anything. It seems rather unfair to Gaunilo's island, then, to saddle it with the unrealistic quality that its excellence depends on how many of a certain item it has. We might be hard-pressed to come up with precisely defined, non-numeric qualities to fill in for x1 through xn, but at their worst they'd be no worse defined than the qualities assigned to God: replace omnipotence with perfect weather, omniscience with perfect habitability (for humans, of course), and perfect goodness with perfect accessibility (again, for humans), and it's hard to see how Gaunilo's island fares any worse in the coherence of its qualities than God does.

But it's worth saying something more about the qualities ascribed to God by Plantinga's argument. Remember, Plantinga's first premise says in essence that a being's excellence depends on its power, knowledge, and moral state. Even a cursory examination of our thought processes casts doubt on that idea, though. Take a pen as an example: do we really judge pens by how powerful, knowledgeable, and moral they are? The idea is almost comical in its stupidity, but at the same time, it lacks something in the way of intuitive punch - pens, after all, aren't particularly great. The same point, though, could be made of any great work of art, which even Plantinga would probably want to say really is great. Or, if "being" means "living thing" for Plantinga, think of the great white shark: is it called great because of its power, knowledge, and morality? Power, maybe, but a shark's relative ignorance and total moral inability ought to more than compensate for whatever power it has. Upon reflection, it seems that, in point of fact, the only being whose greatness depends on its power, knowledge, and morality is a human being, and even then not all the time (Michael Jordan can rightly be described as great, but he's not too bright and I doubt he's a moral exemplar). Ultimately, then, my take on Plantinga's new ontological argument is that it fails for all the reasons the first one did: it makes a naive statement about greatness-as-such based only on greatness as we sometimes perceive it; it switches between epistemic and modal possibility; and insofar as it works for perfect beings, it proves the existence of perfect anythings.

I said already that at least one of these flaws, the equivocation on "possible," could be avoided by taking the somewhat controversial position that epistemic possibility is (or implies) modal possibility. (Really, I did say this: scroll back up to the second paragraph and see for yourself. Even if you already remember, you should still scroll back up, just to give yourself a little break before going into this post's home stretch.) One such proponent of this view is none other than - wait for it - Alex Pruss (yay!). As he says in a 2001 paper published in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, "what seems might not be, nonetheless what seems is possible." With this principle, he says, he can construct "a new [ontological] argument for the existence of God," one that moves from something seeming like God to God's actual existence. Before he explains the argument in detail, Pruss rightly takes some time to refine what he calls Samkara's principle.

The most important task in this effort will be to defend the truth of Samkara's principle. Moving away from the simple formulation he starts with, Pruss makes a distinction between "an experience as of" x and "a sequence that [is] misidentified as" an experience as of x; the difference, in other words between "the 'seems' of a very broadly perceptual presentation, of an experience, [and] a cognitive 'seems'." Normally I'd say something about this being a clever version of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, but I think I get where he was coming from, awkward phrasing aside: to use the obvious example, an hallucination of horses in the clouds is demonstrably not the same as actually seeing horses in the clouds. This distinction also removes the unpleasant need to say that seeming impossibilities (the impression, say, of a square circle) imply the possibility of those impossibilities. Still, if you sense trouble here, you're on the right track: in order to use Samkara's principle to prove God, Pruss will need to prove that some person or other had a cognitive (i.e., not misidentified) experience as of God.

For this, Pruss turns to "high mystical experiences, of which the experiences of St. John of the Cross are a paradigm" [link mine]. He claims, at first without any support, that "there is a presumption that the phenomenal content of the mystics’ experience is as the mystics have described it." A bit later, though, he begins to give reasons: "the moral character of" the mystics means they probably didn't lie, that they "were very sophisticated persons capable of carefully analyzing mystical experience" means that they probably understood the content of their experience, and even "mystics of various [other] religions [say] that they have had an experience of a maximally great reality," even if those other mystics experienced an "essentially non-personal ultimate reality." As the bard wrote, though, therein lies the rub. When faced with similar but incompatible mystical experiences, how can Pruss fairly choose between them? Donning the impression of impartiality, he muses that "[i]t is not implausible to suppose that some mystics may have misinterpreted their experiences on account of the properties they think a maximally great entity should have" while still being in the ballpark. (No points for guessing which mystics Pruss thinks got the details wrong.) This, however, only pushes the question back a step: how do we know which mystics' preconceived notions of maximal greatness are the wrong ones? Pruss pretends to answer this new question by providing the details of his particular set of preconceived notions, but surely the other mystics could explain theirs, too; even if they couldn't, though, merely explaining the preconceived Catholic notions of God doesn't make them any less preconceived. (Anyway, as we've seen above, qualities like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence aren't what we actually use to measure greatness, whatever Pruss finds "highly plausible.") Even without a good way to promote his side's mystics, though, Pruss thinks that by listing the areas in which these mystics agree, he has "shown that it is probable ... that a maximally great entity exists."

In this way, his argument really does seem to favor the religious over the irreligious: when's the last time you ever heard of a skeptical mystic? At the same time, while the current focus on atheism as a phenomenon makes it easy to say that many people don't experience God (or some nebulous great entity), what's needed is an account of someone specifically experiencing not-God, or unGod. Ironically, it's one of Pruss's fellow Catholics that memorably provided such an account recently, saying that she experienced a "reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches [her] soul." This woman, Mother Teresa, even qualifies as a mystic, so her claims (and by extension, any similar claims made by ethical, intelligent, well-trained people the world over) must be counted equally by Pruss's argument. If Pruss allows this to happen, though, everything falls apart. Either some great entity exists, or none does; if this entity exists, either it's personal, or it's not; either a person's preconceived notions of the divine make that person's experiences unreliable, or they don't; either mystics have better access to divine things, or they don't - by drawing a line between real and fake mystic experiences, Pruss unwittingly put mysticism and anything related to it outside the realm of what's knowable. The best we'll be able to do with this argument is to gather up all the mystics in the world (including those mystical doubters like Mother Teresa, of course), stick them in a room together, and tell them not to come out until they've reached an agreement on what, exactly, they were experiencing. Needless to say, if they haven't come up with such an agreement yet, it's pretty silly to assume we'll ever get one, and sillier still to assume - as Pruss must - that they'll settle on Catholic Christianity.

I was going to put a concluding paragraph or two here, but I think this post has gone on for long enough - either way, if I haven't made my point by now, blabbing on for another fifty or sixty words won't help. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, I should think.

A friend and I recently agreed that, thanks to Alanis Morissette, we were members in the post-irony generation. We should have thankfully noted at the same time that John Shook, researcher extraordinaire for various institutions, has thus far kept away from pop radio. In a post for the Center For Inquiry's blog, Shook takes on the idea that any religion can have a priveleged epistemic location from which to access ethical truths. Often, he says, "religions claim to be the one true faith that promotes love" (or some other universal value) because they claim to have a special understanding of love (or that other value) that everyone else lacks. "But," he says, "isn’t there something paradoxical about a claim that 'only our true religion knows this universal truth of love?' If it’s a universal truth, how could it be tied down to a single religious perspective?" So far as I can tell, there's no real paradox here at all. Just like scientific or mathematical or historical truths, while in a sense universally true, can be "tied down to a single perspective," ethical or religious truths can as well. The only way for this to be paradoxical at all would be for the religions to mean, "Love [or whatever] is universally held and understood, but only we really get it," but quite obviously this is not what religions teach. Rather, like an atomist debating a believer in the classical elements or a practitioner of modern medicine debating a believer in humoral medicine, a religion of this sort teaches that love is an objective idea that has certain properties and that only one side of the argument gets those properties right. Granted, the theory that only one religion truly understands e.g. love is absurd, but this is because of the way that religions happen to understand love, not because of any paradox.

For all that conservatives bemoan the left-leaning nature of the education system, they clearly do not object to the idea of having an education system. From revisionist historians and amateur sociologists to creationist pseudoscientists and tin-badge economists, the right is replete with pretensions to academia. And for good reason: conservatism, like any good -ism, relies on the beauty of its theories, but, like many -isms, this beauty comes at the cost of factual accuracy. Take as a case in point the conservative art interpretation movement. Having already caught the attention of such internet luminaries as John Rogers (who was then featured on BoingBoing) and the fellow at You Are Dumb dot net, this movement recently reached a new low by starting a blog about the film industry, unimaginatively titled Big Hollywood. Given the truly putrid reasoning in those other areas, though, how bad could Big Hollywood really be?

Really bad, is how bad. To that end, it helps to have dunces like Jonah Goldberg writing the arguments, but even he ought to have higher standards than he displays in his discussion of Alan Moore's Watchmen. Besides the predictable results of his usual inability to do even basic research or think artistically, Goldberg stumbles badly when he tries to correct Watchmen's sense of history. Focusing on the Cold War, he starts by correctly noting that, "[i]n Moore’s alternative universe Richard Nixon" isn't meant to be Nixon himself but instead "a stand-in for Reagan," who Moore felt was too well-liked at the time to be used effectively in his story. Goldberg wants to apply that to the way that the graphic novel portrays JFK - or, more accurately, the way that Goldberg's own inflamed sense of martyr envy reads it as portraying him: "Kennedy," he says, "was an outright Cold War hawk who ran to Nixon’s right in 1960 on such issues as the 'missile gap.'" As such, he says, Watchmen wrongly indicts only the right, when the left would have been just as bad. For all of Goldberg's self-satisfaction at twisting Watchmen into a vindication of the Nixon presidency, comparing Kennedy to Nixon-as-Nixon is irrelevant given that, in the story itself, the contrast (if any actually existed) was meant to take place between Kennedy and Nixon-as-Reagan. If Goldberg just didn't get that "Nixon" in Watchmen really means "Reagan," we could chalk this one up to mere ignorance; given that he makes a point of explaining this distinction, it seems that this argument, too, must ultimately come down to either a conscious effort to deceive or else an overabundance of stupidity.

For years, it seemed like the arts were too frivolous an area to draw any real portion of the hybrid deceptive/stupid focus of the pseudo-academic right. The founding of an institution like Big Hollywood, however, seems to indicate a change in that regard, especially if it can continue to attract the major players of the conservative commentary scene. But enough is enough, isn't it? Already we can't expect to have a sane conversation about religion or evolution or the family or taxes or torture or race or gender - can't we just leave movies and comics and stuff alone? I mean, as much as I would love to continue the proud American tradition of shooting people at movies because they won't shut up, I think I would love it more if I didn't have to. Sadly, as this argument exemplifies perfectly, if there's anything Goldberg and his buddies are good at, it's not knowing when to shut up.