Rust Belt Philosophy

In a word, daaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

"The manic revelry at the end of the year makes me think of death. That is, of course, a real danger of New Year’s Eve. Aside from prom season, in the suburbs, it’s the prime night to be plowed under by a drunk driver. But that’s not finally what makes me dislike the annual countdown to midnight. New Year’s Eve is an essentially pagan holiday of renewal, one that celebrates our collective ability to leap from one year to the next without falling into the abyss of death...

There are no human beings ritually sacrificed on New Year’s Eve, not yet at least. But it is truly our most secular holiday, our reaction to the realization that the ticking clock of time is, finally, an unreliable support for our fragile existence. As we slide toward death we know that some day in the future there will be a stroke of midnight that we do not hear. That’s why our year’s end celebrations participate, however remotely, in the same pattern of weariness that the Aztecs counteracted with sacrificial excesses. "

And yes, he is saying that with a straight face. So, on behalf of myself and the crazies over at First Things, have a happy and safe new year - and, whatever you do, keep an eye out tonight, because apparently you never know when somebody might try to ritually sacrifice you.

Think about it.

Or, "Hume's revenge (upon the stupid bigots of the right)" - or(!), "LGBT affairs and WarGames: the long-lost connection."

I dunno if you've seen this article floating around, but in what appears to be one last-ditch effort to chronicle their dying viewpoint a few regressive academicians (Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson; hereafter GGA) got together and published a real, honest-to-goodness philosophical argument in favor of "traditional" marriage (you know, that thing that has never been traditional?). I'm just going to hit the highlights because, again, this is no longer an intellectually respectable position and I don't want to pretend like it is, but the highlights are good enough.

To start, they assume that marriage preexists any social concept of marriage. In the same way that "it is in the very nature of beliefs to aim at being true,"* they think that there is some thing or other about marriage that requires marriages to aim at being (or maybe just to be, it's never quite clear) heterosexual, two-party, sexually exclusive, and so on. This is, as I say, an assumption, and so the entire argument begs the question in a pretty serious way. Even so, we can read the argument for its own sake and then see whether or not its conclusions are applicable to actual marriage.

Roughly speaking, the version of marriage offered up in this article is an Aristotelian one: it has an end and any instance is only good to the extent that it fulfills that end. The end in question, they say, is "bearing and rearing children together." The problem with this, as you may be able to guess from this post's alternate title, is that facts and values are not so closely related that we can read the latter off of the former. This is Hume's famous and still-relevant is/ought gap, and GGA get completely crushed by it. Marriage, they say, must have three things:

1. a comprehensive union of spouses 
2. a special link to children
3. norms of permanence, monogamy, and exclusivity

"unions that are consummated by the generative act [i.e., heterosexual penetrative vaginal intercourse]...are thus oriented to having and rearing children."

This is so farcical it can hardly be believed: fucking is "oriented to" rearing children? Leave aside for the moment the fact that there is no one, single "generative act." This was never true and it sure isn't true nowadays, but ignore that for the time being. Fucking is oriented towards getting off at best, and on GGA's obsolete teleology you can extend that to having children. In absolutely no sense is parenting part of fucking. But it gets even better, because GGA realize that parenting in and of itself is not sufficient - remember, facts are not values. What they really need is good parenting, so they allege further that

"marriage has its characteristic structure largely because of its orientation to procreation; it involves developing and sharing one’s body and whole self in the way best suited for honorable parenthood."

Fucking now not only is magically "oriented to" parenting, it is somehow necessary for "honorable parenthood"! In support of this fantastically absurd claim, GGA trot out all of the studies about how two-parent homes are better for children than single-parent homes or homes with a remarried parent, but this is so tremendously insufficient to prove their point that one can only wonder how this article ended up in a real journal. Households centered around committed same-sex couples are neither one-parent households (duh) or (necessarily) households with one remarried parent, so GGA's wealth of citations amounts to absolutely nothing. Studies that do specifically include committed same-sex parents find - to the surprise of nobody - that those parenting arrangements are just as "honorable" as we would want them to be. To recap, then: GGA's argument begins by begging the question, runs by ignoring the fact/value distinction, and in the end reduces to a mere rehashing of the same old irrelevant studies. Only persistent and fervent stupidity could render GGA's line of thinking even remotely plausible - but, wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what we're dealing with when it comes to these people.

"[T]he politically correct attitude not only insists that heterosexual and homosexual relationships are equivalent, but also erases differences between relationships between two women and relationships between two men. If men and women are profoundly different-and both science and common sense tell us they are- then an all-female couple is even more different from an all-male couple than either homosexual bond differs from a heterosexual union. This distinction helps explain the oft-noted quirk in public attitudes that sees stronger opposition and denunciation, in the Old Testament and elsewhere, to a physical relationship between two males and intimacy between two females. A physical connection between a female couple, like a physical connection between man and woman, is based primarily on acts of affection. The most common sexual practice between two men involves an act of aggression"

Understand, the difference between GGA and Michael Medved is only that the latter doesn't have the wherewithal to pin his views on something that can be traced back to a dead Greek guy. Replace his depressing gender essentialism with GGA's devoutly anti-empirical stance on parenting and you'll get their argument all over again. Next year for Thanksgiving (or your country's equivalent), try this one on for size: "I'm thankful that we as a species are increasingly unlikely to be fooled by this kind of tripe." Because that, ultimately, is what this comes down to - at this point, these people can only have any success if we let them. Better to decline the game than to work on strategy; when the object of the game is to see who can hide their faulty logic the best, the only winning move is not to play.

*J. David Velleman, "Deciding How To Decide." Published in Ethics and Practical Reason. Happily, Velleman is not one of the three authors of the article in question - he just had the right quote.

Having just read two consecutive posts endorsing Palin for president - it is still 2010, everybody! Just saying! - in spite of her nonexistent chances of winning, my head hurts. But do you know what will make that better? Blake Griffin!



Ahhhhhhh - much better!

Continuing to give philosophers a bad name, Bill Vallicella blithely asserts that "atheism is bred in the bone before it is born in the brain. The atheist feels it in his bones and guts that the universe is godless and that theistic conceptions are so many fairy tales dreamt up for false consolation...What point, then, in debating them?" This, to put it simply, is cowardice. It is not that Valicella, like some other theists I could name, doubts (even subconsciously) his intelligence; I'm sure that he honestly and thoroughly feels that he can best any atheist in any debate on any topic. He just doesn't have the guts to take his own presumptions seriously: if atheists are really so harmless and simple-minded, why not debate them? Especially for a member of an evangelical faith, this surety should positively compel Valicella into becoming the next William Lane Craig. Instead, though, he prefers to continue what he calls

"the quest for a solution, [as] the horror of this world together with the conviction that we cannot provide the solution for ourselves whether individually or collectively [is unbearable]. Evil is taken by the theist, not as a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God, but as a reason, a motive, to seek God.  'Without God, life is horror.'"

The point here for the principled philosopher is two-fold. First, Valicella's half-assed ad hominem argument would, if taken seriously, positively ruin the entire field. He believes - entirely wrongly - that a person's beliefs simply reduce to their deepest emotional responses, but this is a point that would apply not just to atheists but to theists as well (which he himself admits) and, quite frankly, everyone else (e.g. materialists, compatibilists, consequentialists, etc.). If he dismisses atheists on the grounds that they have emotional response X to evil, it's laughable that he endorses theists simply because they have emotional response Y. Second, as always on this blog, logic is everything. The implicit assumption here is that evil cannot be both "a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God" and "a reason, a motive, to seek God" - for Valicella, those are mutually exclusive options. But obviously that assumption is just wrong, and thirty-five seconds of searching on the web will reveal as much.

It's always tempting, especially given the philosopher's tradition of working from the armchair, to default to the easiest answer - people have emotions; emotions often take priority over reason; therefore atheists aren't worth talking to because they're just puppets strung along by their guts. But philosophy exists precisely in order to prevent that sort of idiocy from taking hold in a person's mind. Anybody who claims the mantle of philosopher without having the fortitude to do the work and take the risks is a fraud.

Quoth Wes Smith:

"I am certainly not against having a good time.  But for some, technology is becoming Soma.  Imagine dying and nothing flashes in front of your mind’s life review except video screens.  A sad waste of limited time.

Whatever happened to just being alone with your thoughts, meditation, or prayers? And what about reading a good book?  I know. I know.  Get thee to the retirement home, Wesley.  You’re getting to be a grumpy old man."

What shining wisdom! TV, a.k.a. the idiot box, is just soma, the drug from Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World. Just like soma, TV

"is [in some nontrivial sense] a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free 'holidays', developed...to provide such inner-directed personal experiences...as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort."

Yes! It is all becoming so clear now! Far from being (just) a grumpy old man, Smith is a (grumpy old) man with a point: it is "[a] sad waste of limited time" to watch television so often, and all of us ought to spend more time "alone with [our] thoughts, meditation, or prayers," or just "reading a good book." Now let me just find out which specific TV show brought all of this on...

"Sony’s long-rumoured PlayStation Portable smartphone is set to be launched in North America and Europe as early as the spring, according to a Japanese newspaper report Wednesday...Sony hopes to take on Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Nokia devices by offering the first smartphone that is based on a portable game console, with a set of controls that allows very advanced gaming."

...oh. So this isn't about TV at all, then. It's not even about the internet, that other never-ending source of flashing video screens. Those flashing video screens are okay, I guess, but video games! They are one step too far, by golly! Or...something.

In making this argument, Smith goes some way towards allying himself with another bioethicist, Bush-era appointee Leon Kass. This is no surprise, as Smith explicitly endorses Kass's thinking on a number of topics, but it does help to highlight the really serious problems in the views shared by those two men. As Nikolas Rose puts it (with my emphasis),

"[t]his debate on the value of natural limits to the human form of life...seems to be an endemic feature of modern forms of life, dating back at least to European thought of the nineteenth century, perhaps even an aspect of the ethos of the enlightenment itself. Of course any medical historian will tell us that the features of the 'given humanness' enumerated by Kass and his colleagues have nothing given or natural about them: there is nothing natural about our present life span, our temporality of reproduction, our sense of ourselves as individual privileged actors realizing our secular life potential or any of the rest of it." (The Politics of Life Itself 96-97)

Smith's problem isn't his grumpiness or his oldness, it's that he doesn't have even the remotest idea of what he's talking about. His knee-jerk crusade against video games has nothing in its favor except the instinctive human fear of the new and the unknown. It's certainly not the case that video games are actually so inimical to human nature that they pose a wholly new kind or degree of threat to our well-being. Indeed, neither Kass nor Smith has even proposed a view of human nature that's plausible in and of itself, so they certainly haven't provided one that has enough strength to support e.g. Smith's ridiculous anti-gaming bias. If you want to find out what's natural for humans, go live in the woods with no clothes, medicine, or manufactured tools for a few months and you'll find out: hunger, cold, pain, loneliness, death. The only reason our lives are worth living at all is because they're unnatural, so it's about damn time that we grew up enough to not go through this little melodrama every time something new comes along.

Because he's two-faced, get it?

"Many politicians and regular folks feel (accurately, in my opinion) that allowing unfettered legal access to abortion will encourage promiscuity among young people. That if we intentionally make sex consequence-free, then more casual sex will happen, and more sex will lead to more babies out of wedlock, which will lead to any number of well-documented social ills. And furthermore, many feel, pre-marital and extra-marital sex is fundamentally immoral, in that it is explicitly forbidden by the three main monotheistic religions and by many other faiths as well...

Angle is the only major politician in recent memory to not only unabashedly tell the truth about her motivations, but also to take a consistent and morally defensible[*] position on the abortion debate. And although I disagree with her position, I deeply admire the fact that she is stating it honestly and openly. Because what I (and many Americans) want in a politician above all else is honesty — and moral consistency. And even though I don’t live in Nevada and so can’t vote for Angle or Reid, I’d much rather vote for an honest and moral politician with whom I disagree than for a dishonest and amoral politician who tells me lies I want to hear."

Ah! So consistency and honesty are the absolute top priorities in a political candidate, as one ought to vote for a consistent, honest candidate whose positions are atrocious over an inconsistent, dishonest candidate whose positions are impeccable. One might raise some questions about whether Sharron Angle of all people deserves to be labeled consistent or honest, but the test laid out here is quite clear: before you do anything else, check to see if a candidate is consistent and honest; if so, and if that candidate is the only such candidate in a given race, vote for that candidate. This applies even if that person's "honest and moral" policies are based in "the three main monotheistic religions [or] many other faiths" - in fact, it may even be easier to be consistent and honest when one's beliefs stem from religious commitments (because if we know anything about religious people, it's that they're totally consistent and honest at all times). Great! So that should apply to a candidate whose platform is, to pick a random example out of the air, all Sharia all the time. It would certainly be honest and consistent, and we know for sure that it wouldn't be disqualified (on this test) just because it comes from one of "the three main monotheistic religions." So, the fictional Sharia-only candidate: an unqualified success, yes?

"Those who oppose Sharia in the United States often argue their point by highlighting how misogynistic, backward, cruel and discriminatory Islamic law can be under most interpretations. And while all that may be true, it is the wrong argument to make. I get so frustrated watching pundits, politicians and bloggers making the weakest argument in what should be a slam-dunk debate that I’ve decided to write this brief outline of what I think should be the prioritized hierarchy of arguments against the use of Sharia in the United States...

1. U.S. law is the 'supreme law of the land,' no exceptions...

2. Sharia, as 'divine revelation,' is inherently undemocratic...

3. Many aspects of Sharia are flagrantly unconstitutional...

4. Sharia is fundamentally religious law, and should be inapplicable to U.S. criminal or civil law."

Now wait just one second. When abortion is the topic of choice, any old honest and consistent stance will do; in fact, it's so crucially important to accept any old honest and consistent stance when it comes to abortion that we should make sure that we always accept any old honest and consistent stance. But when that honest and consistent stance in Sharia, it "should be a slam-dunk" to figure out that honesty and consistency are completely and totally unacceptable. Quite frankly, I smell a rat.

This troll, who goes by the pen name zombie, does not care whether Angle's thinking on abortion violates U.S. law, is inherently undemocratic, is flagrantly unconstitutional, or is fundamentally religious and so inapplicable. Despite being a pro-choicer himself (so he says), he'd rather see an honest, consistent lunatic get elected than a person who just plays the game - but when it comes to those evil Muslims, honesty and consistency are precisely the problem. One can only wonder what he would have done if Sharron Angle had explained that her honest, consistent views on abortion are, in fact, a direct outgrowth of her overall honest, consistent commitment to Sharia. It's not that I think zombie's head would explode, necessarily - that would sort of rely on zombie being honest and consistent himself, which, yeah right - but it sure would be fun to watch him squirm his way out of the trap he's laid for himself. It's easy to get up on a high horse when the subject of legislation is something that can't ever affect you, but we see all too well what happens to zombie's principles when push comes to shove.

*Please note that "defensible" just means "consistent" here. As in, any position that can be defended on some set of premises or other is defensible. It'd be easy to think that he means really defensible - like, I dunno, defensible in light of premises that we know or have good reason to believe are true - but that's not what he's saying. This is worth keeping in mind.

They say there's a first time for everything, and yesterday was the first time I almost got stumped by an article in the USA Today. Impressive, right? See if you can do better.

"His party may have suffered a shellacking in November's elections, but President Obama remains the unchallenged champion on another front: For the third year in a row, he is by far the most-admired man.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton continues an even longer run, ranked in the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll as the most-admired woman for the ninth straight year. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is second, as she was in 2009."

It took me a good, long while, but I finally came up with a man and a woman whom I actually admire, at least in sort of a dry, academic sense. Maybe I'm just abnormally unappreciative - admiration requires a certain disposition in general, I should think - but I have a funny feeling that people don't normally have objects of admiration that they can name right off the tops of their heads. Certainly it doesn't help that most of the popular answers are actually kind of deplorable (if you don't think that Obama counts, just go ahead and read the rest of the lists). I think the problem is more significant than that, though.

Politicians, by and large, are just scumbags. Probably that's not a modern problem by any stretch, but we're much more aware of it now thanks to being bombarded with information all the time. Athletes are, for the most part, at best marginally admirable; to be honest, I'm not sure why the USA Today even bothered to check. The same goes for most artists, and of course the more admirable an artist is the less likely we are to know about that person. Religious leaders are pretty much a wash - that may be more of a modern phenomenon. Philanthropists would be good choices, but they don't as much publicity as they could. Scientists are sort of a mixed bag, especially since most people wouldn't be able to understand the accomplishments for which a scientist would be admirable. "About one in 10 chose a friend or relative," apparently, and that's kind of sweet but maybe a little unhealthy for a relationship. And then one-fifth of people passed on the question altogether, which to me is a surprisingly high number even if it isn't close to a majority.

So is admiration dead (or, at least, antiquated)? Do we admire people anymore? I'm throwing this one out to you all - let me know if I'm just being emotionally dead on this one or if I'm on to something.

This, I fear, is why we need philosophy.

"Here we would say, 'God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,' and 'God is not love, but neither is God not-love.' God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love. Obviously what is happening here is a deliberate straining of verbal logic. It may sound like mere mental gymnastics or game-playing, but it has a very serious purpose: To question and test language, to step outside of ourselves and ask ourselves what we are doing when we talk about God, to critique the very ground upon which theology stands, to search for that place—if there is a place—where concepts fail."

See, Paul Wallace is willing to admit that God (and thus belief in God) makes no sense. He's just not willing to stop believing, is all.

"Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word 'exist' cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes." 

Wallace seems to think that theologians are the only ones to have come up with this very clever idea that language is imperfect. God, he says happily, cannot really be described with any words at all, and so God is a special kind of thing that we cannot disprove using argumentation.* (This strategy, of course, has the tiny flaw of also ruling out any linguistic proofs of God's existence, but oh well.) There are two problems with this: first, Wallace's hypothesis, if true, would rationally compel atheism anyway; and second, his hypothesis rests on the flawed assumption that this thing about language applies only to God.

Hopefully the first of those requires very little explanation: unless you can give some substance, even if imperfect, to what you believe, you're just waving your hands and hedging. Belief in something with no content is not, properly speaking, belief at all. Wallace can go ahead and believe in a god anyway, but by his own admission his belief will be misplaced; his apophatic theology is, by definition, self-defeating. The second point is much more interesting, and it goes a long way towards explaining what's really going on here. Wallace very obviously thinks that apophatism (apophatry? apophilication? what?) is only appropriate in the case of God: he does not say "[o]ur category of existence" must be rejected wholesale because it is itself problematic, he just says that it doesn't that it "does not apply to God." Similarly, he only complains that "the word 'exist' cannot be used univocally of things and God"; if he thought that language was altogether insufficient he would have said that the word "exist" cannot be used at all. There is, however, some tension in his view: note that in the last sentence I've quoted Wallace says that all language consists of "artificial categories imagined and used by human beings." If all linguistic categories are artificial and none of them actually exists in reality, why should Wallace's argument apply just to God?

Well, frankly, I'm not sure that it should. We've already seen that seemingly straightforward assertions like "this shirt is blue" are deceptively complex if they're accurate at all, and I for one am not convinced that any linguistic expression can stand apart from a further explication - at least, if we want it to be completely and fully true. This, I think, is the fundamental error in Wallace's thinking: he assumes that accuracy (or, if you like, truth) can only come in black or white. On that kind of view, it's pretty easy to see that your only religious choices are unerring, perfect belief or mistaken, totally wrong belief. (Atheism, of course, is not a religious choice.) Since he doesn't want to abandon his theism, he tries to split the difference and come up with some kind of zen wrong-but-not-wrong belief-but-not-belief kind of thing, which is manifestly absurd. The far better option is to say that, like everything else, our statements about gods vary in precision and can be trusted to (the output of a function based on) the extent of that precision. I don't mean trusted to be true here, I just mean that they can be trusted to help us determine what is true. When we say exceedingly simple things like "God is love," that could only possibly be marginally true because it's almost a completely generic statement. On the other hand, when we say things like "God created the entire universe, more or less as we know it today, in only 144 hours and that process concluded somewhere near 6000 years ago," that's something we can really sink our teeth into, truth-seeking-wise. Again, this isn't just true of God: it's more helpful, and more true, to say "Her higher brain functions ceased and shortly the rest of her metabolic functions ceased as well" than "She died." Wallace, in short, has only managed to find a general problem in the philosophy of epistemology, not anything that's particularly relevant to religion or God.

In addition to helping to explain his mistakes, this also serves as a pretty strong counter to his argument: we know from experience that our language doesn't need to be perfect in order for us to make some pretty serious progress in our knowledge (either as individuals or a species), so it makes no sense for Wallace to demand perfection in just the one case. The radical skepticism of apophatic theology, in other words, is no different than radical skepticism in general. Yes, we might be brains in vats. Yes, there might be an evil demon controlling my every thought. Yes, in some sense if language is never fully accurate then I can never really know that my reasoning is sound. But, again, nobody is out there advocating for apophatic economics or apophatic biology, let alone apophatic law or apophatic ethics - "Because our linguistic categories are artificial human creations, we must not believe that rape is wrong!" just isn't that convincing. Viewed in light of the full extent of our limitations, Wallace's argument is just special pleading.

As I said, I fear that this is the best use to which we can put philosophy, preventing people from applying bad arguments to novel contexts. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, let alone to reinvent the Pinto or the N-Gage.** Before Wallace goes off half-cocked accusing atheists of not engaging with "mature" theology, he might want to take the time to familiarize himself with "mature" philosophy.

*One interesting rebuttal to this is that every negation is logically equivalent to a positive assertion - that negations are, in some sense, an accident of language - but I'm not sure how far to press this one.
**Yeah, I bet you'd forgotten about that, hadn't you? You're welcome.

If you want more evidence that Catholicism is a sham - why you would need any at this point I don't know, but - check out Jeff Mirus:

"What could possibly possess an organization calling itself the American Civil Liberties Union to conclude that it is part of its purpose to force Americans to engage in actions they believe are morally wrong? The key to answering this is to understand that the term 'liberty' in our national discourse has long since ceased to refer to a rational and ordered system of rights and duties based on universal principles. Instead, the term 'liberty', like the term 'right', is more often used to describe the necessity of whatever our relativistic social elites wish to accomplish at any given moment in the remaking of society."

I want to address the first sentence here eventually, but before that I cannot help but be floored by the capacity for doublethink that Mirus displays in the last two sentences. Relativism, he's saying, is not the thing where you permit any old action that a person happens believe is morally acceptable. Rather, he thinks, relativism is enforcing a single, consistent set of standards. Instead of this thing where the government legislates a specific set of rights and responsibilities and then goes about enforcing it, Mirus would rather that "Americans [be allowed] to engage in [whatever] actions they believe are" in line with their personal sense of morality. This is so astonishingly backwards that I feel Mirus ought to win some sort of prize - a one-way ticket to Siberia, maybe.

Now, back to the first sentence. This is the sort of thing a person can only say in very friendly company, because anybody with even the slightest bit of antipathy towards the speaker will instantaneously be able to tear it apart. The ACLU is a valuable organization precisely because it forces Americans to betray their personal moral beliefs: it forces racist business owners to sell to people of color, it forces school districts to employ LGBT people (and atheists!), it forces libraries to make certain books available to the public, and it does all kinds of other neat stuff all of which centers on forcing people to act against their own sense of right and wrong. Again, without organizations like the ACLU we would live in a (substantially) relativistic society; with them we have some chance of holding everybody to a uniform standard of behavior. Mirus, of course, doesn't want businesses not to be able to sell to people of color and probably doesn't even want school districts to be able to engage in hiring discrimination. What he wants is to force women to die for no reason,* and he's willing to publicly support any premise that'll allow him to get there, even if that premise is absolutely ludicrous and he wouldn't think for a second of endorsing it in any other context.

None of those, it is worth observing, depends at all on the rotten foundations of Mirus's own moral structure. The Catholic view of morality is premised on, among other things, false distinctions, cartoonish metaphysical theories, and the existence of a made-up vigilante deity, but none of that explains in the least why Mirus goes out of his way to confuse moral relativism with moral realism or to attack the idea of equality under the law. I suspect instead that his desperate flailing reduces to just this one fact: when you are saying that it is morally right that a woman should die for literally no reason, you will have very little success framing it in those terms.

*Granted, this isn't any better than supporting racism in shop ownery or anything.

Today on Rust Belt Philosophy, further proof that nobody is perfect:

"'Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,' Julian Assange has said in a recent interview."

Before I get into the real substance of this post, I'd like us all to take a moment and reflect on how truly miserable a comparison this is. On the generous assumption that there is such a thing as the Saudi Arabia of feminism, Sweden may well be it - that's not the problem. The problem is that if Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism, it's really not worth pointing that out. One could just as well say that Payless is the Saudi Arabia of shoe stores or that Dora the Explorer is the Saudi Arabia of daytime animated children's television: even if that information is accurate, what good is it? Assange presumably thinks that this is somehow relevant to his defense, but if that's the best he's got he might as well just give up.

The real question, thus, is not whether Sweden really deserves the comparison with Saudi Arabia. (Or, to take the converse, whether Saudi Arabia really deserves the comparison with Sweden.) Rather we, like Irin Carmon, should ask whether Assange is guilty. We should just do it better than Carmon, is all.

"Assange has yet to be quoted actually engaging the crux of the women's complaints against him, which is that while they wanted to have sex with him, they expressly did not want to have unprotected sex with him. Why is it so hard for him to understand that the women may have wanted to engage in some sexual activity with him, but on their terms? That one may have wanted to flirt in a 'revealing' sweater but not have unprotected sex?"

Despite rightly focusing on consent earlier in her article, Carmon here switches to wanting or desire, which are not and should not be the focus of the law.* We most often consent to things because we want them, sure, and certainly the ideal scenario for sex is one in which all the participants want and consent to it, but it is absolutely possible to consent to something that one does not in fact want. Moreover, people almost certainly consent to unwanted sex frequently. Any such decision originates from the consenting person and the consenting person retains moral responsibility for it; if the women in this case consented to having non-ideal sex with Assange, that is, to be perfectly blunt, their problem.

Granted, it doesn't sound too much like that's actually the case. Given the (admittedly partial and probably fifth-hand) testimonies in the media, what it sounds like is that Assange either misled the women or ignored the stipulations they placed on their consent, either of which is and should be sufficient for him to get into relatively serious trouble. Still, this conversation runs too high a risk of becoming a content-free shouting match as it is and it'd be nice if we could stick to shouting at each other about stuff that's morally and legally relevant.

*At least, I think - I'm not expert on Swedish statutory law, so I guess the first part of this could be wrong.

Some time ago I ran across the idea of a declarative action, the basic gist of which is that saying something amounts to doing that thing. At least, I think that's what they were called, but at any rate it's things like marrying a couple: when the person with the proper authority declares that two people are married, they're married. I feel like bishop Thomas Olmsted has discovered the opposite thing, an action that is not done and is in fact ruled out in virtue of someone saying that they're doing it.

"...earlier this year, it was brought to my attention that an abortion had taken place at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. When I met with officials of the hospital to learn more of the details of what had occurred, it became clear that, in the decision to abort, the equal dignity of mother and her baby were not both upheld."

Right, so we're dealing with the dignity of both the woman and the fetus. Okay - now go ahead and see if you can spot anything relating to the woman in the entire rest of this.

"...the baby was directly killed, which is a clear violation of ERD #45. It also was clear that the exceptional cases, mentioned in ERD #47, were not met, that is, that there was not a cancerous uterus or other grave malady that might justify an indirect and unintended termination of the life of the baby to treat the grave illness. In this case, the baby was healthy and there were no problems with the pregnancy."

See anything there about the woman? I don't. I do, however, see that Olmsted can't be trusted to win even after he's stacked the deck in his favor. The ERD is an official Catholic guide for bioethical decision-making (or, to be a good deal more accurate, endorsing preexisting Catholic doctrine but making it look like bioethical decision-making), and the relevant numbers here say (with my emphasis):

"45. Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted."

 "47. Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

Notice that Olmsted has conveniently omitted any reference to what the doctors in this case intended or had as their purpose. By all accounts they meant to save the woman's life by curing an otherwise lethal condition, but that goes right out the window because there was a fetus involved, dammit, and fetuses are magic!

A disturbingly similar error shows up in Olmsted's wildly inaccurate assertion that "there were no problems with the pregnancy." The fetus was healthy and that's a good start to having an unproblematic pregnancy, but it sure as hell isn't sufficient. If nothing else, Olmsted desperately needs to understand that "the fetus dies either way" in cases like this. "He’s not even demanding that they let the woman die to save the fetus," Ophelia Benson rightly observes, "he’s demanding that they let her die to make a point." That point, moreover, has nothing and can have nothing to do with medicine, morality, or theology. Again, Olmsted's own citations require him to look into the issue more seriously than he did and very likely would require him to permit this abortion as a case of action intended to treat pathology. Moreover, as he himself says, "[c]aring for the sick is an essential part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ." Apparently, though, Catholics can dispense with that "essential" part of their faith when fetuses are involved.

No sensible person would turn a pregnancy into a death sentence and, as we've seen, even for Catholics to do so requires a special effort to escape their own alleged moral principles. There certainly is a point that they're making here, but nobody should be fooled for a second into believing that this decision is one that's required (or even permitted) by a coherent, even half-plausible moral framework. For all that these people whine and moan that their hospitals can't survive without special legal privileges, if this is their agenda we should be happy to see them go. There's no place in medicine for organizations that acknowledge illness and have principles that require the treatment of illness but that sit on their hands regardless.

This sort of thing I would expect from an intellectual charlatan like cl - who, if you can believe it, appears to have reneged on his promise to "definitely get back to [me]" - but Michael Shermer? He really ought to know better.

"We should be skeptical of [the is/ought] divide. If morals and values should not be based on the way things are—reality—then on what should they be based? All moral values must ultimately be grounded in human nature, and in my book The Science of Good and Evil (Times Books, 2004), I build a scientific case for the evolutionary origins of the moral sentiments and for the ways in which science can inform moral decisions."

Yeah, no, Hume didn't mean that moral sentiments couldn't be explained by empirical facts or, worse, that we shouldn't reason about morality as though it were a part of reality. I honestly don't know why this hasn't sunk in yet, but I cannot help but guess that it has something to do with book sales.

At any rate, it's worth taking the time to puzzle over what Shermer means by "human nature," because you'd better make damn sure that you're placing your moral system on solid ground. Although I have no desired to read his book to see if it answers that question, he appears to endorse Sam Harris's approach and may well consider it to be equivalent (or, better yet, isomorphic) to his own. The problem with this is that Harris, as Shermer himself says, uses "the well-being of conscious creatures," a group to which not all humans belong and which is not fully populated by humans. Human nature, then, seems simply to be the wrong tree for Shermer to bark up. The kinds of harms and benefits he's considering can be (and are) experienced by other animals and, assuming that all humans even have a substantive nature, our nature is not what explains the fact that we experience them.

Moreover, there are certain points at which we might very much want to say that the right thing runs counter to our nature (whatever that may be). Euthanasia, for instance, seems unquestionably to be at least prima facie counter-natural for humans: as evolved creatures, part of our nature is to seek survival at almost any cost. That this does not count as a conclusive argument against euthanasia only goes to reinforce Hume's point, but never mind that - there's worse yet in store for the argument from human nature. In order to account for the full diversity of "the well-being of [humans]," Shermer would have to expand his variables beyond simple human nature or at least differentiate within it. Humans, after all, are not single-axis creatures; our well-being, in other words, varies in response to a multitude of factors. To quote Shermer himself - yeah, I folded and went to skim his book, so sue me - "it is as much a part of human nature to be moral as it is to be hungry, horny, jealous, and in love." (The Science of Good and Evil, 57. Sorry, asexuals: you are not humans, apparently.) Without a way to turn this swamp of competing values into a reasonably well-defined formula, Shermer is just sweeping the question under the rug. Look, for example, at the way he tries to give his idea some real content:

"Happiness is a good synonym for pleasure, and unhappiness is an adequate synonym for pain, and thus we may state that one of the fundamental drives of human nature is that we all strive for greater levels of happiness, and avoid greater levels of unhappiness, however these may be personally defined."

If this doesn't seem immediately contradictory to you, this universal yet personally defined thing he's calling happiness, a single example will suffice to reveal its problems. Again following Harris, Shermer proclaims that the fundamentalist Islamic practice of dousing women in acid is, without qualification, wrong. What would he do, then, if a woman sought to be attacked in that way? I doubt that very many women will do that, at least these days, but it's well within the range of human behavior to intentionally, consistently, and persistently seek self-harm on the order of having acid thrown in one's face. Almost all of us, Shermer included, want to say that humans can be wrong about their own good, but if our obligation to follow human nature requires us to defer to each and every person's idea of what to seek we'll quickly find that we can barely proscribe or prescribe any actions at all. That Shermer wants to do so using an impotent definition just shows that he still doesn't understand the impossibility of getting from point A (human nature) to point B (his full moral theory).

On a purely philosophical level, the argument from human nature fails because it chooses the wrong source of value and so has a number of ridiculous consequences. On a dialectical level, however, it's worth noting that Shermer set himself up for failure when he struck out to disprove Hume. I agree that human nature, if the phrase has any meaning at all, is something observable and thus something to be identified through empirical work. Unfortunately, this is precisely what disqualifies it from being a plausible starting place for a moral theory.

(As ever, beware - heavy spoilers lie ahead.)

Remember this, dear readers: whatever Peter Travers says about a movie, he is wrong.

"If visions of sugarplums dance in your head, stay the hell away from Black Swan, a hotblooded, head-spinning erotic thriller in which director Darren Aronofsky does to ballet what Kanye West does to rap: turns it into his own beautiful dark twisted fantasy...At the center of it all is Portman. The actress, 29, trained in ballet as a child and drilled hard for nearly a year to master the choreography and do most of her own dancing. Portman's portrait of an artist under siege is unmissable and unforgettable. So is the movie. You won't know what hit you."

Bullshit, you obsequious hack. I know with unremitting precision what hit me, and I knew almost as soon as the movie started. What hit me was Satoshi Kon's classic psychological thriller Perfect Blue - and I'm not the only one who thinks so.

"...now that we have Black Swan, we no longer need a live action remake of Perfect Blue."

As much as I credit Meredith Borders for her astuteness in noticing that the two movies are more or less actually the same movie, she (perhaps doing her best Peter Travers impersonation) is dead wrong about almost everything in her review. While Travers should be roundly chastised for failing to even mention the wholly obvious influence of Kon's work, Borders's response is hardly better. "This isn’t really a debate of whether Perfect Blue is a direct inspiration for Black Swan," she says. "Aronofsky has already categorically denied that claim, and who am I to argue?" Yeah, Meredith - and Vanilla Ice was right about how the track for "Ice Ice Baby" was totally different than the hook from "Under Pressure." If any of you readers can watch both movies without feeling that the earlier was a heavy influence on the later, I'll be very impressed. For my part, my first time watching Black Swan felt like it was my second time watching it, and that sure as hell isn't because I developed ESP during the trailers.

Here, though, is the bigger problem with Aronofsky's rendering of Perfect Blue: considered as a whole movie, it makes almost no sense. Rather than having "take[n] the best parts of Perfect Blue and turn[ed] them into something more," as Borders alleges, Aronofsky simply added more to the best parts of the anime. Take the use of ballet as a central theme, for example: the events in Black Swan are structured to mirror both the plot and musical progression of Swan Lake, sure, but so what? It would be a neat trick, except (a) any basic modern reinterpretation of Swan Lake would've accomplished the exact same thing and (b) it ruins the plot twists by beating you over the head with foreshadowing (unless, of course, you're as dim as Peter Travers is). Similarly, Aronofsky's characters are more human than Kon's but in a way that detracts from rather than adds to the overall experience; the gestalt here is working in the wrong direction. Portman's character's mother, for example, is portrayed as being viciously (though not consciously) jealous of her daughter's success, but the end effect of this is merely to produce tension when tension cannot otherwise be obtained; from the point of view of the movie's overall arc, her antipathy towards her daughter accomplishes absolutely nothing. It is a piece of deft realism added clumsily to what is, on the whole and by design, a thoroughly surreal movie.

Naturally, the area where this stands out the most is in Portman's character herself. Portman may have done a fantastic job, especially with the dancing, but her role was severely hampered by several half-completed attempts at characterization. We learn, for instance, that she used to scratch herself compulsively as a child, but that's all we learn. Is this habit simply neurotic, like the way that some people chew their nails? Is it related somehow to her dark side (the eponymous black swan)? Does it bear some connection to her mother's sublimated loathing? Has it been caused, or exacerbated, by the other self-mutilating practices associated with ballet dancing? We just don't know! Or, with respect to her underdeveloped sexuality, how has orgasm come to be associated for her with danger or fear? The movie may (or may not) hint at a number of different explanations, but it certainly doesn't give a single, clear answer, and so it's very hard to argue that sex in Black Swan was anything more than (at best) an easy cliche or (at worst) a selling point for artistically disinterested 18-to-40-year-old men.

Finally, there is just too much sloppiness in Aronofsky's version. I'll quickly lay out three examples, because to be honest this kind of thing pervades the movie and it would be beyond me to catologue it exhaustively.

• Example one: Mila Kunis's character predicts that the director of the ballet will eventually come to use his standard pet name ("little princess" or some such thing) with Portman's character; Portman's character denies it. Obviously she is wrong - her overriding character trait is naivete - and so it is no surprise that the director does eventually do so. What's surprising is that he does so approximately ten seconds before she dies and the movie ends. Why did we even bother with that little exercise, exactly?
• Example two: late in the movie, Portman's character hallucinates an acquaintance stabbing herself in the face (a very Perfect Blue moment, that) and walks away from the scene holding the offending implement in a bloody hand. However, by that time the audience knows that she has been hallucinating badly for long stretches at a time. Was the whole thing, then, a fiction, or did Portman's character really lose it and horrifically maim the other person? We never find out. Apparently the life or health of a minor supporting character is interesting enough to be jeopardized for the sake of a cheap horror shock but no more interesting than that.
• Example three: Portman's black swan persona comes to be symbolized in her mind by Kunis's character (which you will see coming all of three seconds after Kunis appears on screen, incidentally), and, as in the original, Portman's good (white swan) persona eventually murders her evil (black swan) one. The problem with this is that, on Black Swan's own terms, the black swan persona is only a manifestation of psychological distress (and not, as in Perfect Blue, another actual person). The various struggles between the white and black swans are, as a result, analyzable only as Portman's character fighting to retain her "true" (white swan) self in the face of the corrupting influences of her situation. So when the black swan persona dies, it is only logical to count that as a win: Portman's character has succeeded in resisting corruption and all is well, we are liable to think. Except no: in fact, when the white swan kills the black swan she also somehow kills herself. While this is unquestionably required by the movie's self-imposed adherence to Swan Lake's plot, it makes no sense given the movie's symbology.

True story: on a field trip in high school one of my friends started to feel ill (nausea, headaches, stiffness, etc.), drank a can of Coke, and felt better. Turned out he hadn't had his coffee that morning cause the bus left too early. Scary stuff.

Mona Charen just hates it when the government tries to do things better, and really, can you blame her? If people start to think that the government doesn't necessarily screw up everything it touches, Charen'll be out of a job.

"Some 31 percent of children and teens, reports the CDC, are overweight or obese, triple the rate of 30 years ago. It isn't even crazy to suggest, as Mrs. Obama has, that when 'one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight, childhood obesity isn't just a public health threat, it's not just an economic threat, it's a national security threat as well.'

And yet, it requires a certain kind of stubborn obtuseness to ride into battle carrying the flag of subsidized school lunches when the problem was partly created by ... subsidized school lunches!"

See, the school lunch program got started cause politicians wanted "to subsidize farmers by purchasing huge blocs of 'excess' commodities in order to keep prices up"* and everybody knows that something that was started for a bad reason can never succeed, even if the people in charge of it consciously change its raison d'etre. But if the genetic fallacy isn't really your style, Charen's got something else for you to try on: the weak sense of possibility.

"The amount of all of this food that winds up uneaten in the trash can only be guessed at (though anecdotal evidence abounds). Wouldn't it make more sense, economically, nutritionally, and (importantly) socially to eliminate school lunches altogether? Parents can pack a highly nutritious turkey, tuna, or peanut butter sandwich with an apple or an orange. Poor parents can afford to do this with help from the Food Stamp program."

See? Parents, even poor ones, can feed their children just fine if only we would get rid of this silly school-lunches thing we've got going on. Just ignore the fact that those same parents, even the poor ones, can feed their children now and you and Charen will be on the same page.

While I don't have anything in particular to say here about the economics of the situation, what would "make more sense...nutritionally" would be to instantiate a program that produces actual results and not just potential ones. It's actually quite simple to devise and implement a system in which parents can feed their children real (or even real-ish) food and not processed chemicals that just so happen to resemble food, but what you'll find (indeed, what we have found) is that very few of these systems will result in parents actually feeding their children in that way. Although I certainly agree with Charen insofar as I acknowledge that our system, whatever it is, must allow for parents to feed their kids nutritionally - we can't, to take a cartoonish example, require parents to feed their kids only corn dogs and pudding - I have a hard time endorsing a system that only guarantees the possibility, however remote, that parents might maybe do that. Policy has to be shaped and directed by evidence that indicates what people actually will do, not mere guesswork about what they could do.

*Which, incidentally, if you think this doesn't still happen big-time in the U.S., you're dreaming.

Bad enough that you should be named Christopher Walker in the first place and therefore get me thinking about Christopher Walken - who, believe you me, sets the bar pretty damn high - but then you go and write another "here's a conservative white person's reaction to rap" article? Really, Chris? To be honest, you probably should've stopped before you even got started.

"My students turned the tables of surprise on me, though, when I asked each of them to introduce me to one song they deemed worthy of appreciation. I expected Christian rock artists, classic rock ’n’ roll, and possibly some Indy Pop..."

Alas, you didn't do that; instead, you chose to actually start writing. And then, when you chose to actually start writing, you actually typed out "Indy Pop"...and then kept on going! Why not cut your losses there? You know, call it a day and start fresh tomorrow? Here, let me be the one to clue you in:

"Despite my temptation to condemn such music immediately for its ugly perversity, a moment’s reflection reveals that the issue is much more complex than declaring an entire genre off limits because the lives of its artists aren’t godly, or because many of the songs contain profanity. These standards would call into question a host of art, music, plays, and movies that I have enjoyed immensely. Thus, while I may not enjoy rap music, making the argument that Christians have a moral obligation to set rap music aside demands more than a quick dismissal. "

Wait wait - you actually committed yourself to the claim that Christians (but not other people...?) have a moral obligation not to listen to any rap? And you still kept writing? To make a helpful analogy, if you accidentally manage to say something like, oh I dunno, "I promise that I will be the first person to swim eight thousand miles through molten lava without stopping," you don't then start looking for volcanoes and Speedos, you quickly shut the hell up and hope nobody heard you.

"Rap lyrics very literally bastardize the English language by ignoring grammar, pronunciation, or clarity in communication. Thus, rap music promotes a 'sing what I want, talk how I want, do what I want' attitude in rejection of standards for right or wrong."

Yes, I, too, hate it when people "very literally bastardize the English language" - you know, by continuing to blatantly misuse the word "literally," even to the extent of qualifying it with an intensifier as though there could somehow be gradations of literalness. ("That was very literally a slap in the face! I mean, about 82% of it was actually a slap in the face and then the other 18% was ignominy and insult due to the first 82%"??) At this point I can no longer believe with confidence that this article wasn't the result of a lost bet or some other form of punishment. I would go with psychosis, but normally psychotics are more chillingly charismatic than this (or so the movies tell me).

"Lyrics often become the only litmus test of acceptable music, but music itself impacts [cough cough bastardization of the language cough] both the mind and the body by stirring up emotions in its listeners. Rap music undermines authority as its jolting beat assaults the standards of musical form."

I'll just go right by the part about how only white people get to decide what "the standards of musical form" are and get to the less astonishingly racist, but nonetheless infinitely more impressive, part: the tracks are so bad that we - or no, sorry, only Christians - are morally obligated not to listen to them?! I can't even begin to conceive of the kind of moral landscape that would allow for this kind of warped logic. A philosophy would have to be positively Lovecraftian in its construction in order to make Walker seem even remotely sane at this point - and yet he writes on!

"If our standard of virtue is built on the likelihood of becoming violent, drug addicted gangsters then this music is probably [?!] harmless to many young people. Most of my students will not take this path of immorality regardless of their musical tastes. But if our desire is to live according to biblical principles, this music fails to meet the standard."

Ah, of course! How could I have forgotten about all of those Bible verses specifically condemning rap? As I recall, they're right next to the ones about how adultery is okay if you're an elected official and the ones about the proper way to deny minorities their civil rights. Why, I believe it was just yesterday when I was reading the book of You Are A Fucking Clown where it said, and I quote, "Get the fuck out of here with that idiotic tripe, Christopher Walker, before your keyboard decides that it has been abused more than enough and, in an act of sheer animal desperation, launches itself out of the nearest window just to make the pain finally stop."

My conclusion from all of this, besides the now-obvious fact that Christopher Walker has the IQ of a nice glass of warm milk, is that he very likely suffers from a rare disorder that prevents him from having even the smallest quantum of self-awareness. How else, I ask you, could a person type even one of those paragraphs I've quoted, let alone all of them, and then continue writing? Last I checked inertia only applied to objects in motion, not abstractions like stupidity (even if that stupidity is massive, as Walker's evidently is). I can only be thankful that he's not a regular writer anywhere, because reading him once was well more than enough to last me my whole lifetime.

This is just awesome. I can only aspire to, one day, attain such superhuman levels of chutzpah.

"'The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times,' Benedict said.

He said that as recently as the 1970s, pedophilia wasn't considered an absolute evil but rather part of a spectrum of behaviors that people refused to judge in the name of tolerance and relativism."

Of course! That would be why, during the 70s, the Vatican also introduced LSD into communion, rearranged all of their hymns into the prog-rock format, and abandoned all of its teachings on the immorality of any sex other than unprotected heterosexual vaginal intercourse within a marriage! Everything is becoming so clear now. Why, the Catholic church is nothing more than a club where people get together in funny hats to chant things in Latin before enacting each and every prevailing social norm that exists at the time. How could I have been so silly as to imagine that it was composed of adults who have the power to think for themselves and so draw their own conclusions about morality?

And, of course, no organization produces reliable historical accounts better than the Vatican, so we can trust that pedophilia really was something that people "refused to judge" at the time. Now I see that tolerance really is a threat - not to society in general, of course, but to Catholics! Just think: all this time we have been recommending a program of critical analysis when it comes to social practices, and here are the poor Catholics, constitutionally incapable of participating in such a program because they only know how to follow the grossest caricatures of general social behavior. They're practically the victims here!

Well, I for one have learned my lesson. In order to protect our poor Catholic brothers and sisters, we must quarantine them from society at large. Even if it seems as though nobody could possibly misinterpret the things we say or do, we simply cannot take the risk; if they can take tolerance to be an endorsement of child molestation, really anything goes. So to all my Catholic friends, I apologize, but your pope says that I can't hang around with you anymore because you might hear me using multisyllabic words, get all confused, and start fondling elementary schoolers.

Because their application is supposed to be, you know, standard.

"In case you hadn’t seen this story, a gunman opened fire at a school board meeting in Florida on Tuesday afternoon...

The reason I bring it up here is because of one line in a CNN article about him:

Under 'political views,' Duke labels himself a 'Freedom Fighter.' Under religious views, he wrote, 'Humanism.'

How long before that becomes the focal point of all of this?

Clay Duke was obviously not a Humanist — Humanists are not violent people."

Hemant Mehta may be friendly, but that doesn't help this argument any. To say that a person does not believe in a certain system of thought because of their actions is horseshit, even if that system is a system you like and their actions are actions you dislike. We skeptics rightly call out religious believers when they deny the "true" religiosity of murderers or bigots or even just annoying fuckheads - how, then, can we justify defending ourselves with that same invalid technique?

Mehta goes on to quote the Humanist Manifesto and to reassure us that "not a single non-theistic group in the country would defend what [Duke] did," but neither of these points is even remotely related to whether or not Duke was actually a humanist (sorry, I refuse to capitalize that word). To make a relevant if somewhat muted analogy, a Jew who eats pork would still be a Jew even given the condemnation of the Bible and every known Jewish group. When we refer to membership in a community whose identifying characteristic is belief, belief is all that counts. Unless Mehta can construct and defend a psychological theory on which people always behave more or less how they believe - which, take my word for it, he can't - he needs to drop this defense immediately and admit that humanists can be terrible people just the same as members of any other group that advertises itself as having special access to moral truth.

The most incredible part about all of this, though, is that Mehta edited his post to say that he's "aware of the No True Scotsman fallacy" and that he "tried to avoid [it] in this post." I'm gonna take his word on both of those assertions, but that only makes things worse for Mehta: if he knew what he was doing the whole time and honestly believed that he had avoided a logical fallacy that he himself can likely identify in the reasoning of others, then his political commitment to the success of humanism (and possibly atheism) has overpowered his ability to think rationally. Skeptics are no more immune to this danger than anybody else, and we shouldn't hesitate for a moment to call each other out when we fall victim to it.

I have to say, I read this first sentence and it made me really want to like the entire rest of the article:

"Among the few tasks that are more tedious than reading the writings of Immanuel Kant is the task of reading the writings of philosophers debating about the writings of Immanuel Kant."

Burn! Double burn! The limit of f(burn) as burn approaches infinity! It's just that the rest of the article doesn't really follow through. Matthew O'Brien makes an excellent argument against (one interpretation of) Kant when it comes to race...

"[I]n order to be a racist you don’t have to think that some sort of racial determinism is true, and so the argument doesn’t tell against ordinary racists. What of the racist who denies determinism, appeals to the ‘wisdom of repugnance,’ and says simply, ‘I feel disgust for people different than I am, just as I feel affection for my family and fellow countrymen’? There’s no self-contradiction here. Yet Arkes’ argument is also too broad because there are many unchosen and 'determined' features of human life that, unlike race, are morally significant."

...but then he goes and says that "the only way to show that some action is bad is to show that it frustrates and impedes the happiness of the person who does it." This is so utterly deformed a moral principle that I have a hard time believing that O'Brien actually means it. Although it's certainly morally counterproductive for one to do things that make oneself unhappy, it should be obvious that one's own happiness only counts as much as every other person's happiness. To exclusively privilege one's own happiness over not just another person's happiness but the happiness of everyone else in the world is, therefore, insane.

To zoom in a bit and illustrate this point using the context of O'Brien's own argument, racist behaviors are not bad as a rule because they make racists unhappy. Put differently, racist behaviors would still be bad even if they only ever made racists happy. This is the case because - and this doesn't seem like the sort of thing we should have to remind people about, but here goes - racist behaviors make the other (i.e., non-racist) people involved unhappy. If we limit our moral considerations just to the effects that action has on the actor, we're going to end up endorsing racism for the (happily few) racists for whom racism really does contribute to their "deep and sustained fulfillment" - and the same goes for sexists, homophobes, pedophiles, serial killers, rapists, and people who hate left-handers. The classic reply here is that racism never makes anyone happy, not really, but O'Brien himself admits that "principles are to be found in experience." Based on both all of human history up to this point and what we observe today, there are no experiential grounds on which to say that bigotry or psychosis is a guarantor of unhappiness.

O'Brien's problem isn't that he focuses on happiness, although in the end I may have to quibble a bit with his definition of the word. His problem is that he seems to have forgotten that morality is almost all about how we treat others. Philosophy is borderline useless as it is; the last thing we philosophers need to do is go around in our professional roles reminding people to make themselves happy.

Apropos of this oldish post about video games and culture, here are some rough calculations I threw together regarding our experience of various art forms:

• $12 for a movie ticket per 1.5 hours in the theater = $8/hr
• $45 for a console video game per 30 hours of play time = $1.5/hr
• $20 for a hardback novel per 5 hours of reading = $4/hr
• $30 for a decent concert ticket per 1.5 hours at the concert itself = $20/hr
• $15 for a CD per 1 hour of music = $15/hr

These are only on the first run through, of course. With live concerts and movies there is only the one run through, but with the others you could re-experience them as many times as you want. Does that, then, make those the worse investments? The other thing that sort of jumps out in the list is that video games are, relatively speaking, incredibly cheap - does that make them the least valuable as art?

An alternative interpretation (and unsurprisingly my preferred interpretation) is that the cost-benefit analysis just isn't very useful for making fine-grained distinctions. But it sure is interesting, because I suspect that many of us sort of lump all purchasable art forms together without thinking about it very much. I don't really have any strong conclusions about this, I just think it's worth mulling over for a minute or two.

Remember this, Americans, the next time you go out to vote.

"I can understand why homosexual men would want to join the military. Number one: It’s Dude Central. Number two: The military lends itself to the gays’ fastidiousness over everything being orderly because everyone, from top to bottom, is required to keep their clothes, boots, room and gear nice, neat and shiny...

In regard to why lesbians join the military, this is also an easy one: no heels, no makeup, no chatty chicks on cell phones, you can cart a few extra pounds without being shamed into looking like Lindsay Lohan by Michelle Obama, and … you get to blow crap up and wear camo. I can empathize."

And this.

"Consider this issue a prediction of sorts, but take it to the bank that those who engage in open homosexuality will feel the freedom if not the need begin to portray themselves as victims of harassment pretty much anytime something doesn't go their way."

Aaaaaand this.

"The debate about repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' now passed into law, has triggered a long-repressed memory of mine from the '70s.  It was when I was hit on by a woman.  I was around 20 and taking a women-only martial arts class.

I was changing in the locker room when one of the women in the class, Judy, stared at me lasciviously.  I automatically turned away and got the heck out of there.  My reaction was instinctual; I didn't have to think about it."

And don't forget this.

"Placing a fellow warrior's safety above your own for the good of the unit and the mission is essential.  Introducing Eros in any form into combat is corrosive in the extreme."

Or this.

"...if it isn’t broke, then don’t fix it. I understand the other side’s argument because of their social-political agenda, but to somehow allege that [DADT] has harmed our military isn’t justified by the facts."

Not a whole lot of "hate the sin, love the sinner" in those quotes, is there? Teh gayz are sexual maniacs who can't control their urges and conform rigidly to stereotypes, and their civil rights just don't matter because the military "isn't broke." And this is just them talking about the military - just imagine how peaceable they're liable to be when it comes time to talk about marriage and adoption.

But my absolute favorite right-wing DADT quote belongs to Tony Perkins, president of a hate group. It's not better or anything, but it sure is original.

"Today is a tragic day for our armed forces. The American military exists for only one purpose - to fight and win wars. Yet it has now been hijacked and turned into a tool for imposing on the country a radical social agenda. This may advance the cause of reshaping social attitudes regarding human sexuality, but it will only do harm to the military's ability to fulfill its mission."

Not only is the conservative position on DADT based in utterly false, hateful propaganda, apparently we need to explain what the military is for. Unless we've become an empire - which, granted, I can't entirely rule out - our military does not exist "to fight and win wars." To conceive of a military in this fashion is to justify any particular war just on the grounds that, hey, we had to use the military for something - it was just sitting around! This attitude isn't nearly so directly harmful to persons as the horrific things that these assholes say and think about LGBT folks, but it sure ain't good.

I wonder: in a past life, was William Craig a hypnotist?

"Now if...a Creator and Designer exists and has brought us into existence, doesn’t that suggest to you that He would have some purpose in mind which He would want us to know so that we might achieve the ends for which He created us? This consideration ought to make us take the claims of revealed religion, or at least the claims of the great monotheistic faiths which are consistent with the existence of such a transcendent Creator and Designer, very seriously."

There are two ways that this argument begs the question. First and foremost, Craig employs it against a deist who believes in a disinterested (or at least uninvolved) creator. Given that, it's pretty hard not to read this argument as anything other than "Hey, I know you've got your position over there, but how about joining me over here? Eh? How about it?" This poor person wants Craig to tell him why a god-like entity must be like the Christian God, yet here Craig is just asserting that it must. On the other hand, it's hard to feel too bad for the guy - he did write to Craig in the first place, after all.

But there's a subtler problem here. Let's take Craig's first hypothetical as given: if a creator exists, that creator would have had a purpose in mind and would have wanted to communicate that purpose to us. What we now need before we start to "take the claims of revealed religion...very seriously" is evidence that a creator exists. To make a parallel argument to Craig's, we could just as easily say that if ESP is a real thing then there would be famous people who have it and can use it to achieve amazing things. And, wouldn't you know it, there are famous people who claim to be psychics with the power to do amazing things. Does that hypothetical, by itself, require us to "take the claims of [alleged psychics] very seriously"? I doubt it - and I doubt that Craig feels any differently. When we have a preponderance of evidence against the antecedent of a hypothetical or even just no evidence for it, the hypothetical itself gives us no grounds at all to take its consequent seriously. Since the antecedent in this case is actually the major claim, Craig cannot be understood at all except insofar as one understands that his argument is utterly backwards.

If there is any inkling of truth at all in Michael Austin's response to Nigel Barber - and don't worry if you have no idea who those guys are, I'd never heard of them either - it is that atheism "in and of itself, cannot form the foundation for a way of life." Anybody who thinks otherwise is a little on the dumb side, so if Barber actually thinks otherwise then he's a little on the dumb side. That said, Austin goes downhill from there pretty damn quick.

"Only by forming and practicing positive beliefs and values can one build a coherent and meaningful life...Perhaps some form of secular humanism will accomplish this task. But here we run into another problem, namely, that human beings long for transcendence of some sort, as shown by the presence and prevalence of religious belief throughout cultures across time."

I rather suspect that Austin has not done the empirical work necessary to back up that first statement, but let's play along just for fun. We need positive beliefs and values, one of which (let us stipulate) is transcendence of some sort. Okay - so what?

"On this topic, Barber claims that sports can replace religion. In one sense, I think he is right. The loyalty, community-identification, and limited transcendence of the experiences related to sports do fuflill many of the functions of religion for many people. However--and I am a passionate sports fan and participant--at the end of the day sports are incapable of doing the work needed to provide sufficient meaning, transcendence, and fulfillment in life."

As fantastically unhelpful as Barber's suggestion may be, Austin makes an interesting admission here: sports, he says, do provide meaning, transcendence, and fulfillment. Presumably they provide these things not just for atheists but for believers of various stripes as well. Likewise, presumably they are not the only non-religious activity that provides those things - having children, for example, is supposed to provide many benefits along these lines. But that doesn't really come through here, does it? What comes through is that, in Wes Smith's words,

"We yearn for faith, we yearn for a proper philosophy, we desire to be part of something more important and bigger than ourselves that can’t be measured, folded, spindled, or mutilated...The faith they adopt might not be in a theistic God, Jesus, Allah, or Krishna.  But the desire for faith will not be replaced with pure non belief (hello,  John Lennon).   It might be the techno-religions of transhumanism, a scientism of radical environmentalism, embracing the living Gaia, an inchoate New Age spiritualism that offers the hope for an  immaterial hereafter without moralism about individual behavior, or perhaps, a Utopian materialism that faithfully believes that if it can just drive 'God' out of the human heart we can create a perfect world."

Aside from Smith's gross mischaracterization of what "a proper philosophy" would look like, the major problem here is that sports don't even remotely resemble Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, transhumanism, scientism, Gaiaism, nebulous spiritualism, utopianism, or indeed any other worldview that advertises itself as a combination ontology-epistemology-ethics. This observation points to two possibilities: either sports are imperfectly fulfilling of our need for transcendence because they aren't that kind of combination or else our need for transcendence is not, in point of fact, a need for that kind of combination. Now which of these do you suppose is the more plausible?

Regardless of what Austin and Smith might say - and, at this point, I'm willing to believe that either one is thick enough to take up the first horn of the dilemma - the empirical fact of the matter is that people do achieve meaning, transcendence, and fulfillment without leaning too heavily (or, in some cases, at all) on an onto-epistemo-ethics. Some of those people are atheists, but the really interesting thing is that some of them aren't. People who self-identify as religious or even believe the tenets of a given religion can find areligious transcendence just the same as the rest of us; some of them even need to do so because their belief is an active hindrance to their process of finding fulfillment. What Austin and Smith are promulgating here, then, is not just a philosophical shambles but a hypothesis that is trivially disconfirmed by simple observation. That they seem to have quarantined their observing mind from their theorizing mind should not stop us from pointing out to them the obvious flaws in their theory with whatever degree of gentleness we feel is appropriate.

Look, everyone - satire!

"Who here loves freedom?

Everyone raised their hands, I see. Well, you’re all liars!

Here in America, we’re trained from birth to say we love freedom, but is freedom really what we’re all about? What do you like about freedom, anyway? That you can do whatever you want? Well, what do you want to do? You want to go out to eat? Well, whatever you eat is regulated by the FDA, health inspectors make sure you won’t get sick, and everyone working at the restaurant falls under various laws protecting their jobs and wages."

That's right! If there's any particular infringement of your freedom at all, you have no freedom. Does the government prevent you from going to McDonald's and ordering an arsenic-'n'-windshield-wiper-fluid burger? Then you are not free at all!

"Freedom isn’t what we want; what we want is a civilized society with security and order — place where things work and we don’t have to worry about every little thing because we have a government to worry for us and tell us what to do and make sure we all cooperate."

Exactly! You cannot have both freedom and civilization, security, or order. Freedom requires that societies be barbaric, unsafe, and chaotic.

"This mindless freedom fetish is also what led to the recent brouhaha over the TSA. Hands off your junk? Sorry, but your junk is of national concern. The only reason we can safely fly is because the government is keeping an eye on your junk, not because of freedom." 

Do you see now? Do you understand? All violations of freedom are of equal magnitude and none is better justified than any other. My freedom to set up my lemonade stand in the middle of the street and block off traffic is just the same as your freedom to sell me rat poison in a bottle labeled "orange juice" is just the same as Frank J. Fleming's freedom to publish a dumb fucking argument about what freedom is - there is, quite clearly, no difference at all between them!

But look, give Fleming at least this much credit: his satirical take on politics is precisely as funny as it is accurate. And that's what good satire is all about, isn't it?