So yeah, after having said all that stuff about ethics, let me practice what I preach a bit by helping Alex Knapp and Leah Libresco get straightened out about consequentialism. Knapp starts off by decrying the phrase "necessary evil" "as ultimately a bad phrase, because it carries with it a greater implication that morality is one path and pragmatism another." He does see one interpretation of it that fits with consequentialist thinking - namely, a "short-term sacrifice for a greater good" - but overall he still doesn't like it. Libresco, meanwhile, employs her "deontological/virtue ethics instincts" to come to a different conclusion. "Even when I make the least bad choice," she says, "I’ve had to act immorally. That wound in my character is not salved by the fact that the choice was necessary to prevent a graver harm." I'm not entirely sure why (or, indeed, if) she feels as though there's no room for character development in consequentialism, but in any case both of these responses miss something crucial.
For Knapp, the issue is that he apparently ignores the possibility that a person might have only (very) bad choices. In his thinking, necessary evils always end up producing "a greater good" - that is, they produce a good. But this is not the only kind of necessary evil: sometimes it's also the case that a person has to do something very wrong (that is, on consequentialism, something that produces very bad consequences) because all of the other available options will be still more wrong (that is, produce still worse consequences). This seems to have occurred to Libresco - she does reference the concept of a "least bad choice," at least - but then she goes and conflates adverbial morality (how one acts) with, and I can't believe that this isn't a real word,* verbial morality (what one does). An evil, I think it makes the most sense to say, is something that we do - murder, for instance, or showing a Carrot Top stand-up special to one's relatives. One can act evilly as well, of course, but acting evilly needn't produce an evil: you could try to show your relatives a stand-up special of Carrot Top's but accidentally put in the wrong DVD, say. Plus, the phrase isn't "a necessary evilly" and so I find this response to be less than compelling. Whatever the connections between immoral actions and acting immorally, the two are at least conceptually different.
And now, dear readers, I'm going to bed so that I can get enough sleep to post something more incisive and compelling tomorrow. G'night.
*Near as I can tell "verbal" just means "in linguistic form" or something similar, whereas what I'm looking for is "of or relating to verbs." How can "adverb," which is just an extension of the word "verb," have an altered form that "verb" doesn't have? English is dumb.
This post recently sprung to mind when I read two of Ophelia Benson's posts over at Butterflies and Wheels about Islam and queer oppression. In one, Benson points her readers to three cases of apparently religiously motivated violence towards gay men and women and even straight men and women who just happen to not be bigots. She calls this motivation "a stupid baseless prejudice," and for most people that should very much ring true. However, in the other post she cites a press release from an actual LGBT organization that "condemn[s] those who use [gay-bashing] incidents to create a moral panic and stoke up racist or Islamophobic sentiment. At present," this group continued, "the people responsible cannot be accurately determined, but it is clear that whoever is responsible, they do not represent any of the local communities." My question is this: if we take the Rainbow Hamlets LGBT Community Forum's press release seriously, how do we react to bigotry on the part of Muslims who explain their bigotry by reference to their religion and, yes, the beliefs and practices of their religious community?
Again, there are some people who will tell us that "all oppressions [are] intersectional, [and] they all matter. Perpetuating one to defeat another, is a defeatist strategy born of a desire to use the master's tools, because it is easier than attempting to decolonize one's mind." Or, to contextualize this for our current purposes and rephrase it in plain English, you just can't beat homophobia while simultaneously increasing "racist or Islamophobic sentiment." Remember also that this "can't" isn't a normative but a descriptive one: the people who say this sort of thing are saying that it's a practical impossibility to make real progress in one area while going backwards in another in exactly the same way that it's a practical impossibility to fly around like Superman. I don't think this is true - in fact, I think it's one of those blatant falsehoods that only come to be believed because of how subversive it is to embrace them - but what if it is? What, then, do we do about Muslims who, motivated by their understanding of their religion, stab a gay man for being gay?
One strategy, of course, is simply to do what Benson does and trust that mockery of various degrees of acidity doesn't count as "us[ing] the master's tools" and won't perpetuate one kind of oppression in order to defeat another. And, indeed, Benson surely doesn't want to come off as endorsing any kind of bigotry against Muslims, so it may seem reasonable to believe that her response is perfectly legit. Unfortunately, though, one can perpetuate oppression without ever meaning to, and not even a writer as consistently level-headed and precise as Benson will ever be able to guarantee that none of her writing ever has the unintended effect of increasing some person's bigotry somewhere. (And not just anti-Muslim bigotry, either - some of you may remember the ableism folks from way back, who would almost certainly object to Benson's use of the word "stupid.") It'll help Benson that her audience is generally just about as level-headed as she is, but I would be surprised if she never ever inadvertently contributed to any oppression ever. So, to repeat myself yet again, how to we react? If even the most finely-tuned criticisms of Islamic bigots can (and, given the law of large numbers, sometimes do) perpetuate the oppression of Muslims, how the hell do we talk about protecting queer folks from Islamic bigots? Or, y'know, women? Or "apostates"? Or indeed anyone who might some day come to be targeted by Islamic bigots?
My answer, of course, is to just bloody well do it and let the chips fall where they may. Even if all oppressions are intersectional, which I doubt, it doesn't follow that you literally cannot perpetuate one such that you end up defeating another; and even if you literally cannot perpetuate one and end up defeating another, which I also doubt, it doesn't follow that you ought not try to do so anyway. This, I think, follows from the pretty obvious fact that not all oppressions are equal. Christians, for example, may well be persecuted and oppressed in some Muslim theocracies, but I would be hard-pressed to believe that they have it as bad as LGBT people do in those same places. Accordingly, if there was some way to benefit queer people by increasing the burden on Christians such that the benefit outweighed the burden, it would be entirely appropriate to do it. It's just absurd for an anti-oppression theorist to decry an overall decrease in oppression (or, perhaps, simply the effects thereof) even though that decrease may require compromise. Moreover - and this is really the ultimate point - it's absurd for someone who claims to be moral to then turn around and refuse to help an entire group of people who are suffering badly just because there's no elegant way to provide that help. Much as it pains me to say this, the world is not an elegant place. It is, rather, an ugly place and a place that many people have good reason not to want to be. If we can make the world less unlivable - and I think we can - I fail to see how a bunch of catchphrases and buzzwords and elegantly constructed sociopolitical claims justify our refusing to do so.
Turning now to an example of what sorts of stupid things we might choose to believe in order to make ourselves happy and shape our lives wholesale, I present Kay Hymowitz...
"It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing."...and, as an encore and a counterpoint, Helen Smith.
"What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?"For my part, I find neither of these views to be particularly plausible; that is, if young men (I can say that now, I'm in grad school) are really choosing to put off the beginning of their "temporary custodian[ship] of the social order until [their] own old age and demise," I fail to see how that would be remedied either by providing them with more arbitrary symbolic benchmarks or by reforming divorce law. Speaking as someone who was bar mitzvahed (legitimately, not in the watered-down way Americans so often are) and is really not affected whatsoever by any concerns about what'll happen if my eventual marriage fails, I am not at all impressed by these suggestions. Speaking, in fact, as a David Fincher fan, I'm much more impressed by one of the many monologues that were adapted for Brad Pitt from Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club:
"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."You want men to be happy and engaged? Maybe it'd help if you quit lying to us. Men (and women) can be and have been happy believing in The American Dream and living out its various entailments but as it turns out it was not a long-term solution; now many of us are even coming to the point of understanding that it is the roles themselves, and not just the associated virtues, that are the problem. "We are a species of assholes," as Dale Smith so accurately summarizes, and it was never a great idea to pretend otherwise regardless of how happy people were to buy into the myth at the time.
Not to beat this point into the ground, but ideas are not trustworthy or benign. They connect to each other and to action, so to adopt one without having done one's due diligence is a wanton thing to do. It is one thing to dip into an idea for a brief period - to, say, build a 1920s middle-American homestead in The Sims or to go Christmas caroling. But when the dip becomes a long soak there are serious risks, and not just of the stuffy philosophical sort that I'm always going on about. The world is not art. The world is not an archetype. The world, if I can be a bit poetic, is not a myth of the world. (You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.) I fully understand that we, along with being assholes, are myth-lovers, but enough is enough already. Men don't need more or prettier lies, thank you very much, and if the idea of the universe's heat death makes you go all wonky then you need way more than just an old book of stories written in a foreign language. If we want our species to grow up, we have to grow up, at least enough to separate out the time for fun and games from the time for serious work.
This is an argument from a New Zealander named Andrew, and you can tell that Andrew is a student of philosophy because he was kind enough to line up his premises one right after another so that they can (given some slight cosmetic tweaking) be made into a nice, clean syllogism, like so:
- "[O]n one [of the candidate] worldview[s, call it worldview A], if we live our lives consistently (that is to its logical consequences) then we can’t be happy."
- "[I]n order to be happy on that worldview, we must delude ourselves and others."
- "[O]n another worldview [i.e., worldview B] we wouldn’t need to engage in such grand delusion in order to be happy."
- "[T]he total available public evidence between the two is ultimately indeterminate."
- If (1)-(4), then we ought to reject A in favor of B.
An early task for Andrew is to prove that we can't live a happy life that's consistent with atheism, an effort that he starts thusly:
"It seems that whenever we act, we do so for some purpose or to achieve some state of affairs that would ultimately make the world better if said state of affairs obtained. It is to say that there is some way in which the world is ultimately supposed to be."This is just a very confused thing to say. First of all, if we always act purposefully, we certainly do not always act to a moral purpose. Using Andrew's words, we just don't always act so as "to achieve some state of affairs that [we think] would ultimately make the world better"; if this were the case, nobody would ever intentionally do wrong. If Andrew is really so much of an optimist (and/or so poor an observer of the human condition) as to actually think that nobody ever acts so as to make the world a worse place, he should really just quit philosophy now. Furthermore, if by some tremendous coincidence I went to sleep last night in a bad world and woke up this morning in a world populated only by good-hearted people, there's a big gap between making the world better and making the world the way it's ultimately supposed to be. The former can happen even in the absence of a best or optimal state but the latter very obviously cannot; the former is not necessarily teleological but the latter is; and so on. As I say, confused.
"Philosophical Hedonism offers a good example of this kind of reasoning. On Hedonism, pleasure is equated with living a happy life and as such becomes the ultimate goal of all action. It essentially seems to be saying that our purpose for living is to maximise our total net pleasure. Put differently, it says that the world is supposed to be such that all people can maximise their pleasurable experiences."Here you see the results of the confusion: the idea that "our purpose for living is to maximise our total net pleasure" is not required by hedonism, nor is the claim that "the world is supposed to be such that all people can maximise their pleasurable experiences." (You'll note, further, that those two statements aren't even the same, contrary to Andrew's apparent impression.) To be blunt, this is a jumbled mess and it makes the rest of his argument very implausible.
"On atheism, so it seems, there can be no ultimate meaning to life. As the universe winds down towards total entropic equilibrium, so too will it wind down towards an inevitable heat death. As the Universe continues to expand into eternity, so will it grow forever darker, forever colder until nothing will be left but a gas so thin that the sub-atomic particles of the tiniest atom will be separated by the distance of a galaxy. Regardless of how we presently act, the Universe will remain indifferent. If we live our lives one way, the Universe will face death. If we live another way, the Universe will face death. In the end, it will make no qualitative difference to the Universe whether we live the lives of a saint or the lives of a Hitler. It seems then that death is at least one of the aspects of an atheistic ontology which would make such a life absurd/devoid of purpose."This whole section relies on the conflation between ought-to-be and is-supposed-to-be, but even if we grant (wrongly) that the two are the same there are still plenty of holes. For example, there is no known worldview* on which the universe won't "face death." So if this is Andrew's test for purposefulness or meaning or whatever, even theism will fail it. And there is, of course, no reason whatsoever to select this as the test: by Andrew's own admission, the proper measure of a moral system is that it tells you how the world is supposed to be, not how the world is or will be. Unless he's stumbled upon a solution to the is/ought gap and would like to tell us all about it, this argument has no traction; to make an analogy that might help to clarify his error, the purpose for which the Phoenix Suns recently traded for Aaron Brooks is to make the playoffs even though they have no shot of actually fulfilling that purpose.**
So, to this point, Andrew has wrongly conflated all manner of normative concepts, wrongly assumed that all purposes must be achievable, mischaracterized human thought and behavior, and proposed a test for his slapdash theorizing that rules out absolutely everything. But, incredibly, we're only up to premise (3). As for premise (4) and the supposed logic linking (1)-(4) to the conclusion, Andrew says that
"where we possess determinate public evidence in favour of that worldview which ultimately denies us the ability to live a life that is consistently happy, then we have a reason to abandon our common sense intuition. However, it is incumbent upon the proponent of the 'unliveable' worldview to provide us with sufficient reason to abandon our commonsense intuition.You'd think, given that Andrew's conclusion is that "theism ultimately is the most rational option," he would address anti-theistic arguments here. After all, it's not like we non-theists have been quiet or demure about all the reasons why "we possess determinate public evidence" against theism. Being a poor philosopher, however, he merely throws up a weak reference to the burden of proof and never returns to the subject. The much bigger problem, though, is his jump from "I can't tell between A and B but I'd like B better" to "I might as well go with B." While at first it may seem as though Andrew is just echoing something like what I've already said about how it's okay and even praiseworthy to indulge in some mindsets or experiences, but recall that, unlike yours truly, Andrew needs us to act and not just believe (or feel, or whatever). The entire point for him is that an individual must be able to "live consistently and happily" with the belief in question, but this means running into moral concerns. Even if contrary to all reason we give him absolutely everything he wants, there's still a major problem with alleging that "it makes no sense whatsoever to go with" atheism as opposed to theism: Andrew has yet to even suggest that we can live not just happily but also morally as theists.
In-fact, if we suppose that there is an ambiguity of the total available evidence one way or the other, the most rational thing to do is to go with that worldview which gives us the greatest chance of living consistently and happily."
For most of his post Andrew lowers his sights to rationality, which is a nice trick for sophists to use (oversell and then back way the hell off), but even that doesn't help. Without a definition of rationality that systematically excludes moral concerns from self-interest - which, if he can achieve at all, will be an account of rationality that's incompatible with at least most versions of theism - he's still one step short even of his more modest conclusion. This, I think, is hardly a coincidence, given that his whole notion is to link rationality to ethics (in the limited sense of what's good for me). In a sense, this is just another, if much more complex, version of "I like this version of x, therefore it isn't really a version of x," as the epistemologically arbitrary selection of certain beliefs and behaviors doesn't cease to be epistemologically arbitrary just because they make the selecting person happy. I've said before, and I repeat here, that we have the right to a certain level of non-rationality only when that non-rationality produces overall good that cannot otherwise be obtained. But this needs to be overall good (not, as Andrew suggests, merely my good) and it does not (as Andrew suggests) transmute non-rationality into rationality. The absolute last thing we need is to start believing that we're justified in acting however we please just because the basis for those behaviors is an idea that makes us happy and we haven't been convinced to abandon it.
**Okay, okay - or, the purpose of those goofy old-school flying machines (these had a name, didn't they? I'm just forgetting it?) was to fly even though they could never possibly have flown. Seriously, though, what is going on in the NBA these past few days?
It seems as though Danielle Bean has been taking lessons from Alister McGrath:
"Here in the United States, we enjoy every kind of religious and personal freedom, but how many of us are truly free?...Catholic teaching on sex and marriage, for example, are popular ones to reject in the name of personal freedom. It is in recognizing our human value and dignity, however, that we can begin to understand God's plan for sex and marriage. Waiting for marriage, practicing monogamy, and rejecting artificial means of birth control might seem like old fashioned notions to some, but those who seek the truth will find genuine happiness in these choices."Yes, brothers and sisters, "Catholic teaching on sex and marriage" will make you free! If by "free" you mean "happy," and if in fact your concept of happiness is so confused and muddied that you feel the need to qualify it by calling it "genuine"! This is clearly just how belief is the same as faith - and, while we're at it, black is the same as white and houses are the same as prisons and bicycles are the same as roast beef sandwiches. It's bad enough for someone like Bean to rule on what happiness can be, but for her to do so in the name of defining freedom is inexcusable.
I mean, I was never a combat sportsman myself and so my direct experience with this sort of thing is rather limited, but I still have trouble getting behind what Mark Mitchell is saying here.
"By now most of us have heard of Joel Northrup, the high school wrestler who chose to default rather than wrestle a girl. The stakes for Northrup were high: this was the first round of the state tournament where he had a good shot at the title. He expressed his reasoning in a statement released by his high school:My problem with this is that Mitchell hasn't actually connected all the dots and so has not really understood liberalism. Begin, as he does, with the premise that a gentlemen simply does not "wrestle with ladies." That seems to be as plausible a criterion for gentlemanliness as any other, especially given Mitchell's conception of the gentleman as "a social role that implies a recognition of forms and limits that constrain action." I might want to add that a gentleman doesn't wrestle with ladies because a gentleman doesn't wrestle period, but evidently Mitchell and I have different understandings of the word's history and application. Either way, that's just the first premise. Next we have the additional premise that this Northrup kid is or was a gentleman; again, I could quibble about this, because in some sense it's up to Northrup to determine whether or not he's a gentleman and Mitchell could well be projecting gentlemanliness onto him, but it's not too terribly implausible to think that Northrup conceives of himself as, if not a gentleman per se, at least something very similar. So far, so good. But then how do we get to the part about him refusing to wrestle Casey Herkelman?
'Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa.'...It seems to me that Joel Northrup was raised to be a gentleman, and when he drew his first opponent at the state tournament, this ideal ran hard into the leveling impulse of the age. Or to put it in old-fashioned terms, gentlemen don’t wrestle with ladies. Reversing the sentence provides another truism: ladies wouldn’t dream of wrestling with gentlemen or of wrestling with anyone for that matter. Now I am on thin ice here, for if I embrace the idea of a gentleman, I am simultaneously embracing the idea of a lady. Doing so must appear, through the caustic lens of liberation, to be suggesting that ladies and gentlemen are substantially different and that a gentleman treats other gentleman in ways markedly different from the way he treats ladies. Precisely."
Remember, we can only work with the two premises that Northrup is a gentleman and therefore that he won't wrestle with ladies. To conclude that he won't wrestle Herkelman, we would also have to know that Herkelman is a lady. Mitchell, it seems, takes this for granted because Herkelman is female - but, in fact, this actually goes directly against what he says. On his own criterion, Herkelman isn't a lady because "ladies wouldn’t dream of wrestling with gentlemen or of wrestling with anyone for that matter." So if Herkelman isn't a lady, then what the fuck was Northrup doing not wrestling with her?
The answer, of course, is hiding in plain sight: Herkelman is, as Northrup so forthrightly puts it, a girl, and he doesn't want to wrestle girls. Not ladies, mind you, but girls. This is where Mitchell's "caustic lens of liberation" is sorely needed: it is utterly inappropriate to conclude that someone occupies a given social role just on the basis of their biology. (It's also inappropriate to conclude that on other bases as well, but biological sex is the operative one in this case.) Accordingly, it is at least problematic and is in many cases outright wrong to treat someone as belonging to a given social role just on the basis of their biology. Northrup of course has the right to decline to wrestle anybody at all, but neither he nor Mitchell nor anyone else has the right to classify Herkelman as a lady just because of her genitalia. The problem, in short, is not that a difference is created but that a difference is imposed. If some group of people wants to go around enacting these social roles that Mitchell has in mind, good for them - but you'd better be damn sure that all of the people in the group want that before you endorse it. Moreover, you'd better be really damn sure that your social roles are either wholly innocuous or universally accepted before you go around slandering the (primary?) school of thought that permits people to escape (as it were) from the social role into which they were born. It's one thing to not be wrestled with, but ladies have also been understood as not having jobs, requiring children to be happy, and lots of other much less unobjectionable things. Again, if Herkelman wants to sign herself up for that - or if she finds herself in that mindset and doesn't want not to unsign up for it - more power to her, but that's not something for Northrup or Mitchell or indeed anybody else at all to decide for her.
Cause this shit isn't funny:
"With the entire nation watching, Wisconsinites are now debating whether the state's public school teachers ought to be required to pay 5.8 percent of their wages to support their own retirement plans and 12.6 percent of their own health-insurance premiums, and also whether their union ought to be able to negotiate a pay increase on their behalf that exceeds the rate of inflation without letting voters approve or disapprove that raise in a referendum.Before Terry Jeffrey devolves into raving about the founders and "fidelity to our Judeo-Christian heritage," his argument is an economic one. Wisconsin public schooling, he says, costs about $10,800 per student and produces only mediocre results, whereas private Catholic schooling "Catholic elementary school tuitions range from $900 per child at St. Adalberts in Milwaukee to the $5,105 for a non-parishioner child at St. Alphonsus in Greenhdale" and Catholic schooling produces marginally better test numbers (between 2 and 3 percent higher, according to Jeffrey's numbers). The flaw here, I hope, should be obvious: tuition-per-student is not the same as cost-per-student.
What Wisconsin ought to be debating is whether these public school teachers should keep their jobs at all."
Assuming that the 3% gain is really worth getting all that excited about - personally, I have my doubts - Jeffrey still hasn't provided us with any evidence that it comes at a smaller cost as well. For him to pretend that any school can run on a budget of just $900 per student per year is laughable, and only the dullest of readers will manage not to wonder if just maybe the low tuitions are subsidized by the obscene wealth of the Catholic church. It could very well still be the case that Catholic schools are cheaper per student than public schools are - which, again, I would tend to doubt - but there's simply no way to tell using Jeffrey's apples-and-oranges comparison.
And finally, as if the whole sleight-of-hand thing with the numbers weren't bad enough, check out his proposal for how to fix the system:
"1) every parent of every child in every school district in the state shall receive an annual voucher equal to the per-pupil cost of maintaining a child in the state's public schools, 2) they shall be entitled to redeem this voucher at any school they like, and 2) the state shall not regulate the private schools, period."I mean, what the fuck. Even if (2) doesn't contradict, er, the other (2), I have a really hard time taking advice on education from a guy who can't even manage to fucking count to three.
Again with the empirical claims!
"The Biblical perspective on human sexuality offers a counter-narrative [to the modern one], a counter-narrative of faithfulness, hope, and love...Paul writes, 'The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife' (1 Cor. 7:4). Sex in marriage, in other words, is an expression of self-sacrifice and submission for both the man and the woman. Sex involves pleasure, of course, but receiving the physical pleasure of sex is intimately related to giving of oneself—giving oneself to the other and also giving oneself to the possibility of bringing life into the world."Even leaving aside the usual silliness of citing one sentence in a text and then pretending that it of course represents the full text (not to mention, in this case, the entire tradition built on that text), Sarah Bailey needs to have her head examined. Assuming that this "is intimately related" stuff actually means anything at all - it is, you'll observe, rather close to just being pablum - it is, as a matter of observable fact, entirely wrong. Usually sexual conservatives manage to drag their view along by keeping things more abstract, but if we're gonna talk about "physical pleasure" we're gonna be able to reject "the Biblical perspective on human sexuality" pretty much right off the bat.
It's also worth remarking on Bailey's idea of consent in sexual ethics. To someone who doesn't quite get what's important about consent, I could see how that quote up there might make some sense: it's all about trust and giving and other nice-sounding words, plus also it's a pretty short step from "I have authority over your body" to "Hey, now I can finally do all that stuff I've been fantasizing about," and that's got to be a pretty strong inducement even for people who generally decry anything that doesn't involve a sheet with a hole in it. The problem for her, though, is that nobody ever completely gives up authority over their own body - at least, not in a sexual context.* If it feels as though that's sometimes not the case, that feeling is either a convenient fiction (used, more frequently than not, to produce pleasure) or else is indicative of rape; whichever Bailey chooses, things aren't looking too good for her view. Granted, it can be confusing to think of consent happening during sex when the paradigmatic examples we have of consent are very stilted and formal (think of signing consent forms at your dentist's office), but that sort of confusion should be addressed with critical thought and not by throwing Bible verses at it, especially if those Bible verses could very easily be misread as endorsing forced sexual participation.
So yeah, if you can manage to ignore your own first-person experiences, discount the testimony of almost everyone else, and sign yourself up for a conception of consent that is basically a non-conception of consent, Bailey is the gal for you. Otherwise, I think you'll probably be okay without her. And anyway, if sex "is an expression of self-sacrifice and submission for both the man and the woman," doesn't that mean they'd have to go out and find a third to be the dom, thus ruining the whole thing? Really, the whole system is just a shambles.
(Also, just a quick PS: this stuff about "the man and the woman" no longer flies. There are, again as a matter of observable fact, marriages in which there is not a man or a woman. Enough is enough with this stuff.)
*Some medical situations may result in this sort of thing.
For everything (turn turn turn) there is a season (turn turn turn) - except gender roles, which are set in stone
3 commentsRight, Mark Regnerus?
"Optimally we wouldn't be talking about who has more power in relationships and why. That's not how relationships were intended to be. As a couple becomes more in love, self-sacrifice generally emerges. That's good. But when the conditions in which relationships develop change—as they have—it's foolish to expect that relationships won't change with them...[but pornography] takes power away from women as a group, because it provides men with another sexual outlet."The context here is that Regnerus is a sociologist who buys into the economic theory of relationships. More specifically, he buys into the gender essentialist theory of relationships, on which "men pay, via economic stability or education or as little as dinner, to get access to sex, while women pay with their sexuality to get goods that men can offer...because [of] basic differences between men and women and basic different interests in sex, marriage, and long-term relationships." For someone who claims to think economically, however, this is a superlatively inflexible theory to uphold.
Pornography, Regnerus thinks, is "eroding the value of what [a woman] has that [a man] wants." Economically speaking, this thesis says roughly that pornography increases the opportunity cost of sex for (straight*) men - but that's all that it says. It doesn't say, for instance, that pornography increases the opportunity cost of the whole relationship for men - that, to put it less technically, relationships become more of a drag and less overall worthwhile. After all, sex is not the sum total of a relationship: there's also companionship, emotional intimacy, increased ease of raising a child or raising one well, and, yes, things like economic security. Then again, he can't even say for sure that porn makes sex as such less valuable; much like sex is not the alpha and omega of a relationship, "normal" sex is not the alpha and omega of sex. In a sense, this is just the home-theater argument all over again: if you want people to go out to the movies instead of staying in, you'd better give them an experience that it's worth going out for. (Put differently, if the conditions in which sexual relationships develop change, one should expect the sexual relationship itself to change.) Regnerus either doesn't see these wrinkles or discounts them because of those inbuilt "differences between men and women," but those are far less fixed than he believes them to be (or, to continue with what is evidently the theme of this post, if the conditions in which people develop change, one should expect the people themselves to change).
So, to recap, pornography has a deleterious effect on relationships only when (1) one or both partners is (pretty much) only in the relationship for sex, (2) the sex itself isn't going to become any more interesting or worthwhile, and (3) neither partner can bring themselves to reformulate their values. I don't think that we have any good reason to believe that any one of these three is necessarily going to hold true, and I sure don't think that Regnerus's economic analogy helps to make a case for that. Especially since the traditional economic picture of (heterosexual*) relationships is deleterious for both parties - just to give one example for each side, men have to outperform women financially while women have to subordinate their own sexual identities - what would really be foolish here would be to accept his arguments.
*Once again, we see here a theory that implicitly parses "relationship" as "relationship between one man and one woman," which is pretty much always a warning sign.
"Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) and the GOP-controlled state House have turned a blind eye to the plight of 98 Arizona patients in desperate need of organ transplants. Since Brewer enacted painful cuts to the state’s Medicaid program in October, two Arizonans unable to pay for the transplants they needed passed away...However, state House Republicans remain vigilant in their anti-human life campaign. They are refusing to let measures to restore funding for organ transplants advance because, as the state House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jon Kavanagh (R) explained, 'not enough lives would be saved to warrant restoring millions in budget cuts' for the transplants."Although I take issue with ThinkProgress's rhetoric - this "anti-human life" thing is a little over the top - people need to understand that how deeply and thoroughly dishonest the whole rationing argument was (and, assuming anyone still makes it, is). Until emergency medical care becomes so cheap that they're giving it away on street corners like Chick tracts, we're going to have to include medicine in the same prioritization scheme in which we include everything else - like, in this case, business.
"While Courtney’s life is on the line, Brewer eagerly signed tax cuts for businesses into law last week — cuts that will cost Arizona $538 million by 2018...For Brewer, the fact that Courtney’s plight is forced to take a backseat to business tax cuts is 'sad but necessary.'"Where are the massive protests? Where is the unchecked anti-government rage? Where is the vitriol about socialism and big brother and Canadian healthcare? The answer, of course, is that there shouldn't have been any in the first place and so now, when the prospective object of such vitriol is on the "right" side (as it were), it has magically vanished. Whether or not Brewer is right to carve up the budget the way she does, at least she's thinking about this like a responsible adult citizen and not like a Tea Party nutcase. Now if only we could find some way to engage people like her in a substantive dialogue that culminates in an opportunity to hold her to account, we might actually have a functioning democracy.
"In a time of tight budgets and financial crisis, politicians nowadays look to economic growth as the centerpiece of their domestic policy programs. Gross domestic product is taken to be the leading indicator of national well-being. But, as we look ahead to 2011 and beyond, we should ask ourselves: is it really wise to accord such importance to growth?While Bok makes some good points, I think it's interesting to see where his imagination fails. While there's a good deal of research out there pointing to the flaws in the conventionally wise richer-means-happier thesis and while economic growth can definitely be a will-o'-the-wisp for policymakers, there are still some reasons to want growth, not the least of which is that a nation's happiness is not necessarily its most important priority.
...Since happiness is ultimately what people want the most, while wealth is only a means to that end, the primacy now accorded to economic growth would appear to be a mistake."
Taking as a premise the idea that a government ought to seek its people's happiness, it's pretty obvious that growth is not a suitable substitute; the one is conceptually distinct from the other and empirically they don't coincide often enough for us to even pretend otherwise. But some of the factors that prevent wealth from producing happiness are, it seems, relatively intractable. Inequality in status, for example, is not likely to be resolved ever, let alone soon. Virtual reality, on the other hand, could well make some strides and then allow otherwise unhappy people to become less unhappy. Medical technology could develop to the point where poor/uninsured people could finally afford to be healthy. Commodities could finally become so easy to produce that we move from our outdated economic model to one more conducive to human happiness. Perhaps governments would have to shape growth in order to accomplish these things, but that's what policy is for. Bok, however, would probably be okay with all of this. The bigger problem is his odd brand of isolationism.
Even if domestic economic policy can safely be shaped by reference to what will make the country's citizens happiest, it seems wrong for Bok to say that nothing "could matter more to...constituents than [their own] happiness." Certainly any given person can take their own happiness to be less important than, oh I dunno, everyone else's happiness combined, so it seems to make sense to assume that a country can consider its own welfare as being of less than paramount importance. Governments likewise have a moral as well as a political interest in seeing other countries develop, and since any given country can only provide foreign aid in proportion to its own economic abilities that means that governments (can) have an interest in growing their economies that doesn't reduce to anything about domestic happiness.
His theory of government self-interest aside, Bok is certainly correct that GDP is at best a very rough measure of happiness and that governments have more pressing responsibilities than the sheer, mindless increasing of what is essentially a simple analytical tool in the field of economics. Happiness is one such responsibility, but foreigners have an interest in being happy just the same as anyone else, and it'd be none too smart to overlook the potential of wealth to facilitate things like equality, justice, and, yes, happiness, especially while so many countries are in desperate need precisely of stable economic growth.
Having now brought up the subject and dabbled a bit in the general area, I might as well go for it. Here are some guideposts for constructing an ethical theory using only reason and evidence (as well as axioms, naturally; there is no system of thought that can be produced without at least some axioms):
1. A theory must be able to say what to value and how to value it.
More specifically, an ethical theory must be able to say what is of ethical value. On this blog we've seen any number of people argue, in effect, for the conflation of moral and aesthetic value, and if you look hard enough you can find people who express similar confusion about evolutionary value, political value, business value, philosophical value, and all manner of other value systems. The first criterion for an ethical theory is that it must deal exclusively with what is right and wrong per se and then let any relationships between value systems fall out from there. That is, we should be able to deduce the relationship between moral and (say) aesthetic value by formulating a precise and robust moral theory and then exploring the implications thereof to see how they relate to aesthetics.
Most moral theorists succeed at least in this, although of course some of the less well-trained ones can never quite put their finger on which values they favor. However, identifying a value is not quite enough, because there are multiple ways to react to a given value. To use an example from Marcia Baron's work on Kant, you can choose to promote values (as in the case of a proponent of free speech who nonetheless argues against a speech act on the grounds that it is overall harmful to the cause of free speech) or to respect them (as in the case of a free speech proponent who permits all manner of speech on the grounds that any other behavior is inconsistent with the value in question). There may well be other options as well, but even just having the two means that we have to pick one or the other (at least on a case-by-case basis if not in general), and this is where theorists tend to struggle.
In both of these cases, however, it's relatively easy to see how reason and evidence can at least play a role in specifying both the correct value(s) and the correct way(s) of handling them. Contrasting moral value with other kinds of value, for example, can help us to sharpen and refine our concept of what matters; better yet, referring back to better-established value systems can help us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of different manners of valuation. Just to have an example, one really trivial truth we can learn from this level of investigation is that business ethics does not suffice for ethics as such, so that one ought at least sometimes go against the business interest's of one's employer. That's not exactly a revelation, I don't think, but it is a moral truth that we can learn just using reason and evidence, so we're already ahead of where Alister McGrath said we could ever get.
2. A theory must be able to give a clear evaluation of each and every possible moral scenario; that is, it must provide a well-defined function for measuring actions. We need not be able to know what that evaluation is, but we do need to know that the evaluation exists.
Briefly, in case some people are confused, the distinction I'm talking about is this: let's say that I pick a certain mathematical function (I dunno f(x) = 3x-7) and then ask my roommate to give me a number to input without telling him what the function is. Despite the fact that he couldn't possibly be expected to guess the output, the output is nice and clear for any given numeric value he cares to give me. Morality, this criterion is to say, might be such that we all are in the position of my roommate in the analogy, but it had better at least be a function. It wouldn't be acceptable, for example, if (to be ridiculous about it) the function had been f(x) = 3x - chicken above July sasquatch or (to be less ridiculous about it) the function had been f(x) = 1/x (for which 0 produces a non-answer).
To my mind, this eliminates a wide variety of deontological views. For instance, any simple deontological theory of ethics that has as moral rules "do not break promises" and "do not steal" will be stumped if I promise my roommate that I'll have the rent on time but then it turns out that the only way I can get it is to hold up a convenience store (or whatever). More generally, any moral view that absolutely forbids a set of actions will be invalid if those actions could possibly be the only options available to a moral agent. I feel like this is a pretty serious knock against all deontological theories, which I have a hard time picturing being able to come up with a definitive answer in hard cases, but in any case it certainly eliminates at least some theories.
Note, however, that a theory need not produce a single best answer each and every time. Maybe, for example, some deontologists would like to say that it just doesn't matter whether I welsh on the rent or steal it because both are equally bad. That's perfectly fine: a well-defined function needn't have unique outputs. It does, however, have to be able to measure and weigh in every single case, which (as you may recall) Chris Tollefsen's ethics cannot do. This, too, counts as moral learning, and is a pretty significant step forward. Now, I think, we can safely reject even a weak version of McGrath's claims about the rational inaccessibility of morality.
3. Likewise, a theory must be able to give a clear evaluation of people (or, if you prefer the more general term, moral agents), even if we can't say in every case what that evaluation is.
In accordance with (1), a theory must take seriously the difference between good behavior and good people. You'd think that this would be easy, but it's shockingly common to see someone identify a(n allegedly) good character trait as some kind of predictor or component of good action. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that we tend to use the same vocabulary for persons and actions, which is why it's encouraging to see someone like Leah Libresco call virtues "important" and not just "good." But another part is that, amazingly enough, some people actually feel as though an ethical theory need only provide either an account of good behavior or an account of good people, which is such a defeatist attitude that I can't even bring myself to attack it seriously.
A moral theory doesn't, however, have to reduce all of our linguistic mechanisms for appraisal to one metric. Praiseworthiness, for instance, may well be different from goodness or dutifulness or respectfulness no matter which moral theory we pick. But if a theory settles for a plurality of views, it must choose one as being the most morally relevant or appropriate. We need to be able to take any two people and say which did a better job in their lives (assuming, of course, they weren't exactly even).
4. A theory must be able to account for (in Ronald Dworkin's terms) both morals and ethics.
There's a major asymmetry that appears when we compare how we ought to treat ourselves and how we ought to treat others: it won't hurt any of us to disappear into our own heads for a while, but if we try to bring other people with us we'll often do so at great moral cost. Some people have taken this to mean that we must behave towards ourselves like we behave towards others - or, at least, they've taken other people to mean that. (This, so far as I can tell, is the only conceivable basis of the whacked-out criticism that [gnu] atheists are soulless, unhappy people or are advocating a system that calls for soulless unhappiness.) That's just wrong, but it's equally wrong to carry this too far, as Frank Wilson seems to.
"The problem with a purely rational approach to things is that it tends to downplay, and in some cases completely ignore, the role imagination plays in thought. I am not, by the way, advocating any sort of neo-primitivism [but merely for the idea] that we ought to feel free to think more imaginatively than we are taught to nowadays...Up until this "profoundest self" stuff I thought Wilson might be saying essentially what I've already said about atheism and transcendence, but whereas my position is based on pretty simple ideas (we can make ourselves happier at no moral cost if we embrace "our own mythologies" from time to time), Wilson seems to have built his on something rather more complicated and esoteric. This leads directly to the next point...
Unfortunately, we tend to run from our own mythologies, or to bury them away, afraid that if others learn of them they will think us eccentric at best or else flat-out nuts. But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world."
5. A theory must not presuppose scientific falsehoods, philosophically incoherent concepts, or anything of the sort.
Virtue ethicists may employ a concept of character that has no psychological existence, Kant may have given too much credit to the common idea that we can choose the reasons for which we act, Wes Smith likes to invent specious distinctions between humans and other animals, and of course any number of ethical theories refer to concepts of self or free will that seem to be either incomprehensible or fictional - and then there's divine command theory, which I take it I need discuss no further. Ethics needs to describe the actual world, not a world of convenient folk-wisdom fantasies.
6. A theory need not tell us that the world is a perfect (or even great, or even good) place. Similarly (or perhaps, more generally), a theory need not conform to or even justify all of our intuitions.
Following on his (aforelinked) foray into Cliff's-notes Kantianism, Tollefsen tried to defend himself with this "Alice's Restaurant"-esque song and dance:
"I do not think one could in good conscience allow the Nazis to depart alone with the Jews. Physically resisting would likely be futile, but not necessarily wrong. One could offer to go with the Nazis in place of the Jews; and if that failed one could insist that one be brought with the Jews (it is very likely this decision would already have been made by the Nazis). And one should be willing to accept that a possibly significant degree of physical harm, perhaps even death, would be visited upon one’s person while one continued to proclaim the truth to the Nazis about the wickedness of their mission.This is just a joke. Rather than simpering and pandering, Tollefsen needs to own up and just admit that his system is a good way to get a lot of people killed to no productive end. Even leaving aside the pretty atrocious claim that permitting a group of Jews to be killed counts as "act[ing] in solidarity" with them, nobody's moral theory is going to have a happy ending all the time. Trying to achieve one not only tends to introduce flaws into one's system - notice how Tollefsen, a deontologist, has now begun to suggest that it's appropriate to judge actions by their consequences - but is simply a waste of time and energy. Anybody with enough brains to go after a full moral theory ought to have enough life experience to know for a certainty that things just plain go wrong sometimes.
In all such actions one would act in solidarity with the Jews and charity towards the Nazi. One would witness to the truth in ways that, were more to do so, could conceivably be the undoing of the regime."
7. A theory need not convince absolutely everyone.
One objection that I rather suspect McGrath would hold in his back pocket is that we've had millennia to work on these issues and yet we seem to be more divided than ever. How, he might say, could morality be reasonably demonstrable from reason and evidence if so many people get it wrong? Of course, there's nothing to explain here: the truth of evolution is demonstrable from reason and evidence and yet it has not been universally (or, depending on your definition, even widely) accepted. Especially because everybody learns some ethics but very few have the slightest inkling of how complicated a subject it really is, it would be absurd to expect any kind of consensus to develop.
To conclude all of this, a brief word about axioms. At some point any viewpoint will cease to be able to explain or prove things, but this does not mean that the tenets at that level must be taken on faith - that is, must simply be accepted and then left alone. We can, for one, seek to disprove them; this is how I think anti-theistic arguments usually work. We can also seek to limit their scope; I've been led to believe that this is what happened to Newtonian physics. And, of course, we can seek to explain them even though they seem to be axiomatic, because our knowledge will never be perfect and there's always a chance that something more fundamental exists. All of these are ways of testing axioms, which, if it is not a means of proof, is nonetheless very different than taking them on faith. Our limits in discovering moral truth, then, are no more mysterious or powerful than our limits in any other area: rather than the truth about morality being somehow sealed off from reason and evidence, it's just one more thing that none of us has the time, energy, or cognitive skills to establish beyond all question.
You may need the previous comic to get this one, but:
As much as I support the ideal of a participatory democracy in which citizens collectively determine policy (constrained, say, by some basic limits on what that policy can look like), there are definitely times when a popular vote is not the right tool to use. Take solving math problems as an example: no matter how many people line up and swear that 0.9999... is not equal to 1, that's never going to make it so. Likewise, one would think, with metaphysics - unless, of course, you're a theist.
"A standard approach to arguing against ontological arguments is to come up with a parody like 'necessarily existing chimera' or a 'maximally great island'. However, I think that a lot of such parodies achieve little because the parodic concept they operate with (a) seems much less natural than that of a maximally great being (or a positive property, in the Goedelian arguments), and (b) is not in common use...The more natural a concept seems, the more likely it is that the concept is of something possible."This, I think, has to be an epistemological claim. That is, Alex Pruss isn't actually arguing that increased naturalness makes a concept more likely to be true (or true in some world), he's just saying that increased naturalness should lead us to trust the concept more. While the former of those is really batshit crazy, I actually have a hard time seeing how the latter is actually any better. Especially because Pruss doesn't limit his census-taking to experts - all "monotheistic devotion," he says, counts towards the common use of the concept of a maximally great being - this seems like a straight-up argument ad populum: people use it, therefore it's true. There are, of course, major and irresolvable problems with this - to pick just two, people can believe mutually incompatible things and there's a long, rich history of commonly used conceptions being wrong - and that's why it's a classical example of a fallacy.
Pruss apparently tries to bolster his claim by adding that "the more a concept is in common use, the more revisionary it is to claim that the concept is of something impossible," but why should this matter? Being revisionary just means being in opposition to popular conception, so this premise only makes a difference if we presume that the popular conception is to be trusted - which is, of course, the ostensible conclusion and thus disqualified from being a presumption.
Furthermore, there's an empirical component here that's just missing. Pruss wants to say that "maximally great being" has a certain level of common usage, but does it actually? I don't think he knows that at all. I especially don't think he knows that when it comes to the common churchgoer, who I rather suspect would have trouble just parsing the phrase "maximally great being," let alone understanding it in the philosopher's sense and finding it natural and intuitive. Then, on top of that empirical sleight of hand, he adds another: "The concept of a gratuitous evil does have a certain naturalness to it," he says, "[b]ut I think this argument still loses out to the ontological argument because the concept of a gratuitous evil is to a lesser extent in common use than the concept of God or a maximally great being." What makes him think that he knows this? I understand that philosophers often need to incorporate claims about the empirical world in their arguments, but to just up and declare this kind of thing is absurd.
Finally, I rather suspect that Pruss's criterion is too broad and that he may not even mean to use it. When we say that something is "in use," we're obviously leaving open what it is being used for (or, if you prefer, how it's being used). This is a real problem for his common-use criterion because, for instance, "square circle" is a concept that gets tons of use - just, y'know, as a paradigmatic example of an impossible object. What this means is that Pruss can only make a prima facie case for the likely possibility of (e.g.) a maximally great being, and I'm guessing that's all he wanted in the first place, but a contradiction in terms should never be prima facie possible to any degree. We now see, then, that his common-use criterion would be significantly improved if we added in some kind of check on the manner of the use. So, to continue with the previous example, square circles would be exempt from the rule because nobody (I hope) actually uses them in a way that supports their existence (or, perhaps, because everybody uses them in a way that denies their existence). At first, this may even seem to help Pruss, because I'm fairly certain that (even lay) theists use the concept of a gratuitous evil all the bloody time. Most of them just deny that such a thing exists, is all - I mean, you can't have a sermon about how all apparently gratuitous evils are really part of God's plan unless you use the concept of a gratuitous evil, right? Unless Pruss wants to come up with a whole new interpretation of, say, the book of Job, this puts his empirical claim in some pretty hot water, I'd think. The trouble is, if he adopts some kind of check on the manner of use either in order to avoid jeopardizing his empirical claim or in order to avoid coming out in support of contradictions, this whole thing starts to look a whole lot more like "people believe it, therefore it's probably true," and everybody knows to avoid stuff that looks like that. As I said before, I think this is an ad populum one way or the other, but I think the only way that Pruss can hide this is by pretending that usage-of is somehow a more objective measure than belief-in.
If you want to learn about the ontological argument, you'd be better off reading Ophelia Benson or Dale Smith. What you learn might not be as applicable to a career in philosophy, given that Benson and Smith don't flail around as extravagantly as Pruss does, but I like to think that becoming a better thinker is worth it even without an economic incentive.
Okay, back to normal for Wes Smith.
"The very word organism implies organization, an overarching principle that binds the parts and processes of life into a harmonious whole. As a living being, an organism is an integrated, self developing and self-maintaining unity under the governence of an immanent plant."So if you have a genetic defect that leaves you without, say, a functioning kidney, you're not a human organism? You're not even an organism? Or if you decide to cease self-maintenance (by starving yourself to death, say), you exclude yourself from the class of organisms? Dying humans are no longer organisms? (Or is dying a "harmonious" expression of "the parts and processes of life"?) And how is an embryo strictly "self-developing" given that its development is contingent on having (usually) a womb to grow inside of?
"For an embryonic organism, this implies an inherent potency, an engaged and effective potential with a drive in the direction of the mature form. By its very nature, an embryo is a developing being. Its wholeness is defined by both its manifest expression and its latent potential; it is the phase of human life in which the ‘whole’ (as the unified oranismal principle of growth) precedes and produces its organic parts…To be a human organism is to be a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens, with a human present and a human future evident in the intrinsic potential for the manifestation of the species-typical form."This is already so far wrong that I can barely keep track of all the loose threads. It's typical for our species to have two legs - does that make one-legged people not human (organisms)? If the "inherent potency" is that which is "engaged" while an embryo develops, why is it the potency and not the combination potency-and-engagement that matters? Or, to ask the question slightly differently, if the inherent potential of an embryo is to develop but that potential needs external help (again, in the form of a womb, usually), in what sense is an embryo "a developing being" just because of its "nature"? If an embryo is by nature developing into a full human organism, how can it simultaneously be a whole living member of the species? My head hurts.
"That is different and distinct from the cells I kill each morning when I brush my teeth. They are chips off the old block, to use my late father’s favorite expression. But they are not the block."Okay, now he's just making things up. The cells of an adult human do indeed have "the intrinsic potential for the manifestation of the species-typical form" - it's called somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning and it's been around now for long enough that self-promoting bioethicists like Smith ought to know about it as a matter of course. It takes more work to get a skin cell to grow into a full organism, but the "inherent potency" is there. And, again, it's not like either cloning or natural embryonic development can succeed without outside manipulation of the relevant biological material; pregnancy isn't like winding up a jack-in-the-box and then just waiting for it to pop out. There is a difference in kind between the help an embryo requires and the help a skin cell requires, but that's irrelevant for a definition that requires self-development. It would also be fantastically stupid to let too much hang on the difference in kind between natural help (i.e., help that is or could be provided without artifice) and artificial help: what do you do, then, with the babies that need to go on life support right after they're born? Refuse to call them human, to accord them any more moral status than a rock?
I know these words are different than the ones I'm used to seeing, but somehow the ideas just don't seem to have changed (let alone improved). Someone call me when this debate is less full of sheer stupidity.
While we're all (breathlessly, I'm sure) for my opinion on the provability of morality, let's take a look at how not to do philosophical ethics. Over at Slog, Paul Constant calls this video of some random Mormon woman "A Christian Doing the Christian Thing":
First of all, calling this "the Christian Thing" is such a massive oversimplification that I can't even stand it. For this woman it is Christian to support marriage equality, but marriage equality is not in any meaningful way Christian because it isn't a clear tenet of Christianity or a clear implication of any Christian tenets and, even if it were the case that marriage equality were clearly supported by Christianity, Christianity still wouldn't be the only system that supports it. Worshiping Jesus is the Christian thing to do; holding Random Political Position X is just the right or wrong thing to do depending on what Random Political Position X happens to be. Believe me, I'm really happy that this woman has managed to (at least partially) overcome the influence of the somewhat creepy religious sect to which she belongs, but that doesn't make it "the Christian Thing." Now then, to the video itself.
- "Pictures like these are the reason I go to church...I want us to learn that we love others, not just those who don't look like us but those who don't believe like us, either."
- "Wouldn't it be cool if in that picture there was a woman in a burka, a Catholic priest, or even a man with a cigarette?"
- "So why is this church who's [sic] taught me so much about my savior asking its members for their time and their money and their votes to deny other people marriage? And why should I not follow them?"
- "I had to figure out who I really am...I'm a wife, I'm a mom of five, I'm a loyal member of this church. But I'm also a member of the community at large, and most importantly I'm a disciple of Christ."
- "And that last characteristic is what makes me obligated to follow my own conscience in this matter."
- "I know my church has good intentions...but I think my marriage can only be as protected as the marriage that is least protected in society right now, and that would be gay marriage."
- "What happens if we give our government the power to decide who can be married based on morality?"
Even so, holy shit:
Quoth Gordon Haff,
"Watson is in no real sense thinking and the use of the term 'understanding' in the context of Watson should be taken as anthropomorphism rather than a literal description.Is Watson just about brute force then? One might think so. Its hardware specs are impressive:On the one hand, Jeffrey Shallit is entirely correct to criticize Haff for talking trash without first having provided "a formal definition of what [it] means to 'think' in a 'real sense'": this is one of the areas where it's currently extremely easy to just throw words around without ever even considering that those words have to have a meaning. Likewise, this silliness about how Watson would have compared to five-year-old computers is truly irrelevant - the comparison we're making is to people and how powerfully we can compute (and how much memory we have, etc.), not to some arbitrary benchmark that just so happens to have been established a round number of years ago. On the other hand, though, if this isn't really thinking, maybe real thinking is overrated.
IBM Watson is comprised of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.To put this in perspective, by my estimate, Watson would have been the fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list just five years ago."
Okay, yes, the tasks we would like help doing are more algorithmically complex than just looking up trivia answers. But Watson doesn't just look up trivia answers - it also parses language, which is a notoriously difficult thing to get computers to do. And, to be kinda blunt, a lot of us could really use help looking up what amount to trivia answers. I mean, that's a pretty large part of being a doctor or a librarian or a lawyer or pretty much any job for which significant amounts of research are required, is just being able to remember (or find) the best-known answer to what is formally identical to a trivia question. I wouldn't want a robot doctor - yet - but it'd be a big step forward (both in terms of clinical practice and in terms of providing a solid foundation for research efforts) if medical treatments were more consistent and more consistently in line with the standard of care.
Anyway, as much fun as it would be to see Watson actually compete against humans instead of, y'know, slaughtering them, this is what we want. If they're going to be as useful as we need them to be, computers need to be able to solve problems better than humans but in a way that makes their answers easily accessible to humans, and for all of its limitations Watson is a pretty good step in that direction.
Y'know, for someone who spends the first eleven paragraphs of an essay talking about the dangers of sophistry, Alister McGrath sure is a fucking dickhead. Here are his paragraphs 12 and 13:
"So what is faith? Why is belief such a normal and important way of life, whatever the New Atheist establishment says about the matter (and no matter how confidently it says it)?Er, yeah, but belief and faith would be two different things, sort of like eating and eating without chewing. Incredibly, although the two words are very obviously different words and are pretty obviously meant to mean different things, McGrath is utterly consistent in conflating them.
The simple truth is that belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world. It is not blind - it just tries to make the best sense of things on the basis of the limited evidence available."
"As the philosopher Julia Kristeva observed, 'whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say "I believe", I mean "I hold as true".'This is on the order of quoting a Christian theologian and then going off on a rant about how absurd thetans are. McGrath is just not close. The best he can do is take Hitchens out of context and make it seem as though he (Hitchens) is arguing for a contradiction: "Our belief is not a belief" is a phrase that appeared in one of Hitchens's books, but in context it's clear that he means that rational skepticism is not a creed. Whether or not this is true, it is at least not the obvious contradiction that McGrath makes it out to be.
Dawkins clearly believes otherwise. He set out his characteristic views on this matter in The Selfish Gene back in 1976.
'[Faith] is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of supporting evidence.'"
The really sad part about all of this is that, hidden amongst these truly awful arguments, McGrath actually floats an idea that's not deplorable. His defense of religious faith, he says, is premised on the notion that he "can't prove any [moral] beliefs to be true, and neither can anyone else." (Interestingly enough, when he says "prove" he means it in the same sense that Dawkins et al do: evidence combined with logic.) You can take my word for it for now that he's wrong about this - which, having mentioned it, I suppose will have to be its own post soon - but in the end it doesn't even matter. If specific moral tenets are unprovable (or, really, incapable of being supported by evidence; he really needs this latter claim), we can still prove (or, at least, provide evidence) that morality is a real, existing thing. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are unsupported by evidence and part of a system that can't be proven (or supported evidentially). That's a pretty significant dissimilarity between the two kinds of belief - but then, as we've seen, pretty significant dissimilarities aren't sufficient for McGrath to catch on. Quite frankly, between his poor reading comprehension skills and his outrageous reference to "the somewhat meagre truths that reason can actually prove," I am really not sure why anybody takes this clown seriously.
Anyone know what the term is that I'm looking for? "Body fascism"? "Fat prejudice"? Something?
Well, anyway, following cold* on the heels of this wildly successful post about Ed Brayton calling Sarah Palin a shrew, I am now going to make each and every one of the same points again but in a different context, and all thanks to good ol' Dan Savage. Savage, as you might recall, was the subject of a particularly dim-witted attack by one Renee Martin, who claimed that he was in essence an oppressive wolf in progressive sheep's clothing. In a similar vein, although less rabidly, one of Savage's coworkers recently accused him of oppressing fat people.
"I get that you think you're actually helping people and society by contributing to the fucking Alp of shame that crushes every fat person every day of their lives—the same shame that makes it a radical act for me to post a picture of my body and tell you how much it weighs. But you're not helping. Shame doesn't work. Diets don't work. Shame is a tool of oppression, not change.This is Lindy West writing, and she claims to be five-nine and over two hundred and sixty pounds, so (and this is her own claim that I'm just repeating!) she should know. When she puts it this way, it's awfully hard to figure out how Savage could be anything but a hateful, mean-spirited, fatphobic (I think that's a real word) bigot. Except when you read Savage's response, it's hard to see what the bloody hell West thinks she's talking about.
Fat people already are ashamed. It's taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and 'choices.' Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they're trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it's because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don't even have yet? You know what's shameful? A complete lack of empathy."
For example: West misattributes to Savage the view that rolls of fat are objectively undesirable or ugly when in fact he was making a claim about fashion, albeit a rather badly-phrased one. Mere bad phrasing, though, is not reliably indicative of ill will; indeed, part of the whole oppression-theory framework is that even well-intentioned people are led to communicate in harmful ways (see: Brayton, Ed). Strangely enough, though, West neglects to account for this relatively central premise of the view that she is busy propounding. Then there are West's similarly odd assertions that she needn't justify her healthiness (as though the comorbidities of obesity are just going to go away with the right sociological perspective) and that, "if you were concerned about my health, you would also be concerned about my mental health" (as though it's impossible to say hurtful things to someone whose mental health really is a priority of yours). It's not that West doesn't have any good points - viewed from a distance, her article is pretty much full of good points - it's just that when she goes to apply those points to Savage she does a really bad job of it.
Nor is this to say that Savage is perfect or without fault. Thoughtlessness or poor phrasing would be sufficient in and of itself, but he also admits further wrongdoing; some of this West identifies correctly, some not. The interesting thing about the interaction, I think, is that West appears only to be able to think within the oppressive mindset whereas Savage, whatever his actions, is clearly living outside the oppressive mindset. To see what I mean, check out these paragraphs, which appear near the start of West's post:
"I always thought that some day—when I finally stop failing—I will become smaller, and when I become smaller literally everything will get better (I've heard It Gets Better)! My life can begin! I will get the clothes that I want, the job that I want, the love that I want. It will be great! Think how great it will be to buy some pants or whatever at J. Crew. Oh, man. Pants...
This is my body. It is MINE. I am not ashamed of it in any way. In fact, I love everything about it. Men find it attractive. Clothes look awesome on it. My brain rides around in it all day and comes up with funny jokes."
I'm not sure how much of this West explicitly believes or will admit to holding to be true; she may well believe none of it. But it's worrying that people choose to get free of their victim's mindset by simply embracing the fictitious archetype to which they had been comparing themselves. We don't (I think) want self-conscious fat people to feel the way that they imagine/have been told that The Thin Person feels, we want them to feel the way that actual non-self-conscious people feel. So, for example, we don't really want people to conclude that they love their bodies unconditionally and totally no matter what and then decide that they don't need to change a thing about themselves because trying to change your body is tantamount to self-hate. We would prefer (I think) for people to feel as though they can (want to) change their bodies while at the same time having an overall liking for their bodies. Or, if they absolutely must feel as though their bodies are overall unacceptable, they should at least regard their bodies in the way that one might regard a slightly messy bedroom (and not in the way that one might regard, say, a child rapist). Put briefly, it sure seems like the best alternative to feeling oppressed is feeling immune from oppression and not feeling as though one has conquered oppression.
But for people for whom that's not an option (for whatever reason), it's understandable that anything short of love and support would be hate: if it seems as though the scales must tip one way or the other, there's only one kind of contribution that's welcome. This, I think, is both why it's often so difficult for people to recognize their allies and so crucial for them to be able to do so. West doesn't really want to alienate or fight against Savage just like feminists don't really want to alienate or fight against Brayton - at least, not right now and not because of opposing agendas. Maybe at some point these relatively nitpicky concerns will be right up at the top of the list of things that need changing, but as it stands now we're nowhere near that point. And, of course, even if people really do want to sweat the little things right this very instant, there's just no situation in which it's wise to confuse ineptitude with malice. Just because Savage doesn't luuuuuurve everything about fat people doesn't make him a villain.
*Yes? "Following hot on..." means "soon after," so "following cold on..." would mean "long after"?