Rust Belt Philosophy

At least, for now! Dun dun dunnnn!

I think most people have heard by now of Michele Bachmann, Minnesota's craziest-ever senator representative (thanks, anon!). Since she's part of the neocon "no facts allowed" treehouse, she's been going after global warming. Not that this in and of itself makes her crazy - it's her method that's the problem. Carbon dioxide, she says, isn't at all dangerous because it "is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide." This, if it weren't so incredibly stupid, would also make a great argument in the ongoing torture debate: waterboarding cannot possibly be torture because water is natural and therefore harmless. Same thing for fire, and cyanide, and mercury, and...

Somewhat less obviously stupid but still very silly is the always-entertaing Alex Pruss. Now he thinks he has "a very nice...theistic explanation of why there exist beings who like telling stories." Ready? "The creator is the author of the universe, and so there is good reason for there to be creatures who also engage in authorship." Whatever way God authored the universe is not at all the same way that (for instance) Umerto Eco authored The Name Of The Rose: that first case is strictly metaphorical and the second is literal. Moreover, the God of Pruss's belief is actually quite reticent to tell tales: according to the Bible, that task almost always falls to humans. But I don't want to get in too deep here - there's a basic equivocation in this argument and therefore it fails.

I will close today with the sad sad tale of the Oklahoma state Republican party, as told by PZ Myers: "...any random amble through any piece of [the OK state GOP platform] will have you laughing at the audacity of wingnuttia. ...this is my favorite, just because they are two goals sitting right next to each other, and the Rethuglicans didn't even notice the contradiction.

4. While the objective study of philosophy and religion can be beneficial, public schools should not be endorsing any specific religion or philosophy. We believe that students and teachers should enjoy the right of free exercise of religion.
5. We support posting the Ten Commandments and our Nation's motto, 'In God We Trust,' in all public schools in recognition of our religious heritage. U.S. citizens. We support teaching the intent of our founding fathers, the original founding documents, and the difference between a democracy and a republic.

So the public schools shouldn't endorse any specific religion or philosophy, but they should be be posting the ten commandments?"

Let's ask also whether or not schools should be enforcing any moral guidelines - ethics, after all, is a branch of philosophy. And what does it mean to "teach the intent of our founding fathers"? Political theory, too, falls under philosophy, and "teach the intent of" could pretty easily become "endorse," one imagines. But hey, it's Oklahoma - what am I worrying for?

Exhibit A: Jeff Mirus. In coming out against the truly loony notion of outsourcing prayer, Mirus defines "the primary purpose of prayer" as "drawing into closer union with God" - fair enough, so far as offering a definition of prayer goes. And, happily, he's very consistent about it, saying that praying helps "us to turn toward God and to place ourselves in His hands," which he also calls an "interior conversion" and a "transformation." Pretty clear, right? Except, then he says that "perfect prayer is perfect conformity with God’s will," which makes about as much sense as saying that perfect navigation is reaching the north pole and then continuing to go north: if prayer is only as good as it converts or transforms or changes us in some beneficial spiritual way, it's literally absurd to say that the best prayer is prayer that doesn't change us at all.

Exhibit B: Byron York. Looking over the poll numbers about Obama's first 100 days (which, for the record, I would really love to have not talked about, being as it is just an arbitrary round number), York thinks he's found a curiosity. Though Obama really is pretty popular, York says, "his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are." If you're looking for more argument here, you're out of luck - that's it. African-Americans, apparently, just do not "actually" count for Byron York. Seriously.

Exhibit C: John Derbyshire. Derbyshire wants in on the anti-gay-marriage party but - alas! - he lacks the theocratic tendencies that would have put him on the guest list. He's not too worried about that, though, because he thinks he has not one but six areligious arguments against gay marriage. Dale (among others) provides some pretty good reasons to dismiss these; I'll now add a few of my own.

Of his six reasons, my favorite is number 4: "If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to." I guess Derbyshire only cares about the dumb straight people, cause on this argument dumb gay people are out to dry, anchoring-instutition-wise. My least favorite is his number 1, which he describes concisely as the idea that "[t]he majority has rights, too." That would be a worthless enough argument on its own, but in the state of New York - where Derbyshire is focusing his criticism - marriage equality is the majority position. Finally, the most philosophically interesting of Derbyshire's arguments is his fifth, in which he claims that "society and human institutions need to 'fit' human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it." The air quotes here are a telling sign: he has no fucking idea what he's talking about. "Need" is at least a three-place predicate in English - it has an subject (the thing in a state of needing), an object (the needed thing), and a consequence (what the needing thing needs the needed thing for). Derbyshire just says that we need to make gay marriage illegal, but he never says what for. Without fully fleshing out this concept of a need, Derbyshire is basically just babbling.

But wait - there's more! Assuming tonight's NBA games aren't wholly consuming, I'll be posting a late-night edition of Thursday silliness blogging later today.

One of the challenges of doing philosophy is interpreting arguments. Though this has its clearest expression in cases of historical works, translated as they are from dead languages and dialects, it's really equally pressing in modern cases. So as to standardize and formalize a line of thought and thereby avoid these problems, philosophers have begun to lay out their arguments either in linguistic or logical syllogisms. This often makes those arguments easier to evaluate fairly, but it also has its disadvantages.

Take as an example AP Taylor's argument for universalism, which is apparently the idea that everybody goes to heaven. Taylor puts it this way:

"1. If Libertarianism about the will is true then none of our decisions is causally determined by any previous physical or mental event(s) (or state(s)).
2. If none of our decisions is causally determined by any previous physical or mental event(s) (or state(s)) then there is always a possibility that even the most recalcitrant rejecter, R, of divine reconciliation may, at some time in the future, tF, freely choose to be reconciled to God.
3. Therefore if God sustains R in existence until tF, then R will be freely reconciled to God.
4. Furthermore, It is no cost to an omnipotent God to sustain R in existence until tF.
5. So then, God if God desires that everyone is freely reconciled to him, then he will sustain everyone in existence until they freely choose to be reconciled to him.
6. God does desire that everyone is freely reconciled to him.
7. Thus everyone is freely reconciled to God. (i.e, Universalism is true)."

Notice how neat and clean the syllogistic form makes things: it's very easy to simply read down the page (or screen, I guess) and see the connections between the ideas. In fact, it's so easy to do this that one might miss how strange the actual content of this argument is. Premise 2 in particular is just bizarre. I think, though he doesn't offer an explanation, that his reasoning went something like this: if we are free to decide among the choices presented to us, we can decide to reconcile with God.* But there's little to no reason to believe that this is a choice presented to the general "us": comatose people, lunatics, and people who've never even heard of Taylor's God are just some groups that we would expect not to have this choice at all.

Though putting this argument in syllogistic form helped make it clear in one way, it also hid the ad-hoc nature of its premises. Luckily for Taylor, the subject matter allows for an easy fix: if he just stipulates, as I'm sure he would, that God magically makes reconciliation available to everyone, then the problem goes away (though it is replaced by another, more fundamental problem). In other contexts, this kind of issue is much harder to resolve. Here I turn to an argument by Michael Huemer, again concerning free will. According to Huemer:

"1. With respect to the free-will issue, we should refrain from believing falsehoods. (premise)
2. Whatever should be done can be done. (premise)
3. If determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (premise)
4. I believe MFT [i.e., "at least some of the time, someone has more than one course of action that he can perform"]. (premise)
5. With respect to the free-will issue, we can refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 1,2)
6. If determinism is true, then with respect to the free will issue, we refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 3,5)
7. If determinism is true, then MFT is true. (from 6,4)
8. MFT is true. (from 7)"

Whereas the legitimate structural fortitude of Taylor's syllogism belied the weakness of its content, Huemer's argument suffers in mere intelligibility when laid out in this way. His 1, for instance, seems very different than the way he describes it in prose: "What we may not do, consistent with rational discourse," he says initially, "is to accept mistakes or biases as such." This is quite obviously not the same thing as saying that we may not accept mistakes or biases at all. Similarly, Huemer defines "we" as "I" at various points in his article, "A should happen" turns to "[someone] in some manner recommend[s] in favor of A," and "'can' is used in the sense (whatever that is) that is relevant to free will." With all of the shifting that takes place in this argument, it's not even clear enough to evaluate - any one of these definitions can make or break multiple premises, so stacking them up on atop another like Huemer does turns his argument into one big question mark.

As useful as syllogisms can be, then, sometimes they're only good for masking an argument's weak points. Every argument is in some sense a rube goldberg device, and syllogisms help to identify the various pieces of rhetorical gadgetry in a given argument and the way that they go together. What they can't ensure - and what Taylor and Huemer badly need to demonstrate - is that even one of those pieces works the way the inventor says it does.

*This is the most sane version I can come up with. If this isn't it, I can't imagine this argument being even remotely plausible.

Is it just me or has there been a certain progression in the war-hawk reaction to the U.S. torture memos? First waterboarding and the other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were not torture and were necessary and legal (just like in 1984!), then they were probably not torture but still necessary and legal (just like in "24"!), then they were torture but definitely still necessary and therefore probably legal (just like in "The Dark Knight"!) - and now, according to people like Dennis Prager, they definitely were torture and almost certainly illegal but still necessary. Moreover, Prager says that "those who oppose what the Bush administration did to some terror suspects...need to respond to some questions" in order to justify that opposition. I'll deal with the relevant questions individually and then address the overall state of Prager's "no, let's talk about you" project.

To begin, he asks, "Given how much you rightly hate torture, why did you oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein?" In a very basic sense, Prager has a point: certainly Hussein was not a good person, and part of that not-goodness included the torture of innocents. But ethics, one must always remember, is not a one-dimensional problem. As bad as torture is, wars - especially badly planned wars based on false premises and possibly started with malicious intent - aren't so great either. Furthermore, it's one thing to oppose the Iraq war and quite another to have opposed the removal of Hussein: one is an end and the other a means to that end. For Prager to heavily imply that one must go after every single case of torture as hard as one can in order to be justified, then, is both stupid and wrong.

Prager then embarks on a series of questions that are just as relevant for him as for his opponents. Most of his remaining questions seek to delimit torture or our reactions to it, but since Prager admits that anyone "with a functioning conscience or a decent heart loathes torture" that kind of question, if relevant at all, would be as relevant to ask of him as anyone else. Since he apparently feels unburdened by these questions, though, something in his argument has gone wrong.

Only two of Prager's finally eight questions don't apply equally to Prager himself or confuse morality for legality. One asks whether or not we torture critics would "seek to prosecute members of Congress such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who were made aware of the waterboarding of high-level suspects and voiced no objections." Presumably Prager thinks the answer to this question is "no," but I'm happy to disappoint him: we should absolutely investigate and prosecute without taking party affiliation or current position into account. On a somewhat different track, he also suggests that we ought to publicize "the photos of the treatment of Islamic terrorists only if accompanied by photos of what their terror has done to thousands of innocent people around the world." Here I will cite an aphorism and leave it at that: two wrongs do not make a right.

But even though all of his questions fail to make an impact, Prager, it seems, might still have a point. Working from a logically consistent legal and moral framework is quite important, so he's not wrong to check for it here. Instead, the wrongness of his argument has two faces. The first is the one we've already seen, that he provides no serious challenge to his opponents' consistency. But assuming he had, he would still err in concluding "that you [torture critics] care less about morality and torture than about vengeance against the Bush administration." An inconsistent argument, as we know, is one that considers only one kind of case yet generates two substantially different conclusions by arbitrarily applying different metrics. Though we can say for sure that it's wrong to do this, it doesn't say anything about which of those standards of reasoning, if either, is right.

Take my own remarks a few paragraphs ago: though Prager applies a double standard to conservatives and liberals when he asks only liberals who loathe torture to justify themselves, I specifically refrained from saying either that everyone needs to justify themselves or that nobody needs to. This isn't because I don't have an opinion on the subject - I do - but the mere fact of an inconsistency in an argument doesn't resolve that inconsistency in any particular direction. Thus, even if he proves an inconsistency, Prager has no grounds from which to claim that it's the justification for pursuing Bush that's lacking - it could be the justification for not pursuing Pelosi, for instance, or any number of other possibilities.

Finally, even if our underlying motivation is to punish people we don't like, that wouldn't prove that those people don't deserve to be punished. Prager, in other words, seems to think that our motivations (the things we "care about") are capable of disqualifying us from taking the morally and/or legally proper action (i.e., prosecution of criminals) - or perhaps even changing what the morally and/or legally proper action is. Needless to say, this is a ridiculous notion. Especially given the phenomenal unpopularity of ex-president Bush, it would be inane to require the prosecutors in this case to be totally emotionally neutral. Really, though, there's not much else for Prager to hope for in this case. Having already admitted that torture is morally abhorrent and strongly intimated that it's also illegal, he's denied himself all the traditional escape routes, which basically means reducing "fight or flight" to just "fight." I leave it to my readers to make their own evaluations of a man who's willing to fight on behalf of torture and torturers.

And no, this has nothing to do with Fox News. A few months ago, I wrote a post criticizing Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism for taking it too easy on the superstitious. Then I lent the book to my dad, well...he's a busy guy. Having just received it back from him, though, I can now write the other post in my two-post series about Cosmopolitanism.

Towards the end of the book, Appiah considers a now-famous ethical story that claims to demonstrate the veracity of a certain worldly ethical position. Named after its best-known proponent, Peter Singer, Appiah identifies this position as the following: "If you can prevent something bad from happening at the cost of something less bad, you ought to do it" (160). Appiah lists several of the thought experiments used to justify this Singer principle, but they all start, he says, with Singer's shallow pond argument. "If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it," this argument says, "I ought to wade in and pull the child out" (158). When put that way, ethics seems incredibly clear. Indeed, Singer's simple scenario verges on the epiphanous, especially when backed up with similar experiments, which Appiah credits to Peter Unger: "Suppose you've [restored] a vintage Mercedes sedan to mint condition...and you pass by a hiker with a badly injured foot...Wouldn't you [rescue this hiker] even though the bleeding from his wound would ruin" the car (158-159)? And so on and so forth: just make the sacrifices that are less painful to you than the alternative is to others. Easy, right?

Not so fast, says Appiah. First of all, this has dire monetary consequences, as it demands that one essentially charitably contribute oneself into near-poverty. And "[a]s for that hiker with the bleeding foot," Appiah counters, "he's plainly out of luck: why hurt the sedan's resale value, given all the good in the world we could do with the money?" Eventually Appiah gets to the heart of the matter, noting that "our moral intuitions are often more secure than the principles we appeal to in explaining them. There are countless principles that would get you to save the drowning child [or rescue the hiker, etc.] without justifying your own immiseration. Here's one: If you are the person in the best position to prevent something really awful, and it won't cost you much to do so, do it." (161) In other words, Appiah believes - absolutely correctly - that Singer and Unger's thought experiments underdetermine morality and therefore fail to prove their specific version of morality.

In this age of poll skepticism, it's a wonder that anyone still takes thought experiments seriously. Everyone and their mother will tell you that the way you ask the question will influence the answer, but philosophers seem not to have caught up. Appiah deserves credit for smelling out this bad argument - and for proposing an alternative solution to the problem that Singer and Unger propose. This is a blog, though, and not a library, so I'll have to insist that you go read Cosmopolitanism yourself in order to see more of Appiah's work.

I dunno what happened with me yesterday, but yeah. Anyway.

Today I want to look at a few arguments pertaining to religion and see how they go wrong. First up, William Lane Craig and his always-entertaining Q&A series. This week he fields a query from a somewhat philosophically clumsy atheist who says, "as an atheist one can certainly live with tremendous hope. I mean if there is no God then there is no ultimate accountability." While I have no real desire to defend the hope = no accountability thing, Craig's response deserves some examination.

Though he admits that such a hope exists, Craig argues that "that doesn’t really negate what I said." In particular, Craig claims that he only meant to discuss "the shortcomings of our finite existence," like suffering and death. While that would indeed be a different story, it's pretty much just a lie. Here's what Craig actually said originally: "If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. If there is no God, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the shortcomings of our finite existence. ... For example, there is no hope for deliverance from evil. ... If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for deliverance from evil.

Or again, if there is no God, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death. ... Atheism is thus a philosophy without hope." It's clear that Craig both identifies specific contexts in which atheism is ostensibly incapable of supporting hope* and then uses that as a rhetorical crutch to support the stronger claim that atheism is hopeless in general. If he didn't mean to assert this latter conclusion, he shouldn't have kept saying it. Since he did keep saying it, though, one can only assume that he thinks it's warranted, which it is most certainly not.

Next up, Alex Pruss and a novel defense for the problem of evil. Here's how he sets up the argument:

1. Atheist: The world contains many instances of suffering, all of which could easily be averted if there were a God, simply by modifying the laws of nature. For instance, there could be a law of nature saying that knives turn to water before they penetrate hearts, etc.
2. Theist: Such laws of nature would be unduly complex. For instance, they would have to specify exactly when knives turn to water, in what way (does the process happen all at once, starting at the tip, etc.), how close they need to be to the heart for the process to start, etc. Simplicity of law is intrinsically valuable—a world all of whose laws are as elegant as General Relativity is a world of great value, in its diversity reflecting God's infinity in its and in its simplicity God's unity.
3. Atheist: Any value of such simplicity is far outweighed by the disvalue of suffering for persons.
4. Theist: It is valuable for us to be able to figure out the laws, both for the sake of the understanding itself and to enable us to exercise more meaningful agency. But laws complex enough to stop every kind of suffering would be too complex for us to figure out.
5. Atheist: But God could give us more powerful intellects.I want to take a moment here to go into this notion of value before continuing on with Pruss's argument. First and foremost, there doesn't seem to be any independent need or motivation for the values that he cites (i.e., simplicity and epistemological accessibility of physical laws), which makes them suspiciously ad hoc. Second, not all values are moral values, but moral values are what Pruss needs here. In particular, that talk about "diversity reflecting God's infinity" and so on seems more indicative of aesthetic value than moral value. Either way, though, simply identifying it as valuable isn't specific enough.

Returning to Pruss now, we see that he begins his reponse to 5 with another speculative value: "there is a value in having enmattered intellects which do a significant part...of their thinking by use of a physical organ (the brain), an organ whose morphology arose through natural physical processes of not too small probability. Now, a more complex set of laws given such conditions might require a more complex brain. But it could well be that the energy usage and evolution of such a more complex brain would require further complexification of the laws. I do not know that this is so, but neither do I know that this is not so, and I doubt that anyone is in a position to claim that it is not so." This spins quickly out of control, but fear not: Pruss doesn't really want to go down this road. He just wants to point out that "[i]t's fun and humbling to note how easily our thinking hits up against things that none of us know." Yes! Totally fun and humbling, like Chuck E. Cheese crossed with a seminar on the mechanics of string theory! But wait - where did the rest of his argument come from, then?

If Pruss doesn't know anything about how complex brains would have to be in order to understand physical laws of a certain level of complexity, his theist clearly cannot support 4 because 4 is nothing other than a specific statement relating the complexity of brains to the complexity of physical laws. It also seems safe to say (especially given the ensuing comments to his post) that Pruss doesn't really know how complex the laws actually are or how complex they would need to be to prevent evil - but now 2 as well is based on what he doesn't know. At this point it's fair to suspect that this argument is not really humbling at all and is only fun because Pruss gets to accuse his opponents of arguing from ignorance while doing the exact same thing himself.

Finally, a throwback for those who've followed this blog for a while: an argument from the phenomenally thick Apolonio Latar. It's been some time since I bothered with him, but he was an early favorite on this blog - heck, I even gave him his own tag. (My writing back then was somewhat worse, but it might be worth reading some of it anyway.) Well, it turns out there's even more dumbness there than I'd originally thought. Here, and I promise I am not making this up, is his take on evolution: "The human body may have evolved, but there are things in the human person I do not believe that did. For example, there is the human mind. Why should I trust my mind if it came from non-rational objects? Imagine using your calculator, hitting 7+7. But before you hit '=' I told you that they were made from alligators. Should you trust the calculator? It seems to me that if we hold to evolution without God, we shouldn’t trust our minds."

I think - I hope - that this is Latar trying to be Alvin Plantinga and just failing spectacularly (not that it's worth it to be Alvin Plantinga in this case). Let's just assume that he meant "made by alligators" and not "from alligators," because otherwise this really makes no sense: a calculator made from alligators would combine convenient mathematical functionality with stylish fashionability, not disprove the epistemic reliability of evolved minds. Not, of course, that it works the other way either: this analogy is so utterly fucked up that I literally don't even know where to start. As such, I'll just string everything together into one run-on sentence fragment. Okay, ready? Here goes: evolution, which lacks consciousness, is not like alligators, which couldn't make a calculator even if they tried, even though they have no reason to try, unlike evolution which in some sense does have reason to produce brains, although obviously not to try to produce brains because, and this is where a lot of brain-dead apologists screw up, evolution doesn't try to do anything, being as it is an impersonal force (not even a force, really, just the result of basic statistics and advanced biochemistry), which is not at all sufficient to say that it's unreliable, or else all causcally efficacious impersonal forces would be unreliable, including things like gravity and magnetism, and anyway we have far more experience with the result of personal actions being unreliable, which in this case would necessarily include God's creation of our minds (if such a thing were the case) because most people don't even believe in that God.

Ah...feels good to get that off my chest. Not that it'll help matters, of course - Latar will keep on being dumb, just like Pruss will keep on getting way ahead of himself and Craig will keep on being a smarmy git. Just like the last 499 posts, though, I'll keep on offering what small resistance a blog with maybe 20 regular readers can offer. See you at post 1000!

*Which are, of course, wrong: I refer, as usual, to atheist religions, like Buddhism.

Yesterday, it seems, was a good day for fallacies on one of my favorite sites. BoingBoing, the somewhat optimistically subtitled "Directory of Wonderful Things," featured two stories about bad argumentation in politics, both of which I'll summarize here.

The simpler of the two is a classic case of special pleading. As Glenn Greenwald reports, "when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, [Jane Harman argued] that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power." There's really not much more to say here, actually: Harman doesn't have a leg to stand on and she ought to be laughed out of Congress and, if guilty, into jail.

More seriously and subtly, the White House's Office of Legal Counsel provides a serious challenge to the "we torture us" argument. As reproduced basically everywhere - professional news organizations, amateur news organizations, professional yet amateurish news organizations, and, of course, in the minds of normal Americans - this argument notes that waterboarding is a part of some U.S. military training and then concludes that it must not be so bad. The problem, according to the OLC, is that "the SERE [military training] waterboard experience is so so [sic, probably] different from the subsequent [Central Intelligence] Agency usage [on terrorists] as to make it almost irrelevant." In both "frequency and intensity," the way we waterboarded our enemies greatly exceeded the way we waterboarded our own people. This may seem pedantic, but keep in mind that frequency and intensity are the only things separating a friendly punch on the shoulder from assault. When the legions of pro-torture writers made the "we torture us" argument, then, they were (unwittingly or otherwise) equivocating on "waterboarding." Though the training-oriented and interrogation-oriented techniques obviously bear several important things in common, there's enough difference between them to decimate this argument.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call these reports wonderful, they do represent something wonderful: journalism. The best way to find the holes in an argument is to learn more about its subject matter but the best way to sell news is (or at least has recently been) to undercut such learning in favor of emphasizing this or that salacious aspect of a story. That the latter interest is beginning to conform to the former is welcome indeed, and I can only hope that we see more of this as time goes on.

They say all the world's a stage, but if that's so then most of us are getting totally shafted when it comes to face time. I think it makes a lot more sense to say that certain parts of the world are very stage-like, even if that stage is just a soapbox on a busy street corner. Politicians in particular are notorious for their overly dramatic soliloquies, most of which (at least in this country) thankfully disappear into the void of channels like CSPAN. Every so often, though, a stray couplet slips through into the wider world, usually to cause nothing but trouble. Such is the case with Texas governor Rick Perry's none-too-subtle comments about Texas's independence.

Wanting to jump on the whole tea-party bandwagon, Perry "suggested that Texans might at some point become so disgusted with Washington's gross violation of the U.S. Constitution [i.e., taxes] that they would want to secede from the union," which has been met with some degree of skepticism. Walter Williams, however, thinks that such skeptics "have little understanding" and wants to "look at," by which he seems to mean "defend," Perry's musings. One can conclude that Williams makes a mistake in doing so even before reading this defense - just let it disappear into the CSPAN void, Walter! - but that point is driven home when one sees just how inept that defense is.

Williams starts, weirdly, by referencing the state constitutions of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, because "they made it explicit that if the federal government perverted the delegated rights, they had the right to resume those rights. In fact, when the Union was being formed, where the states created the federal government, every state thought they had a right to secede otherwise there would not have been a Union." It's hard to see why he thinks this is at all relevant. Those three states, it must first be noted, are not Texas; further, their state constitutions were all drafted before the year 1800, so there's no guarantee that the motivations that were valid at the time would still hold today (or, equivalently, that Perry's motivations were like those of the 18th-century state constitution writers'). But let's assume they were: why would that matter? Williams wants to show that secession at this point would not be treasonous, but treason isn't decided by the number of people (or states) involved.

Incredibly, though, that turns out to be Williams's most cogent response. As the article progresses, he tries to change the subject altogether ("one response to federal encroachment [other than secession] is for state governments to declare federal laws that have no constitutional authority null and void and refuse to enforce them"), makes totally loony ethical arguments ("no one has a moral obligation to obey unconstitutional laws"), and asks totally irrelevant rhetorical questions ("Which is a more peaceful solution: one group of Americans seeking to impose their vision on others or simply parting company?"). Since none of this even addresses the concept of treason, none of it could possibly prove what Williams says he's proving.

There's a good reason that very little serious reporting happens in response to things like this: what Perry said wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Just like the audience in a regular play knows not to rush for the exists when a character says the building's on fire, almost everyone understands enough to ignore politicians when they say stuff like, "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot." Williams accurately identified that little spiel as being in some sense dramatic, but he turned it into a joke when he forgot to take its context into account: no matter how serious things are onstage, you'll always look like a clown if you rush out from your seat and try to join in.

Yesterday we took a quick look at some bad ways to defend the practice of torturing an enemy combatant, most of which reduced down to attempts to reframe the conversation so as to make torture look like the kinder of two options. I said then, and I still believe now, that it's easier to defend torture as a good than it is to defend it as a necessary evil or an evil that nonetheless demonstrates how morally mature we are. Though it may not be clear at first how torture could possibly be the right thing to do, Alex Pruss's blog post from today unintentionally provides the perfect opportunity to make it clear.

His argument seeks to address "the idea that God['s decision to kick] Adam and Eve out of paradise, thereby ensuring that their descendants would grow up in our vale of tears, is unjust." So as to make things interesting, he assumes "that God was just in punishing Adam and Eve with death," and I'll do likewise - mostly because otherwise we'd never get to the part that's relevant to torture. On this assumption, he says, we need only ask "whether God was just in having us live outside paradise." To help answer that question, Pruss draws up three scenarios:

"1. God kills Adam and Eve on the spot, and the human race gets no further.
2. God kicks Adam and Eve out of paradise, and prevents them from reproducing.
3. God kicks Adam and Eve out of paradise, but does not prevent them from reproducing."

Since we assumed that death was a just punishment, "world 1 is a world where (as far as these sketches go, at least) God does not act unjustly. What about world 2? Does God wrong anybody there? Not at all. He doesn't wrong Adam and Eve: he treats them somewhat less harshly than in world 1. Does he wrong us, Adam and Eve's descendants? Surely not--for we don't exist in world 2, and one cannot wrong the non-existent." As such, Pruss concludes that "in 1 and 2 there is no injustice." Here's where I'll part ways with him: he wants to talk about whether 3 contains an injustice, but for the purposes of this post I don't much care about that. Instead, I'll stay on this idea that worlds 1 and 2 are both just.

In particular, I want to hone in on Pruss's consideration of Adam and Eve. Again, world 1 is our control world: it exactly matches our hypothetical about death fulfilling justice. In world 2, though, Pruss specifically identifies a lack of extra harm. God "doesn't wrong Adam and Eve" because "he treats them somewhat less harshly than in world 1," Pruss says, from which one can conclude that world 2 also meets the demands of justice. But in fact this does not follow, because justice has a floor as well as a ceiling. In other words, an overabundance of kindness violates justice just as much as an overabundance of harshness does. Think, for example, of students who get caught plagiarizing: even if refusing to punish them would be strictly less harmful to them, it would still fall short of justice. Similarly, if Adam and Eve deserve death on a strictly justice-based account as Pruss postulated, to let them live would at least partially interfere with justice. I ought to pause here before getting to the punchline, because it might seem like I'm saying that letting Adam and Eve live would be wrong, but that's not what I mean. There are ethical systems on which justice ought to be tempered with other considerations or applied only in certain situations, so I don't mean to make any absolute moral claim in cases like this.

That said, justice-centric moral views aren't unheard of. Especially in the philosophy of law, it's often very compelling to say that justice is the single most important, if not the only relevant, consideration. On a view like this, it would be unacceptable not to torture someone if that's what justice called for just like it would be unacceptable not to punish someone who plagiarizes - even though torturing that person clearly would do them more harm. Of the people we looked at yesterday, Buckley came the closest to embracing this kind of reasoning but ultimately couldn't bring himself to do it: he prefaced his defense of torture by claiming that the U.S. follows the good by "not doing this anymore." Given the ease with which people defer to (their idea of) justice in other contentious contexts - in defending the death penalty, say, or the concept of hell - it's just bizarre that so few people have done so in this particular debate. If even a heuristic as pitiless as justice cannot render torture morally palatable, people ought to quit defending it; if on the other hand justice is the way to go, they ought to quit dicking around and get down to business, because this is getting old fast.

So it turns out there's this thing about waterboarding that people are all upset about, namely that the CIA uses (or at least used) it. But the weird thing is that people are all upset about it in very different ways. While some people, like Andrew Sullivan (on whose site I found all these other links), are upset that it happened, others are upset that people in the first category are upset. Here are three examples:

"Look, we hanged Saddam Hussein and sent the 101st Airborne to kill Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay. What is 'waterboarding' compared to violent death? ... [We should] contrast (a) the tender-hearted concern for the 'rights' of terrorists manifested by the New York Times with (b) the manner of treatment that Abu and Khalid could expect from attendees of the Texas State Fair."
-Robert McCain (no relation, I suspect)

"...if there were agents of the United States government acting on legal advice that what they were doing was legal and appropriate, that they should not be prosecuted.

If people acted outside the law, that's a different issue. But the main point is the president has banned these enhanced interrogation techniques. We have turned the page on this episode in our history. We have so many challenges in front of us, in terms of our national security, our relations in the world."
-David Axelrod

"It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one."
-Christopher Buckley

McCain's response is an exercise in what I often call shiny-objects argumentation (though I usually only do this in my head): rather than address the topic at hand, point to a shinier topic close by and hope people forget what they were supposed to be talking about. It really is irrelevant what we did to Saddam and his sons (in other words, the moral or legal arguments regarding these two things are not necessarily connected), and it's irrelevant and morally retarded to refer to "attendees of the Texas State Fair" as moral arbiters of any sort. Buckley plays the same game, only with a Minority Report-esque twist. As emotionally motivating as doomsday scenarios may be, what terrorists would have done has absolutely no legal weight and almost certainly has no moral weight either.* Both also seem to be operating on the mistaken assumption that the waterboarding was in some sense punitive: it was not. And, again, while it may be emotionally or even morally compelling to speak of torture as an instantiation of justice, emotional and moral arguments are of a wholly different sort than legal arguments.

Axelrod, on the other hand, seems to cover the legal side. In two sentences, he uses four references to the law, which gives him a certain sense of credibility. Unfortunately for him, that credibility is pretty much totally destroyed by the actual content of his argument. Focusing on the waterboarders themselves, Axelrod creates two categories: people who acted on reassuring legal advice and people who broke the law. However neat this may appear, the entire point of the debate is that these two categories are not so cleanly separable. By failing to consider people who fall into both of his categories, Axelrod creates a false dichotomy designed to make his position seem more reasonable. While his haste to bury the conversation altogether is a problem (just because we're busy now doesn't mean we shouldn't deal with this ever), it's secondary in scale to this overly simplistic categorization.

What's interesting about these cases is that nobody takes the obvious way out by just saying that, on their moral and political systems, torture is okay in certain situations. They put faux-comic spins on it, try to make it pale in comparison to other things, and work to explain it away with legalistic jargon, but none of this is anywhere near as defensible as just starting over from scratch and finding philosophical niches that better support pro-torture intuitions. Obviously these people have strong feelings about the matter (possibly excepting Axelrod), though, which raises the question of why anybody would bother to defend proudly and sincerely held beliefs on a serious topic with such half-assed attempts.

*Some ethical theories will take this into account, but many either ignore hypotheticals of this sort altogether or greatly reduce their import. Of particular importance here is the range of the hypothetical - in other words, what we're allowed to stick after the "if" and before the "then." This kind of argument tends towards its most credible in scenarios like Buckley's, but it can be made much less credible really easily: "If these terrorists had been given a decent education growing up, they wouldn't have been terrorists at all. Therefore, we should punish them much less than we would initially suspect."

Yesterday, I thought I had seen it all. During a severe global economic recession at the beginning of a new presidential administration that's engaged in serious military action, that continues to move in new directions scientifically, and that routinely talks about changing its basic interactions with its people, George Will decided the best use of his time would be to inveigh against blue jeans. Crazy, right? Well, it appears I was overhasty, because today I discovered not just one but a whole site's worth of arguments that are even crazier.

Having been linked to John Cole's perfectly accurate analysis of one of these even crazier pieces - he summarizes the author's argument as "it has numbers in it, so it must be true," which pretty much nails it - I then proceeded on to the source: Pajamas Media. Pajamas Media, put succinctly, is a cornucopia of idiocy. If my standards were low enough to allow for this, I'm confident that I could write about a Pajamas Media article daily and never ever have to worry about finding material. Just to show you all how tragic that would be - and maybe also because I'm feeling a little low-standardsy today - I'll give you a taste of what that would be like today, with AWR Hawkins's luddite-tastic "The Information Highway: More Like a[n Information] Roller Coaster." (Amazingly, PJM doesn't seem to have any full articles listed on one page, so here's page 2.)

Hawkins begins, as all good tenth-grade writers do, with his thesis statement: "President Obama['s] new type of diplomacy — 'YouTube diplomacy' — [is best seen] as a harbinger of the dangers attending the openness of post-modern technology." He worries that "events of the day and political messages ... come to us with an unchecked immediacy" that violates certain (conveniently unnamed) ethical boundaries. To give you a sense of how bizarre this idea is, here is a real, unadulterated example of what Hawkins calls "the impact that imminent news reporting has on people and culture" (the bracketed comments are his, not mine):

"in 2001, Cindy Petterson described how former President George H.W. Bush once 'ended a presidential press conference [by] saying he had to leave to call the President of Turkey. In Ankara, [the President of Turkey] turned off CNN, walked into his office, picked up the ringing phone and said "Hello, Mr. President."'"

Yes! Tremble, o timid internet opinion piece reader, at the horrifying implications of...whatever it is that he objects to here. God help us all if phones never ever have to ring more than once, especially if those phones belong to foreign leaders!

Okay, but seriously, it wouldn't even matter if Hawkins had succeeded in identifying a coherent moral concern, because this idea of immediacy or unfiltered-ness changes from one context to the other. When news channels "unintentionally broadcast the suicide of" people in car chases,* Hawkins calls that "'unfiltered' news [that] is thrown at us with great rapidity" in very much the same way that he criticizes Obama for wanting to be able "to deliver his words directly and unfiltered to the Iranian people." The theory, according to Hawkins, is that immediacy or unfiltered-ness leads to desensitization, so the fact that "both the news and Obama’s foreign policy positions are delivered via a scripted blitz from which we can hardly turn away" means that both are desensitizing us. Just behind the obvious two questions** is a clear case of equivocation: the filter that's missing from the nightly news (some nebulous ethical something) is not the same one that's missing from Obama's YouTube videos (i.e., a foreign government and press). In particular, YouTube has exactly the kind of content monitoring that Hawkins wishes the news had, so for him to tag them both as unfiltered is, to say the least, deceptive.

Hawkins wraps up his argument with a piece of folk wisdom that falls to pieces once placed under philosophical scrutiny. Proceeding from what I guess is a warped understanding of market principles, Hawkins says that "if everyone is a diplomat then being one is overrated at best, unnecessary at worst." In other words, if Obama succeeds in connecting the citizenry of various countries, what Hawkins calls "real diplomats" will be redundant. The weird irony here is that the context itself disproves this idea. YouTube makes everybody into a TV producer (at least in some sense), but has that made professional TV producers overrated or unnecessary? No - or, at least, no more so than they already were (I'm looking at you, whoever green-lighted that insipid Paris Hilton show). The absoulte worst-case scenario that Hawkins could construct using this strategy is the blog/newspaper thing, but even that would be a stretch - newspapers rely on market demand but diplomats do not, so the demand-siphoning effects of blogs would likely not apply to amateur diplomacy.

Before I bring this sad display to an end, I just want to point out one more thing: none of this has anything to do with roller coasters. Roller coasters are awesome and fun and they don't deserve to be dragged into this. Whatever goofy non-issue the people over at Pajamas Media want to complain about, they should at least have the courtesy to leave innocent thrill-based rides out of it.

*Is it just me, or does this not actually happen that often? Am I missing out on something by not compulsively watching the news?
**One: in what sense can we "hardly turn away" from the news? Literally everyone I know can turn away from the news pretty easily. Two: just how sensitized were we with respect to diplomacy anyway? Even if I grant him all his nutty premises, it seems like most people just didn't care about foreign negotiations in the first place, which would make his entire argument moot.

When first I read the title of George Will's most recent article, I thought it referred to some kind of metaphor. "Forever in Blue Jeans," after all, does not exactly sound promising if interpreted literally: what, one wonders, do jeans really have to do with anything? As it turns out, one is entirely justified in wondering, as Will bah-humbugs his way through what I sincerely hope is a sarcastic argument against wearing jeans. Just to repeat that: George Will, political commentator, wrote an entire article about why we, as U.S. citizens, ought to put "away childish things, starting with denim." What this has to do with politics is anyone's guess.

Incredibly, Will claims that denim "is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche." Quoting Daniel Akst, another person I really hope was just kidding, Will calls jeans "a manifestation of "the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing'" and "the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances." I have no idea what he thinks he's talking about, but even if he's right he cannot then go on to say that "[d]enim reflects 'our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings'" and that "[j]eans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not": if we wear jeans because we don't care what we look like and have no desire to use clothing as a social marker, then it would be absurd to try to disguise them or use them symbolically. If, in other words, we used jeans to avoid what Will calls "the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters," we would do so by draining them of meaning, not by piling one meaning (acid-washing as fashion) on top of another (jeans as tough-guy clothing). While matters of human belief are not always subject to the laws of non-contradiction - "I believe x" is compatible with "I believe not-x" - even a cursory survey of jeans-wearers and -makers will reveal Will's caricature of their motivations to be a total straw man.

Will's main complaint, though, seems to center around the history of jeans. "Denim on the bourgeoisie is" - note the historical vocabulary - "discordant" because jeans are "authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil." Levi Strauss "made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold," Will rhapsodizes, and therefore "it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed" in that same kind of pants. In reality, this is no sillier than using dynamite for non-mining purposes - a thing's origins do not forever determine its proper use.

If Will were a professional athlete, the phrase here would be "it's time for him to hang 'em up." (It's never really clear what he would be hanging up, but whatever.) Will, it seems, is past his prime, assuming he ever had one. Not only is the subject of this argument profoundly irrelevant, his treatment of it falls well short even of amateurish. Will's only real hope here is to claim that the whole thing was just a joke, but this a man who gets paid to write seriously about serious topics. All of that having been said, there is a silver lining to this cloud: at least he didn't make up more faux-facts about global warming.

Today is a happy day: I found a pretty viable way to actually play the mixtapes on my mixtape blog (see e.g. here - still working on a way to supply the missing songs, but I think that should be relatively easy), and I also found out that conservatives can talk about religion without going totally nuts. Even better, they can do so when religion intersects with science - although still maybe not on the issue of evolution.

Having read what seems like a very interesting book "on the biological basis of religious experience," Michael Gerson takes it upon himself to summarize the process by which believers provide vital "scientific skepticism. The faithful will issue a challenge to science: Ha, you can't explain the development of life, or the moral sense, or the nearly universal persistence of religion. To which the materialist responds: Can too. It is all biology and chemistry, thus disproving your God hypothesis." Besides the straw man there at the end - that's not why materialists (or non-materialist scientists) think that the neurology of religion is philosophically relevant - that's not too bad. That relative level-headedness continues for almost the entire remainder of the article, too - you should go read it, cause it's actually kind of interesting even though Gerson mainly sticks to summarizing others' work. Actually, that might explain why it's kind of interesting - when he finally gets around to making his own arguments, things go downhill quickly.

Gerson chides the book for focusing on improving one's inner life, saying, "if this is what spirituality is all about, it isn't about very much." It may seem at first like he means this ontologically, and indeed he talks later about "the question of truth," but he also thinks that belief ought to have certain practical implications. "Mature faith," he says, "sometimes involves self-sacrifice, not self-actualization; anguish, not comfort." This seems to be a very weird response, for two reasons.

First, it's not at all clear why mature faith inherently includes suffering and sacrifice and whatnot, or even what that means (a sacrifice-with-respect-to-faith needn't also be a sacrifice-with-respect-to-wealth, for instance, but this seems like what he's driving at). The label "mature," then, seems just to be a rhetorical device with no logical backing. Second, self-sacrifice and self-actualization aren't mutually exclusive, and likewise it's not immediately obvious that one can only improve one's inner spirituality through self-actualization and comfort - in fact, the soul-building response to the problem of evil explicitly denies this, saying that a rich spiritual life requires a certain amount of anguish. Though Gerson deserves some credit for making it through an entire article about the science of religion without saying anything really crazy, his eventual failings strongly suggest (as though we needed more evidence of this) that the discussion regarding the intersection of science and religion is still anything but well-understood.

Rebecca Hagelin unwittingly takes a shot at children with this glowing answer to the question "What happened to the joy of parenting?": "Perhaps the happiest moment of a couple's life is when their precious little one is placed in their arms for the first time. Close your eyes for a few moments and try to remember. ... I was ready - and it was a sheer delight to begin the journey." If that's supposed to be part of parenting that's joyous, the part where the child hasn't existed for long enough to piss you off yet, then so much for parenting. It's hard to answer a question about the joy of parenting when one apparently doesn't know what that is.

As a result of my ongoing argument over epistemology here, I ran across David Hart and what I will call his "oh well" theodicy. His main line of thought seems to be "that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible" and, more strongly, "that it would be far more terrible if it were." I'm really not sure how he comes up with that latter part, but the former clearly is just an appeal to ignorance: I dunno about suffering and death, so leave me alone! Even better is the laughable defense that "Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity[??], defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own...hence it can have no positive role to play in...any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness." Sure: and since the lack of dexterity is likewise just the privation of a good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, it can't be the case that being clumsy makes you a worse professional athlete. Right...

And finally, tea parties: they are dumb. The motivation behind tea parties comes, theoretically, from the original Boston tea party. In some sense the two are supposed to be analogous, but it should be overwhelmingly apparent that they are not. The original tea party protested an entire system of government with the aim of establishing a better one, but contemporary tea parties are just around so people can whine: these groups do not want to fundamentally change the representative democratic republic system, they just want more power in it. Both groups surely have similar emotions - frustration, anger, resentment, and so on - but that's hardly sufficient.

It's easy in philosophy to talk big: words like "obvious" and "clear" and "indisputable" fly around quite a lot, and they're almost always meant earnestly. However, given that almost every classical debate in philosophy is still ongoing, not much of this talk has translated into actually obvious or clear or indisputable proofs. Today (technically yesterday, actually) another chapter is added to that long history of disproportionately confident chatter with Mike Almeida's "Irrefutable Ontological Argument."

Almeida begins with the premise, "1. <>(Ex)(x is maximally excellent & x is necessarily existing)" - in other words, it's logically possible that some thing exist such that it is maximally excellent and necessarily existing (i.e., it exists in all logically possible worlds). (Almeida doesn't specify this, but I take him to mean that x is maximally excellent in each of those worlds.) I'm not quite sure why he thinks that this "is an easily observed a priori truth" that "beg[s] no questions," but he is simply wrong about that. It would be easy to observe that each world has some being or other that is maximally excellent in that world, but you can't go from that to what Almeida asserts with 1: to do so would be to take the "Every hour, a man gets robbed - poor guy!" joke way too seriously.

But let's move on anyway, as there's still interesting ground to cover. So as to clarify what the phrase "maximally excellent" means, Almeida claims "that it is equally undeniable that there is some degree K of knowledge that (more or less closely) approximates omniscience, some degree P of (essential) power that approximates omnipotence, some degree G of (essential) goodness that approximates (essential) omnibenevolence such that Px & Kx & Gx are compossible with necessary existence, Nx. So, the only question that is open is what is the greatest degree of each that is compossible with necessary existence." My bold is there to show that Almeida evidently considers each of these omni-esque* qualities to be separately compossible with necessary existence, not necessarily that they as a group could exist with necessary existence. (This is the difference between saying, "Tim Duncan, the guy who wears the numer 9, and the left-handed Argentinian are Spurs players" and "Tim Duncan, the left-handed Argentinan guy who wears the number 9, is a Spurs player.") However, he uses this latter, stronger meaning in his next premise:

"[2.] <>(EK)(EP)(EG)(Ex)([]Kx & []Px & []Gx & Nx)"

In other words, there exist properties K, P, G, and an entity x such that x necessarily (in all possible worlds) has properties K, P, and G, and such that x exists necessarily (in all possible worlds). Since one can accept his earlier claim ("Px & Kx & Gx are compossible with necessary existence") and still deny 2 (in essence, "Px & Kx & Gx is compossible with necessary existence"), everything that follows is suspect.**

After repeating some standard ontological moves, Almeida concludes that "any being satisfying all of those properties would have to be non-natural or supernatural, since there is no natural being that has the property of necessary existence and there is no abstract object that has the properties P, K, or G. Call that being God-. ... Now imagine believing that this supernatural being God- exists, but refusing to believe that God exists. That would be strange." It's telling that the argument ends there: even though he hasn't shown the existence of his God, there really is nowhere else for Almeida to go.

Moreover, he has already gone too far in many ways. First of all, it would not be strange to believe in God- but not God. For one thing, the two are plainly not the same. Even if Almeida hadn't already pointed out the differences - namely, that God is truly omni whereas God- is only omni-esque - it's still easier to believe in a nebulous god-like thing than the God of Almeida's Bible, what with its weird tripartite nature and questionable sense of morality and seeming inability to get certain basic facts right. Second, there's very little that separates Almeida's argument from other ontological arguments. Stephen Law, for instance, might answer Almeida's 1 with one compatible with his God of Eth:

1'. <>(Ex)(x is maximally evil & x is necessarily existing)

If "maximally evil" means "maximally excellent, just with evil in lieu of goodness," the entire rest of the argument can proceed the same with no apparent loss in content or intuitive strength. Or replace "maximally excellent" with "maximally excellent and tall": since Almeida defines "maximal excellence" as the property "that there is nothing that is more excellent (than it)," it's fair to define "maximally tall" as the property that there is nothing taller (than it). But is Almeida's God actually maximally tall? What about maximally short? Fat? Thin? Beautiful? Hideous? Industrious? Lazy? I could go on, but I hope my point is made. 1 might seem intuitive to Almeida, but (at least for me) it's no more or less "easily observed a priori" than if we tacked on any of these extra qualities, none of which he really wants and any of which would significantly decrease the likelihood that God- is Almeida's God.

As well as this argument sits with Almeida's gut, the substance just isn't there. Even if we play along at every step, the entity we end up with is not the Christian God. In particular, this argument does nothing whatsoever to weaken any anti-Christian skeptical argument, so it would not be strange in any way to accept Almeida's argument and still reject Christianity. (If this is still seems wrong, consider that Almeida himself seems to accept his argument and yet rejects all but one sect of Christianity, even though all sects, including those with very different ideas about God, could make the same strangeness claim that he made.) Ultimately, though, we have no reason to play along in the first place. This whole argument rests on a logical possibility that in turn rests only on that most capricious of qualities, being obvious to a philosopher.

*How about that - it's a prefix and a suffix with nothing in between, and yet meaningful. Fun times with language!
**Note to Mike: I know this is not what you mean, but I am holding P, G, and K fixed throughout. I think it's easier to talk about it this way than the way you did it, and I don't think I've actually changed your argument. Either way, my objection still applies: whatever intuition exists about []Px, []Gx, and []Kx surely wanes somewhat when you try to string them all together, and I think this does more harm than you let on.

[edited later today: well, this is disappointing. Turns out this whole thing is a misuse of modal quantifiers. Move on, folks, nothing to see here.]

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a blog carnival, the idea is that large numbers of bloggers will submit their best work on a subject for inclusion in a (semi-)regularly published topic-specific roundup - sort of like the internet version of an academic journal. As it just so happens, I'm bored today, so I'm going to see if I can go through the entirety of the most recent Conservative Blog Carnival and lay each of its featured posts to rest.

Taking the easiest first, there's Ron Miller with the polarization talking point. For the sake of brevity, I'll only address his main argument, though it sure is tempting to ask him how it makes any sense to "refuse to judge [how polarizing Bush was] in the harsh light of current times while emotions are still high and opinions unyielding." (In particular, is he willing to give the same courtesy to Obama?) Basically, Miller just lists a bunch of stuff that he himself is pissed off about - taxes, Organizing For America, abortion - and concludes that Obama is inherently divisive in some way. A sample size of one is well short of representative, though, so we can pretty much just ignore Miller's crabbing - especially since "Obama, not Bush, had the higher overall approval rating" at this point in his presidency.

James Yanke expends a huge amount of energy on what is basically just an ad hominem attack on Obama (noticing a trend here?): that he is "bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish [fact from] his fantasies." And why should we think this? Because, according to one lone guy, "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist." Yanke runs with this, none-too-subtly hinting that Obama is a member of a group of people who "consider themselves peerless," whose "'friends', companions, and acolytes provide them with an obsequious, unthreatening audience," and so on. That Obama consistently refers to his marriage as a partnership of equals and stocked his administration with his critics seems to have escaped Yanke, but even if it hadn't the ad hominem thing would've been enough to sink him.

NotYourDaddy (and thank the heavens for that) joins the group clamoring for more teabagging - with bullet points! Some highlights include a fantastic lack of understanding of the idea behind a bailout ("now they’re pretending to get us out of [the recession] the same way they got us into it – by ...investing our money in the same toxic assets that are threatening the world economy!"), then a weird defense of our right to cause recessions ("they’re absolutely convinced that they know how to spend our money better than we do"), and the ever-popular founding fathers bit ("If the founding fathers could have even imagined the plethora of [regulations], they would roll over in their graves"). Supporting those toxic assets now is not at all the same as what the banks did in the first place (and anyway, they meaning "the government" didn't do that, the banks did); the fact of someone being convinced that they know a better use of your money than you do is not in and of itself sufficient to prove that they do not actually know that nor is it usually reason to withhold your money from them (remember those banks from a second ago?); and, for the last bloody time, it doesn't matter what the founding fathers would have thought.

In response to the Rick Wagoner thing, Steve Faber goes on a nice, long rant about how great GM was doing until that darn gas price thing happened. "It wasn’t like some people would have you believe. GM was not like a drug peddler at a junior high school. They didn’t force these vehicles on consumers. ... They couldn’t just [sic] their product mix change at a whim when fuel prices rose 35% in a year," is all. It's a pity that Faber forgets to tell us why this is relevant, because I for one was under the impression that it was the CEO's job to put the company in a position to succeed in the long term, which includes the ability to predict market trends and react quickly to changing market conditions. Having thus built up a logically impotent sob story around Wagoner, Faber ends with - seriously, is anybody noticing a trend here? - an ad hominem directed at the government: "Maybe those in Congress should hold themselves to the same standard. Wouldn’t that be a change. When congress has a 10% approval rating, as they did a few months ago, perhaps they should resign."

Michael Bass actually hits upon a good point in his article about Mississippi governor Haley Barbour: Republicans don't reliably legislate so as to increase "limited government, private property, and individual rights." That alone, though, does not mean that the GOP "has left conservative values and it has left conservatives." To be specific, the GOP continues to embrace socially conservative values and the people who hold them. Things would be easier all around if Bass's hastiness in this matter were justified, but Republicans and Republican voters still need to figure out how to justify economically conservative principles that are almost always directly at odds with socially conservative ones.

While it looks pretty solid on first blush, David Lamb's article is maybe the worst of the bunch. He starts with a truly awful explanation of why protectionism is bad: "The primary reason that protectionism doesn’t work is that it interferes with country’s comparative advantage—their ability to produce more goods or services more efficiently. For example, if the 111th Congress passed a law excluding the importation of all crops and President Obama signed it into law, American farmers would need to find methods of grow [sic] watermelons, strawberries, corn, and kiwis during their sub-tropical winters or risk not having access to those foods." Far from decreasing the efficiency of production, this would raise it - which Lamb himself admits ("to find new methods of grow[ing]" something in this context means nothing other than to increase one's ability to produce that thing efficiently). But that pales in comparison to Lamb's continual use of "regulation" and "deregulation" as binary choices. He considers all American finance singe Reagan to have been deregulated, period, and proposes that Obama's legislation would make finance regulated, period. It ought to go without saying that there are many (perhaps infinitely many) degrees of regulation, but apparently Lamb is not smart enough to count any higher than 2.

(Conservative09's and steven germain's pieces don't contain any actual argumentation and Jay Green's appears to be a straight-up infomercial, so I'll skip those.)

Jared Rhoads's position is "that there is no rational justification for government involvement in healthcare in the first place," which he manages to support with only the usual gripes. " To even discuss the alleged merits of" government-funded medical research, he says, "is to evade the source of the funds (confiscatory taxes)." Evidently this dilemma does not actually exist: he manages to do both without much of a struggle. As for his suggestion that we leave medical research to the free market, I suggest that he go ahead and give that a try.

And finally, Eric Johnson's article will have to wait for another day, if ever, because by now my brain is mush. Christians, have a nice Easter; Jews, good luck avoiding bread for another 6 days; the rest of you, have a nice weekend - see you Monday!

I guess this whole Iowa/Vermont gay marriage thing really has conservatives worried, because there has been very little reaction to Obama's recent remark that the U.S. isn't a Christian country. The only real push-back I've seen comes from David Limbaugh, who evidently thinks that we should emulate Saudi Arabia on this one. "Can you imagine the Saudi king coming to America," he asks, "and bragging that his nation is not Muslim? I assure you that he's not ashamed of the Islamic character of his nation, even though his nation is demonstrably less tolerant of other religions." So as to clear up the question of why he seems to laud the Saudis for their backwards jingoism, Limbaugh goes into a bit more detail about why he thinks we should consider ourselves to be Christian.

While he denies "that America is a Christian theocracy, that our government should give Christians preferential treatment, [and] that members of other faiths aren't welcome," Limbaugh does think that "if we are talking about the ideals that led to the very colonization of this land, our declaration of independence from Britain, and the formulation of our Constitution, then the answer" as to whether or not the U.S. is Christian "is certainly 'yes.'" I'll get the easy part out of the way first: Limbaugh may or may not be right, but his hypothetical has nothing to do with what Obama meant. The original contrast dealt with the "ideals and...values" that we actually live by. Trying to respond to that view with an argument from history is just stupid, if not also intentionally deceptive.

Dumb though that is, it's the underlying structure of his argument that should really give us pause. Granting Limbaugh his premise that "our freedom tradition can be traced to our predominantly Judeo-Christian roots" not only screws with his conclusion (in that case, he should've said that we are a Judeo-Christian nation, not just a Christian one) but also opens up another area of inquiry: what, exactly, are the ideals that led to the founding of this country and the formation of our constitution? One can quibble over whether the racism and sexism in our founding documents were really essential to or representative of the movement itself (I think they were), but at the very least Limbaugh should be nervous about classifying what the U.S. is now with the xenophobic, isolationist country that was created on the assumption that the people who were already living here had no right to the land. As a general rule, then, the things we used to be are not the things we say we are now, even when those things were pragmatically or ideologically crucial to the founding of this country. Since Limbaugh makes no distinction between our ostensibly noble Judeo-Christian roots and these other factors, his desired conclusion falls in just the same way that a similar argument would if it tried to demonstrate that the U.S. is currently an isolationist, xenophobic, (sexist, racist,) Native-American-hating nation.

This just in from Special Pleading Central: "Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose, they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us." That, it seems, is the primary message of the newly-formed National Organization for Marriage, whose membership faces the challenge not only of being bigoted fools but also having some sort of eating disorder.* They're really quite serious about this, as you can see from their talking points (emphasis mine throughout):

"People [you know who!] have a right to live as they choose, they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us."
"Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose; they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us."

Eventually, though, the facade begins to slip a bit:

"The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of husband and wife, that’s who. That is just not right."
"The people of this state will lose our right to keep marriage as the union of a husband and wife. That’s not right."

Until it falls away entirely:

"The people get to decide what marriage means."

Yes - you see, when we define marriage it is the people acting, but when they do it that is an unjustified imposition on us and therefore just not right. Similarly, when we run into problems "trying to transmit a marriage culture to [our] kids" that is a problem, but when they encounter such problems it is really not a big deal. And don't even get us started on questions of universal rights, because to suggest that "people like [us] who believe mothers and fathers both matter to kids are like bigots" is "pretty offensive," and obviously whenever we get offended you must be wrong.

There's a lot - like, a lot - more wrong with their talking points, but that really should come as no surprise. I started this blog precisely because "emphasizing sound bites deemphasizes sound argumentation," which is precisely what's happening here. It may very well be emotionally compelling to go around turning all of one's political opponents into faceless others who just want to bully normal folks, but the logical asymmetry in arguments like this could not be more pronounced. In the real world, everybody counts as "the people," which means that these NOM twerps need to suck it up and start looking for a better anti-gay argument than "waaaah."

*NOM? Really? Even Google thinks "nom" means "the sound you make when you eat."

Though best known for his canonically nerdy looks and his total lack of journalistic standards, George Will also has a penchant for the sport of pennants - that's baseball for those of you not following along at home. Since baseball in fact is boring in every way, I've taken it upon myself to reform his stickball-loving ways. Not that this effort has been in any sense successful, but it is kinda fun.

Will's most recent ode to steroids-ball focuses on the umpires, who Will seems to think have a special place in sports officiating. Taking all his cues from some guy named Bruce Weber, Will states confidently that only baseball "asks an on-field official to demarcate the most important aspect of the field of play -- the strike zone." Further, umpires "are custodians of decorum" and "islands of exemption from America's obsessive lawyering: As has been said, three strikes and you're out -- the best lawyer can't help you." Having seized upon this legalistic language, Will does his best to make the most of it: "Umpires, baseball's judicial branch, embody what any society always needs and what America, in its current financial disarray, craves -- regulated striving that, by preventing ordered competition from descending into chaos, enables excellence to prevail." Aside from the weirdness of George Will calling for more regulation of the financial sector, this is a joke.

Baseball, contrary to Will and Weber, is not the only sport where the officials get to decide where an important area of the field starts or stops. Tennis officials regularly use their best judgment (which we now know for sure is often flawed) to determine whether balls are in or out, and soccer referees have the unenviable task of making offside calls - and that's to say nothing of football's "plane of the goal line" rule for touchdowns and safeties. Likewise, every sport has rules about decorum, from basketball's technical fouls to Wimbledon's dress code. As for his "regulated chaos" theory, the analogy simply doesn't work. While we've seen recently that markets do really need a significant measure of third-party control, sporting events take place all the time without any umpires, refs, or other miscellaneous judges: they're called a pickup games, and any schoolyard player will be able to aver that they do indeed "enable excellence to prevail."

As badly written and researched as this piece is, I have to say that I would rather Will continue to write about baseball. The alternative seems to be equally badly written and researched pieces about real issues, and I need more of those like I need a longer baseball season.

Instead of "Do you want to know a secret?/Do you promise not to tell?/Closer/Let me whisper in your ear/Say the words you long to hear:/'I'm in love with you,'" the president's version will allegedly be: "Do you want to know a secret?/Do you promise not to tell?/Closer/Let me whisper in your ear/Say the words you ought to fear:/Any lawsuit related to warrentless wiretapping should be dismissed because 'its very subject matter would inherently risk or require the disclosure of state secrets.'" That last bit breaks the scansion somewhat, yes, but that's nothing Obama doesn't think he can overcome.

Seriously, though, that's pretty messed up. So messed up, in fact, that one might be tempted to hint at a "media double standard," as Larry Elder did a few weeks ago. When it came to providing evidence, though, Elder only offered his imagination - he uses the phrase "imagine if" a total of nine times, as opposed to zero instances of an actual double standard in action. As I've stated repeatedly, arguments that proceed from the imagination in this way beg the question. As if to drive this point home, the media that Elder maligned has in fact come down pretty hard on Obama about the whole state secrets thing. Blogs, which supposedly are the new far-left power center, have not been shy about disagreeing with the policy - DailyKos did it twice, ThinkProgress did it, AMERICAblog did it, the Huffington Post did it, and, of course, Dale did it. Okay, so much for the blogs - maybe the real news media have let him slide? Not if the New York Times, Salon, the Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe are any indication.*

One presumes that none of this would bother Elder in the least, given that he didn't look to reality in the first place for his evidence, but it still needs to be said: there is no vast media conspiracy to silence any and all negative reporting about Democratic officials. Even if there were, Elder would need way more than just his overactive imagination to prove it.

*Two things worth pointing out here: first, I guessed at the actual content of that MSNBC link. Maddow has been pretty reliable in not just falling in line with whatever Obama does, so I included it without really knowing whether she's against this position or not. If someone out there watches it and tells me that she defends Obama in this case, I'll remove it. Also, I couldn't find pretty much anything on CNN's website about this, which is probably worth noting in the context of the liberal-media-bias argument. I dunno that this proves anything about CNN's relationship to Obama or the Democratic party in general, but it sure is interesting.

Meme-watchers of the world rejoice: the "activist judges" argument has returned! As a wholly predictable reaction to Iowa's recent marriage equality ruling, pundits across the country dusted off this old standby - though their efforts might suffer somewhat as a result of Vermont, which I guess now has an activist legislature. Either way, at least one writer went the extra mile to put a slight twist on the usual formulation: Ken "please don't let this man's middle name begin with K" Klukowski.

Being a legal expert, Klukowski focuses most of his efforts on the fine details of the court's decision. "Although the opinion is written with clarity and evenhanded language," he says, "the Iowa court chose to cast this issue in terms that show what the justices personally believe." Specifically, "the Iowa court decided that 'heightened scrutiny' was appropriate for cases involving homosexuals. However, in the 1996 case Romer v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme Court held that heightened scrutiny does not apply to gays." (For the curious, here is a pdf of the court's full opinion and here is a brief introduction to the concept of tiered scrutiny.) Oddly, despite his obvious subject expertise, Klukowski does everything except address the actual legality of this move.

His first and most obvious move is to attack the judges themselves. They cannot have been objective in their decision, Klukowski says, because of their "comparison of this decision to prior cases about slavery and discrimination and [their] breaking with the U.S. Supreme Court while claiming to follow precedent." At least the first half of this claim is irrelevant, though: while it may or may not be a good idea to judge passionately, the emotional state of a judge has no legal impact on that judge's rulings. As for the second half, Klukowski rebuts his own argument a bit later on, saying that "there is no federal jurisdiction in this case." It's fair of him to call out the Iowa Supreme Court for trying to gain an unwarranted rhetorical advantage, but, as in the first case, they could be rhetorically wrong and still legally right. In particular, if Klukowski is right in his demarcation of jurisdictions, then his citation of Romer v. Evans is exactly the kind of legally moot yet oratorically effective move for which he criticizes the Iowa judges: if legal [federal, I mean - edited 4/12] precedent is meaningless in this case, then it obviously doesn't matter whether or not their claim to it succeeds or fails.

As a matter of course, Klukowski then runs through all of the standard conservative talking points: judicial fiat, undermining democracy, and so on. Without an actual legal case, though, this is still just empty talk. Presented with an open forum to produce the best such case that he could, Klukowski chose instead to attack the judges' character and chide them in their use of rhetoric - which, one cannot help but notice, is not exactly legally compelling. The question isn't whether or not the Iowan judges overstepped their PR bounds but whether or not their decision fit the frameworks relevant to Iowa's decision-making process, and none of Klukowski's histrionics here are capable of showing that.