Rust Belt Philosophy

Just in case you were wondering whether sexism is still a thing, here is a hint: yes.

"I guess you could argue that, as superheroes, neither Buffy Summers nor Diana Prince need big muscles to do their jobs. They’re inherently strong. But their male counterparts are heavily muscled. Tom Welling is pretty cut on Smallville (am I the only person shocked that that show is still on?), as was Tobey Maguire when he played the somewhat lithe Spider-Man.

My suspicion is that live-action women superheroes aren’t buff because in order to be traditionally sexy and feminine, they just can’t be. A Wonder Woman with powerful muscles would be intimidating to fanboys, not attractive."

You can add to this incisive analysis almost every science fiction heroine, every female warrior in a high fantasy world, the pitiable women on the various pro "wrestling" circuits, and, in fact, almost every depiction of a woman in any role whatsoever other than "nauseatingly steroid-filled bodybuilder." In Wonder Woman's case the battle was sort of lost before it even began, but I'm not sure why we should be surprised by this anymore. Annoyed, disappointed, frustrated - sure. But surprised? Only if we haven't been paying any damn attention at all ever. The vastly more interesting question is what we should do about it. For instance, I'd be perfectly happy to watch a movie about a well-muscled female superhero, so long as that movie was a good one. But what are the odds of that? What, even, are the odds of there being an intellectual property that would qualify to be made into such a movie? I fear they are not good.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to me!

"I don't think religion and atheism are compatible (with the exeptions [sic] of some extremely boring religions)...And, on either side, the stakes of being wrong are high enough that there's little use in papering over the differences or agreeing to disagree. If you want to sort out the truth, I think that goal is best served by respectful rhetoric."

In case you can't tell from reading this blog, I myself am not so sure that Leah Libresco knows "that [truth-seeking] is best served by respectful rhetoric" - but only because I'm not sure that anybody knows that, because I'm not sure that it's, y'know, true. At the very least it would be smart to acknowledge the perverting effect that respectfulness has had on at least some academic truth-seeking, and to understand that respectful content is ultimately more important than respectful rhetoric. To wit:

"Science fiction is the literature of If. It’s best practitioners tend to ask theological questions: What does it mean to be human? What’s it all about? Where do we come from? Where are we going? It’s funny that so much of the genre is so bent on basically theological issues while so many of its authors are atheists...

So, for instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by the atheist Stanley Kubrick and co-written by him with the atheist Arthur C. Clarke, puts us in a godless evolutionary universe and then supplies mysterious godlike aliens who help our race become divinized and, quite literally, born again. Steven Spielberg was quite surprised when somebody pointed out to him that the story of a peaceful being who descends from heaven, befriends children, has the power to heal and give life, dies, rises from the dead, and ascends into heaven was done before E.T. Similarly, in The Matrix we see the central character, Thomas Anderson ('Twin Other Son') revealed to be Neo, the New Man, as he is heralded by a John the Baptist figure, betrayed by a Judas figure, killed by a Satanic figure and brought to life again by the kiss of a character named 'Trinity'. After this, he destroys the powers of Hell from within and then, once again, ascends into heaven.

...[These artworks] are, as all great pagan art is, evidence of a search, not evidence of having found the Christ for which we search. They search for Christ because we can’t not search for him, our hearts being made for him."

See any disrespectful rhetoric in there? Any profanity or personal attacks against non-believers or "inflammatory phrases or stunts"? Anything, no matter how small or piddling, that might make you think that Mark Shea's "feelings stemmed from spleen instead of logic"? Maybe you can squeeze something out of the way he describes Spielberg - but, then, I for one have no particular desire to defend the creative mind behind Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Judging by the criteria that Libresco offers, one would be forced to conclude that Shea is displaying nothing but respect and appreciation for atheists. And one would be wrong.

For a start, Shea's reasoning is shoddy at best. Jesus's story was told before ET, sure, but it was also told before Jesus. Whether Shea simply doesn't know his history or is intentionally skewing it to his favor, it's hard to spin this as a respectful sort of thing to do: when faced with a serious and intelligent interlocutor, the least one can do is to perform some basic research about one's own thesis. Likewise, the argument about science fiction is as clear a case of post-hoc reasoning as you'll ever see, a fallacy that is confirmed by the slew of great sci-fi works that bear no similarity at all to the Christian mythology.* But the biggest and most egregious act of disrespect is the automatic marking of each and every thing as being Christian.

Philosophical questions, for Shea, are really "theological." The way in which science fiction artworks "move us" is Christian. Everything we desire as humans reduces to wanting Jesus. Unbelievers are even so far alienated from themselves that they "will imprint the pattern of the [Christian myth] on [their] best tales, even if [they] are not conscious of it." Quite frankly, I have a bit of a hard time conceiving of anything more disrespectful than this: without knowing the first fucking thing about me, Mark Shea thinks he can tell me what's going on in my head. Has he expressed this thought angrily or bitterly? Not even close. But is it disrespectful nonetheless? You damn well bet it is. And it wouldn't be so bad, either, except we are trained not to recognize this as disrespect. When skeptics do the same thing we see right through it immediately: attributing all religious belief to the fear of death, say, or a delusion is very obviously a bad, and indeed a biased, argument, and that obviousness isn't hidden at all by even-handed writing. The same theists who rightly bristle at those arguments, however, will turn right around and tell us that we should really take Shea's thinking seriously - that, in fact, if we don't take them seriously we are the ones showing disrespect - despite the fact that the two arguments are essentially equivalent. Keeping this all in mind at once, the take-away lesson is this: for theists, respectful rhetoric is a way to retard philosophical progress, not to advance it.** We waste time and energy addressing shit like this precisely because it sounds so reasonable and decent to the demographic we would like to convince; to pretend that it contributes in any way, shape, or form to the progression of knowledge is a tremendously awful idea.

Another story Dan Savage told last night was about the reaction to his spreading santorum campaign. For those of you who don't know, Rick Santorum was (I am embarrassed to say) a senator from Pennsylvania who, among other offenses, once compared same-sex intercourse to bestiality. In response, Dan asked his readers to come up with and then vote among some new definitions for "santorum," from which the winner was "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex." The idea was so successful that the new definition now represents the first two Google results for Santorum's name and his political career has effectively been ended. Seeing this whole story unfold, some of Dan's readers wrote him to express their concern that he was sinking to the level of his opponents or bullying people. His response was this: Rick Santorum threw a punch at me; all I'm doing is defending myself. Theists have been attacking skeptics for literally thousands of years, including with psychologically offensive material like the post I quoted from Shea. I have nothing against the enjoyment of science fiction because it reminds somebody in a comforting way of their religious beliefs, but when other people start telling me why I enjoy science fiction they are trying (successfully or otherwise) to undermine my psychological stability and discredit my way of life, at which point the respectfulness of my response becomes a moot issue.

To her credit, Libresco is right to this extent: insofar as either you or your discussion partner has a fragile ego, a conversation just can't exist unless it's respectful on both sides. But not all of us need to be handled with kid gloves, and, as we've seen, respect itself can work against the truth as well. This is for the simple reason that respect is a fundamentally political notion and not a fundamentally philosophical one; that is, its most appropriate applications are those in which one is faced with a situation that revolves around relationships, authority, or power, not those in which one is faced with a situation that revolves around the truth. It's one thing to want to build bridges, but you need to be pretty damn careful about where you're building those bridges to (coughObamacough). Forming a respectful relationship with somebody who honestly believes that using condoms "lessens the dignity of the human person" or that "life without unconditional surrender is banal" is not going to help me get closer to the truth, and I don't need such a relationship to know that those ideas represent, at best, clumsy, credulous, and frankly lazy approximations of reality. And if I'm being asked not to feel respectful but merely to hide my disdain under a facade of pensive thoughtfulness or meek receptivity, I see even less value in the proposition - self-censorship is just not my cup of tea.

If we want to get at the truth, the first truth to accept is that doing so will frequently be disrespectful. Every society is premised on and has grown out of a flawed understanding of reality, yet respect demands nothing if not the preservation of at least some of these flaws. Truth-seeking, then, is an inherently disrespectful activity, at least when it happens within a social context - there's a good reason why one of the best-known philosophers in history was put to death for practicing his trade. There is, of course, a level of disrespect that serves no philosophical end, but to say that disrespect as such is forbidden is to castrate the philosophical enterprise - and for what? To get the chance to play patty-cake with soft-headed twits like Mark Shea? Thanks, but I'll pass.

*A very partial list: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Firefly/Serenity, Blade Runner, Nightfall, Solaris, Cowboy Bebop, Dune - I could go on.
**This is actually a specific case of a pretty trivially derived rule from oppression theory that states that oppression sustains itself in part by warping the terms of conversation. Theists, men, white people, and rich folks are all going to have much more rhetorical leeway than skeptics, women, people of color, and middle- or working-class people because we're all, almost literally, speaking their language (or, oftentimes in my case, "our" language). Libresco echoes this thinking when she remarks that "[p]oor conduct by some atheists means all the rest of us get treated with suspicion when we try to engage in discussions or debates," which is an idea that'll be intimately familiar to anybody who's ever played the part of a minority.

Having just returned from hearing Dan Savage speak on his morally heroic It Gets Better project, this story I was going to write about anyway has a little added significance.

"Despite no promised certification that lifting the military’s ban on homosexuality won’t harm readiness, recruiting or retention, Obama’s Pentagon has already produced materials hatched in a theater of the absurd. As Washington Times correspondent Rowan Scarborough reports, Marine commanders will have to ponder, for example, what to do if two male marines are seen kissing in a shopping mall.

Now there’s a scenario for building respect for the military among the nation’s youngsters."

Robert Knight is a member of a dying breed. "The national assault on Judeo-Christian morality," he says "mirrors what is going on in communities all over the country" - and his most compelling response to this, as you can see above, is anemic hate-based humor. As much as I could say about the religious overtones here - and one of Dan's audience members spoke about how her Orthodox Jewish parents have terrorized their daughter (the audience member's sister) into attempting suicide three times, so don't think this is just a Christian problem - there's a subtler and perhaps even more worthwhile point to be made here: Robert Knight, increasingly rare specimen though he is, is still held up as a mainstream American conservative.

The premise of Dan's It Gets Better project, in case you don't know and can't be arsed to follow the link I so conveniently provided for you, is to prevent LGBT kids from killing themselves by providing them with firsthand accounts of adult LGBT happiness and success; in short, to prove to them that the project's name is no lie. This, you would think, would be an absolutely risk-free venture for anybody and everybody. Suicide is considered to be a clear moral wrong and a major tragedy by almost every current worldview, even including most of the fantastically bigoted worldviews that are still tenaciously holding onto their condemnation of same-sex attraction and/or intercourse. Contributing a video to Dan's cause - to the cause, in essence, of preventing suicide - would seem to be a totally safe, utterly uncontroversial, reliably praiseworthy thing to do; conversely, working against Dan's project - working, in essence, to promote suicide - would seem to be an unquestionably deplorable, universally loathed thing to do. And yet Robert Knight is still held up as a mainstream American conservative.

As much as I understand that guilt by association can be a dangerous game to play, the silence from the Republican party and its various supporters is, at this point, deafening. Until and unless they publicly defend the idea that suicide is acceptable for a queer child with a bright future - and remember, these are the same people who won't even allow the brain-dead to be removed from artificial life support - this inaction points to only one conclusion: the conservative hatred of queer people is so pervasive and so unshakable that nothing short of a completed social revolution will erase it. As we wait for the GOP to field candidates for the 2012 presidential election, this point should not be allowed to fade into the background. Republicans and conservatives of all stripes have an unprecedented and, to this point, practically unique opportunity to contribute to a great moral good at essentially no cost to themselves - and they are not doing it. Rather, they are doing the exact opposite: increasing, rather than decreasing, the volume and insistence of their rhetoric. Civil rights are not a joke. Suicide is not a punchline. It does and it will get better, but not while moral monsters like these continue to populate our city halls, senate floors, and school boards. For the Republicans  and their psychotic voters, we must ensure that things only get worse.

Rhetoric can be a tricky, tricky thing. Just look at Anthony Esolen's use of antiquated terminology to suggestively describe modern times, which I'm sure he thinks is very clever.

"It is not just that the people of Wakefield are in a better position than are the king’s flunkies to determine how their children should be brought up, which men should be constables, and whether stocks or whipping posts better deter disorderly behavior. It is that, if the king or anybody else should take from them the authority to do such things, such usurpation would violate man’s nature. These were the people’s decisions to make."

Yeah! If only our "king" and his "flunkies" would stop trying to tell us who should be "constables" and stuff, we would be free to fulfill our human* nature! But wait, why should we think that, again?

"In the year 1215, at a place called Runnymede, the barons of England, having paused from their usual pastime of bickering with one another, allied themselves with another brotherhood, the bishops of the Church, to checkmate their own king. They compelled him to sign a document called Magna Carta...They were moved by no theory of government, no early version of the French Revolution’s Rights of Man. They were resisting a centralizing of power and the theft of their 'ancient liberties and customs,' meaning the local right of self-government and the raising of duties. By signing Magna Carta, the king conceded that there were many centers of authority besides his own, from that of his enemy the belligerent duke down to that of the free man in his home."

Oh - right, because it's what we've always done, therefore we have the right to keep on doing it. No, wait, that can't be it, cause that's just relativism. On that argument, we would be justified in continuing to tax people and stuff simply because we've been doing it long enough for it to qualify as a custom - and, worse, we would be unjustified in treating LGBT people like people, cause that hasn't been practiced long enough to qualify. Surely Esolen can't mean that, can he?

Another way for him to go would be to emphasize the part where these people "were moved by no theory of government." That, at least, would probably be true - or, if not, we can grant it to Esolen just for the sake of argument. The problem here is that he's mistaking an epistemological claim for an ontological one. He wants to say that these "ancient liberties and customs" represent some kind of "metaphysical and political reality that preceded the state," such that "the state" begins to look more and more like an artificial modern construction with no inherent importance except that which we deign to give it. Unfortunately, he can't prove this just by referencing what the people at the time thought or believed. Worse yet, the very fact that he thinks that "there [are] many centers of authority" implies certain things about the political philosophies that are open to him, and the first such implication is that he has to have one. Talking about "local right[s] of self-government" and wrongful "centralizing of power" means talking about a theory of government, period. So that road is closed as well.

Yet another interpretation of Esolen is that he wants to expand the domain of rights-worthy entities. On this idea, "the people—not simply individuals, but the people in their full nature as social and rational beings, freely associating in their guilds, villages, schools, and churches—retain authority prior to all the cravings of Washington or any other Laws R Us." This, however, makes no sense: neither guilds, villages, schools, churches, families, book clubs, improv comedy troupes, nudist colonies, nor indeed any other group of individuals qualifies for the rights of a single individual, simply because no group of individuals is an individual. These things especially can't be said to "[precede] the state" in terms of their moral status because many of them depend on the state (or, at least, some political entity) for their existence. Where, then, can Esolen turn? How about a rose-tinted past?

"I do not see that a man in sleepy Stockholm now, hedged round with creature comforts and given plenty of vacation time to poke around in the glorious funeral parlor called Europe, is living as free and full and human a life as an artisan in a chartered town would have done centuries ago, or as the pioneers of the American West did, bearing responsibility and skill and devotion and authority wherever they went."

At this point the game becomes clear: Esolen would rather be a cowboy and he's sad that the government isn't letting him. He even thinks, contrary to all available evidence, that "[t]he Church has been beaten into submission" and that contemporary America doesn't allow for the formation of what he calls brotherhoods.** That this is a tremendously skewed picture of modern life shouldn't be too incredibly difficult to figure out - if anything, our technological capabilities and increased leisure time have likely made us the freest generation in American history (at least, in terms of the associations that Esolen holds so dear). His failure to find responsibility, skill, devotion, and authority in this context is nobody's fault but his own, and his attempt to pin that personal failing on social progress verges on the disgusting. For him to ask us to roll back literally centuries of moral victories just to that he can discover the grass-is-always-greener fallacy firsthand is massively egotistical and, at any rate, not supported by even the merest sliver of reason.

*I am being a little generous here, as Esolen pretty consistently uses masculine language, which suggests to me either that he's been in a coma for the past 40ish years (which I know to be false) or he's intentionally flouting well-established linguistic conventions.
**What'd I tell you?

Following on last week's post about nuclear power, Shikha Dalmia's comments on the same subject are worth reviewing. If not always accurate, they're at least apropos.

"Nuclear advocates are dismayed that radiation fears over Japan’s Fukushima plant might kill an industry that has a better safety track record than virtually any other. But the public in Japan and elsewhere has every right to question the safety of nuclear power that everywhere receives massive government support. The Japanese government, in particular, has aggressively pushed nuclear in its quest for energy independence, perverting with political considerations the market’s natural ability to take safety issues into account."

Insofar as Dalmia worries about human interference in otherwise elegant plans, I'm with her. The market fetishism is on the strong side and is almost certainly another case of overspecification - market "plans" aren't the only plans that get undermined by random human misbehavior - but the rest of it seems pretty sound.

"[N]uclear [power] appeals to Japan’s mercantilist rulers who, since the mid-60s, have regarded the country’s lack of indigenous energy resources as a major strategic vulnerability that must be corrected at all cost. They have committed themselves to increasing Japan’s energy independence ratio from 35 percent currently to 70 percent by 2030. 'We can no longer rely on the market to secure energy,' declared Koji Omi, chair of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Energy Security Committee a few years ago. 'We should put much more emphasis on energy as our nation’s strategy'...

[T]he mother-of-all subsides is the liability cap that nuclear enjoys. In the event of an accident, the industry is on the hook for only $1.2 billion in damages, with the government covering everything beyond that...The liability cap effectively privatizes the profits of nuclear and socializes the risk. It uses taxpayer money to diminish the industry’s concern with safety—which government regulations can’t restore. In 2008 Tokyo actually started offering bigger subsidies to communities that agreed to fewer inspections. The problem of regulatory capture is particularly endemic in Japan given that regulators seek industry jobs upon retirement, and hence often cosy up to companies they are supposed to oversee."

Again, no matter how safe an ideal nuclear power plant would be, evaluating the safety of the nuclear industry means taking more into account than just plant design. My major gripe with Dunn last week was that he seemed to have fallen in love with an idealized vision of human behavior on which everything always goes according to plan, whereas in reality we know that plans are followed seldom if ever. Safety and quality cost money and require humility; humans, or at least the ones we've got now, are greedy and prideful. This is not a good combination.

Nor, to be a bit redundant, would leaving everything to The Market make this go away. For one thing, businesses now know that there's such a thing as "too big to fail," so a government's refusal to offer special protections won't necessarily translate into better behavior from businesses. To use Dalmia's entirely apt terminology, risk is increasingly socialized even in the absence of explicit recognition of that fact: if and when shit hits the fan, you can bet that the taxpayers are going to be the ones cleaning up. Corruption, moreover, is hardly a quirky Japanese problem; if Dalmia expects our market actors to be squeaky clean, she's living in a fantasy world. Of the contributory factors she lists, only one is absent from the US: we're not as desperate for nuclear power as Japan apparently is. That having been said, if US oil companies are desperate enough for profit to blatantly neglect their own safety protocols and US banks are desperate enough for profit to over-leverage their assets to an extreme degree, I see no particular reason to believe that the US nuclear industry wouldn't eventually become so narrowly profit-seeking that it would do something really dangerous, market forces or no market forces. At this point I'm actually beginning to be impressed with and to trust the technology, but it'll take a whole hell of a lot more to get me to trust the people using the technology.

It is a tribute to modern politicians - or, really, the modern political machine - that I am having a very tough time penetrating Obama's speech on Libya. I'm still very leery about the whole thing, mind you, and I find it to be curious in the extreme that he managed to squeeze in this whole war-like-but-not-technically-war, international-military-effort thing when he's still having trouble figuring out what to do about no-brainer issues like Gitmo and same-sex marriage, but I have to admit that this is a very well-written piece of propaganda.

"It is true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right. In this particular country — Libya; at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Gaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action."

There's a level of vagueness here that, while being despicable philosophically, is politically invaluable. The claim, I think, is simply that "our interests and values" were in jeopardy because of the situation and that the costs assumed by taking action were (judged to be) less onerous than the risks involved with inaction. It is not, as Andrew Sullivan would have it, that "America is simply incapable of watching a slaughter take place - anywhere in the world - and not move to do what we can to prevent it." In fact, that's precisely the problem: Obama wants to curtail the actions of our military according to some balancing algorithm, but he very intentionally refuses to say what that algorithm is.

This leads to the impression - on my part, at least - that Obama has placed himself between a rock and a hard place. If he chooses to leave his prerequisites for action at the level of "interests and values," it's hard to understand how he could arrive at a reliable balance between risk and benefit. On the other hand, if he provides more details, he almost certainly opens up the objection that he is obliging himself to act in more cases: surely Libya is not the one and only country where there's an international mandate for action and a plea for help from the people and so on (especially because some of that stuff came to exist because we wanted it to). My only guess as to how he could resolve this issue is for him to point to specific national security threats his government had either predicted or observed that are, compared to similar threats generated by other countries, uniquely quantitatively or qualitatively grave - which, if he were to do it, would make this look not all that different than some other wars I could name and would significantly undermine the feel-good America-to-the-rescue vibe he wants to build.

I admit to not being an international political expert, but I feel pretty confident that I can spot evasion consistently, and this looks to me like a clear case of talking around one's real motivation. Obama clearly thinks that this mini-war is good for something, but just from reading his remarks I have no idea what that something might be. As a citizen of the country he leads and someone who is going to have no good choice but to vote for him again in 2012, that's a little disturbing.

One cannot help but wonder if rabbi Eric Yoffie is a junior rabbi - or, at least, one can't if one is intimately familiar with the work of Joel and Ethan Coen.

"I have long struggled with how to best answer the question: 'Rabbi, how do I connect with God?'...

Begin, I suggest, with a new openness to the world around you. Reawaken your capacity for wonderment. Make room for the sense of awe that you felt as a child when you considered the beauty and the mystery of the natural world. There are divine sparks there, if you will allow yourself to experience them.

Turn next to the sacred texts of our tradition...Texts are important because they are a record of how others before us, faced with the precisely the questions and doubts that we face, made their way to God and to faith...Remember, too, that God is not only a noun but a verb, not only a presence but a process. We may not know precisely what God is, but our tradition clearly tells us what God does: God heals the sick, clothes the naked, houses the homeless and pursues peace...

And finally, experiment with religious rituals, including those that you may have earlier discarded. Rituals give structure to the holy. They help us to cultivate a sense of the sacred within ourselves and in our midst."

My first reaction to Yoffie's advice is - in the grand modern tradition of fatalist philosophy - to reach for a quote; in this case, specifically this quote:

"I too have had the feeling of losing track of Hashem [God], which is the problem here. I too have forgotten how to see Him in the world. And when that happens you think, well, if I can't see Him, He isn't there any more, He's gone. But that's not the case. You just need to remember how to see Him. Am I right? I mean, the parking lot here. Not much to see. It is a different angle on the same parking lot we saw from the Hebrew school window. But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn't familiar with these...autos and such...somebody still with a capacity for wonder...Someone with a fresh...perspective...Because with the right perspective you can see Hashem, you know, reaching into the world. He is in the world, not just in shul [synagogue]."

This corresponds, in a sort of relief/bas-relief way,* to the point that Ophelia Benson makes here.

"I spent a large chunk of pre-dawn time just this morning staring at a particularly spectacular moon – it’s full, so it was low in the west at 5:30 a.m., and the clouds had parted, so it was reflected in Puget Sound. I listen to leaves; I stare at eagles perched in trees over my head; I stop dead when I hear the chatter of a hummingbird, to look for it and then watch it when I’ve found it. That has nothing to do with religion. It is compatible with religion (though not the contemptus mundi kind) but it is in no way dependent on it."

God, for a start, is not in the parking lot, and no amount of manufactured wonderment is going to make it appear there. Already this is a problem, because the line about God is that God is everywhere, and, as nondescript as the parking lot is, it's still a place. But if God is not in the parking lot, is God in "the beauty and the mystery of the natural world" - you know, the perigee moons, the leaves, the eagles? Let's check.


Doesn't look like it to me. I mean, don't get me wrong - there's wonderment (or there was at the time, anyway) and it even has the advantage of being non-manufactured wonderment, but wonderment didn't say "let there be light" or any of that stuff. And, y'know, yeah, you can choose to call your wonderment "God" in the same way that Nietzsche chose to call his pain "dog" - but, again, only so long as you're playing pretend with yourself. Yoffie, you will note, has chosen to bring others into his game.

Granted, the other players in Yoffie's Judaism are coming to him and are coming him specifically because they feel a need to keep playing. Shouldn't they (one might ask) get to choose for themselves which game to play? Indeed - and Yoffie, if he is more empathetic than jingoistic, will let them do just that. Finding God, you see, would have to be more than finding a special sort of feeling in nature, great texts, rewarding altruistic activities, and rituals: I (and probably Benson, among many others) have already figured out how to find a special feeling in all those things, yet it remains true that my unbelief is driven by my not having found God. This is because "God" is not just a name for special sorts of feelings, any more than "dog" is just a name for a headache. For all that he does to help the people who really do want to find God, I suspect that Yoffie doesn't do much at all for the people who, having not found God, just want permission to enjoy the things they have found. If I am correct, those people are up a creek: keep looking, Yoffie says, and if that doesn't work, look some more.

The fortune-cookie answer to this conundrum is that life is short and you can't waste it on games you don't actually enjoy playing. I, however, find it more convincing to look at it the way that Chris Rock and the Coens look at it: life is too long to spend beating your head against a wall because you can't believe - or, alternatively, muzzle your disbelief - as well as your ancestors did. People, especially in religion-saturated countries like this one, need to know that there's nothing wrong or shameful about going to the beach or the soup kitchen and not finding God there. The sublime or transcendent experiences we have are just that: experiences. To valorize one species of transcendence over another qua feeling - that is, to suggest that only one kind really counts or that you're doing it wrong if you have other kinds - is abusive, manipulative behavior. Even before we get to questions of true and false or of the various ancillary effects of belief, we should be able to recognize at least that much.

*Does this imagery make sense to anybody but me? Did this one come through?

Given that I've spent two whole posts on the epistemology of moral thought, some of you may be wondering, "Why the heck is he even bothering?" Most of our behavior is barely above the level of reflex, if it even gets that far, and in fact people can be quite good even with a totally ludicrous base for their personal understanding of morality - religious people, for instance, are probably statistically no worse in general despite primarily attributing their moral code to one or more fictional entities. So what does it matter, really? Isn't it all just whistling in the wind? Well, to be brief, no.

"Of all Christ’s teachings as reflected in the gospel accounts, there is none as consistent as his defense of the poor and downtrodden. This teaching applies also to international relations and individual and societal responsibilities toward the poor and marginalized beyond one’s own borders. The Christian desire to assist the economic development of poorer peoples is founded on the principle at the heart of the Christian life: love. To be concerned about and act in favor of the poor around the world is to practice the virtue of charity.

However, in this context, it is a mistake to equate charity with government aid. When the Church talks about solidarity and the preferential option for the poor, it usually refers to these concepts in the context of charity: the service of love in providing for one’s neighbor without expecting anything in return...This is not to say that there is no role for governments in providing aid for poor nations. However, such aid does not fulfill our duty of solidarity, and it is for individual Christians to make prudential judgments as to whether government aid is effective in aiding the poor."

Philip Booth is, of course, simply reiterating the main point of contention in our earlier discussions about caritas and tzedakah (and, eventually, taxation and libertarian ethics and all manner of other fun things). Since we've already done this topic more or less to death I don't want to lay out all the details here, but just to recap: if the "duty of solidarity" is met by "be[ing] concerned about and act in favor of the poor" (presumably such that the action is connected in the right way to the concern), government aid can in fact fulfill that duty; I have yet to meet anybody who expects a personal reward for indirectly funding foreign aid with his or her taxes, so that's just a bizarre thing to bring up; and even if government aid were indeed totally exclusive of this definition of charity (which it's not), it might still be worth doing or even required of us. None of that, however, is news - as I said, we've been over this once before and Booth doesn't bring anything new to the table. But notice that bit wedged in at the very end: "it is for individual Christians to make prudential judgments as to whether government aid is effective." Why - why why why - does this not get top billing?

Stripping off the mildly insulting part where Booth specifies Christians (as though non-Christians don't have the right to evaluate the actions of their governments, or something), what he's saying is that foreign aid efforts might fail to accomplish moral ends just because they don't work. Perhaps thinking of Paul Collier's interesting and pretty persuasive The Bottom Billion, Booth claims at the very end of his article that "there is no substantial economic evidence that aid does significant good and a lot of evidence to suggest that it might harm the citizens of the countries that receive it." If he is thinking of Collier's work he ought to be more precise because that's not really what Collier says, but at any rate it's easy to recognize the vast difference between this kind of argument and the kind of argument he starts off with: this one doesn't suck.

For one, the aid-doesn't-work argument actually addresses the concerns of the group it's meant to convince. This shouldn't need pointing out, but it's really hard to affect policymakers (or indeed anybody) unless you can identify a point of shared interest.  A second benefit is that the aid-doesn't-work argument is an empirical, nonsectarian one and so is appropriate to employ in a pluralistic country like the US. And, of course, third, it isn't based on a made-up moral distinction that, even if were accurate, would be only part of the moral picture. Thus not only is this argument more theoretically sound - that is, its basis in theory is easier to establish and is more firmly established - it actually has some chance of directing us towards a well-functioning solution, whereas the not-really-charity argument leaves us, at best, relying on utopian psychology: if everyone would just start to love everyone else, it says, the problem would be solved. And that's the best-case scenario - in the worst case, it leaves us with nothing at all.

That Booth leads with the Christian-charity thing is, then, a minor tragedy. It's needlessly partisan and philosophically suspect, yes, but it compounds those errors by hiding, deemphasizing, or even contaminating a good, or at least a valuable, policy argument. Those of us who find Collier's reasoning to be compelling don't necessarily want the aid-doesn't-work argument to be seen as a Christian argument or as based on Christian premises - not least of all because it isn't actually the aid-doesn't-work argument, as Booth's Christian worldview would have it, but rather the certain-kinds-of-aid-don't-work argument. Moreover, we really don't want to the discussion to be either sidetracked or, worse, dominated by ill-conceived ethical theories. Aside from the time and energy that it would waste to play saints and sinners with Booth, somebody might make the mistake of actually trying to formulate policy based on the idea that "the principle at the heart of the Christian life" is more important than actually providing people with food, potable water, shelter, and so on. It's bad enough that Booth should slow or stall the process of developing good policy by waving encyclicals around, but to derail it altogether by advising us "to use government policy to encourage more voluntary support" in order to serve a specifically Christian vision is unacceptable.

Aside from the recent Japanese earthquake having wrought terrible destruction on actual people, there's been some talk recently about how it has also hurt the nuclear power industry. I've heard both kinds of reactions myself - i.e., "it shows that we should avoid nuclear energy" and "it's just an anomaly" - and I think that reflects to a large extent the fact that the science here is badly understood just in descriptive terms and, even for people who understand the facts, is of a sort that we're not trained to analyze in a helpful way (for instance, the long time spans involved take us out of our usual, short-to-medium-term mode of normative reasoning). For my part I still think that nuclear should be behind solar and wind on the list and this obviously hasn't done anything to change my mind, but even so I can recognize the difference between good and bad thinking on the topic. This, to take but one example, is bad thinking.

"[T]he Fukushima reactors survived one of the worst earthquakes in the historical record without breaking down catastrophically. This is a compliment to the designers (GE, in case anyone was wondering), the construction crews, and the operational teams. If the same had been true of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the accidents that occurred at those sites would have been of interest only to specialists. (Remember that TMI had a critical set of coolant valves put in backwards, while the Chernobyl reactor had no containment structure and was deliberately red-lined with all the safety features shut down, for reasons never adequately explained.)"

The conclusion, says JR Dunn after taking some other things into account, is that safety concerns regarding nuclear power are "nonsense." This is a charming, if fantastically naive, way of looking at the world of human behavior. Dunn, as indicated by the above paragraph, just doesn't know why people do the stupid things they do - installing parts wrong, intentionally violating safety standards, and so on. That's dumb, he seems to say, and we can pretty much label dumbness a rarity and an outlier. Here again we see the extent to which our normal reasoning mechanisms fail us - even an outlier can be very serious if its consequences are dire - but there's something bigger going on as well: Dunn is being a super-optimist about just how smart humans are, and, worse, is basing that optimism on what he himself admits that he doesn't know.

To rewind a short ways, I'm sure you all recall that the BP oil spill of last year was followed quickly by news that the company had a history of flagrant and repeated safety violations. It was not, that is to say, that their tools were badly-designed or that they didn't know how to maintain them. Rather, they were given reliable, pretty much safe materials and practices to work with and then - due to processes that, to use Dunn's wonderful hand-wave, were "never adequately explained" - consciously chose to make those materials and practices unsafe and unreliable. Whether or not we can actually adequately explain this is, I think, an open question (hint: $$$), but that's ultimately beside the point: whatever the reasons were, people screwed up and the spill happened. With that in mind, it's interesting to look at Dunn's laundry list of improvements to nuclear technology and see if we can't foresee some holes in his theory. TRIGA reactors, he says, are impossible to overload - but "can't be scaled up to an economical power reactor." CANDU reactors likewise can't melt down - but they're "more expensive to operate." And so on and so forth: this reactor has passive safety features, that one uses physics, etc. It's actually an impressive list and, given that I'm a geek, pretty exciting in some ways. But it's not enough in and of itself to address safety concerns - indeed, until Dunn comes up with some reasons for past failures, nothing he presents could be enough.

Take the example of wrongly installed parts. Dunn says that he doesn't know why the parts in the Three Mile Island reactor were put in backwards but that was the cause of the accident. The question, then, is whether these other reactors could also break down in disastrous ways if parts were to be wrongly installed, to which I can only believe that the answer is "yes." The various safety systems that he lists, even the passive ones, still need to be installed; to make maybe a simpler analogy, the best anti-virus software in the world doesn't do you any good sitting on a CD gathering dust. Or take his other example, Chernobyl. Again, people chose to do something that Dunn doesn't understand, namely, to intentionally put some other good above the good of safety. Could that happen with these modern reactors? Sure seems that way to me: if they can't provide the power we need or can only do so at a large expense, I can actually quite easily picture people choosing to stay with the less safe but less expensive reactors. People wouldn't necessarily do this, of course, but that doesn't touch the fact that the safety of any nuclear energy program depends on their not doing so. Contrary to Dunn's position, then, there's quite a bit of sense in being concerned about nuclear safety: it's the exact amount of sense that the people at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and BP lacked.

Presumably the people who would actually be in charge of designing and operating these more modern reactors have answers to these problems - or, at least, hopefully they do. And if they do, then those answers would potentially be a compelling response to nuclear doubters. But this stuff about how we don't need to worry about accidental or purposeful stupidity is just wrong. Moreover, it's a really good way to set ourselves up to be victimized again. If we want to display any kind of learning curve at all, we can't just sit here and pretend that abstractions like good plant design are going to make up for the sad reality of human incompetence.

Or maybe my attenuation to advances in technology is advancing at the same rate as the technology itself? Hard to say, really. At any rate, enough non-technological geekiness has transpired since the last one of these that I can now have another, starting with Goodnight Dune.

Clearly Julia Yu is some sort of mad genius, because this is incredibly awesome. I won't ruin it or deprive Yu of her clickthroughs by going into too much detail here, but check it out for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

Going in a slightly different direction, apparently Dubai looks like a scene from Final Fantasy or something, complete with the huge dropoff between their outlandishly luxurious cityscape and their slum-like living areas. This, I think, is a point in favor of the cyberpunk mythos, which has always seemed to me to understand real-world economics and sociology better than straight-up science fiction. In particular, it seems to me that, in order to construct buildings of the physical scale and symbolic splendor of the ones in Dubai, a group of people would have to alienate themselves somewhat from normal (which is just to say common) human concerns. This picture sort of captures that:


I mean, you just have a really hard time imagining that the people who conceived of that skyline also care to any appreciable degree about all the people that it looms over so threateningly. Of course it doesn't help any that history has borne out and continues to bear out this suspicion, but the optics, as they say, are just not good. It's worth remembering, in light of this, that the protagonists of the more SFy Final Fantasies are pretty much all revolutionaries (or, if you prefer, terrorists).

And, okay, I guess there's a little new technology that I find neat - watch the whole thing if you want, but you can probably skip to about 13:00 without missing much.



Paul Wolpe, however, is an alarmist. Yeah, it sounds really terrible to think of animals being hooked up to machines so we can harvest their bodily fluids - except we're already doing that. And gosh, yeah, isn't it awful for us to deprive mice of their autonomy. So much worse than, say, keeping chickens in cages for their whole lives and then slaughtering them for food. If Wolpe only wanted to draw our attention to certain kinds of moral dilemmas by highlighting their reappearance in new technologies, that'd be one thing. Instead, however, he seems to think that all of this stuff is just a consequence of new biotechnology, which is simply false. Also, that thing with the monkey and the robotic arm is fucking cool.

Finally, I know that I've linked to this before, but it deserves another go 'round:

One of the really interesting things about reading philosophy is how frequently people misconstrue the problem on their hands. Given how much philosophers like to give problems catchy names - "the problem of evil"! "the is/ought gap"! and so on - you'd think this would be a very infrequent issue, and yet...

"If we take the criterion as it stands, that one must be conscious to qualify as a person, all sleeping and sedated human beings will fail to be persons, a reductio ad absurdum. And if we instead claim that you are a person only if you have an immediately exercisable capacity for self-awareness, we will include sleeping adults, but exclude those in temporary comas (who might take years to recover, and who at any rate almost never have an 'immediately exercisable capacity' for consciousness)."

Although Raymond Haim (and his citation, Christopher Kaczor) believes this to be a claim about abortion, this is nothing more than a simple question about personal identity. This can be seen from the fact that Haim's preferred solution to the abortion thing doesn't apply at all to the discontinuity problem. According to Haim, "all human beings are persons," which is understood easily enough but tells us absolutely nothing helpful about personal identity over time. We know, for example, that an organism is human because of its DNA - are identical twins therefore the same person? The same question applies to any view that connects identity via physical parts, as twins frequently share biological material in utero. Similarly we know that a person ceases to be an organism when they die, that is, when certain metabolic and homeostatic mechanisms cease to function. Yet we have technology that allows us to restart these mechanisms, which creates a problem for Haim: if personal identity disappears along with key biological functions and if, as he alleges, personal identity is all that motivates us to protect or save lives, then we would no longer have any reason to use these medical technologies. Worse still, certain surgical procedures that require the cessation of metabolic functioning would cease to make sense: once the patient's functions stopped, the surgeons would no longer have any reason to finish the surgery. And, of course, Haim's theory would say that a human consciousness in any body other than a human body would fail to be a person - which, while a fantastical scenario to consider, deserves a better answer than the one Haim would give.

A much smarter and more appropriate response would be to say that personhood depends on consciousness but that consciousness is not limited to our common intuition thereof. Rather than saying that consciousness is a binary condition - either a strict YES or a strict NO - we can simply say that it comes in degrees and flavors, in the same way that computers vary between each other in terms of (e.g.) processing capacity and within themselves in terms of which processes are running at any given moment. People sleep but retain their consciousnesses and thus their personal identities; computers sleep but retain their processes and thus their session identities. (So, for instance, when someone asks you the last time you rebooted your computer, you'd be wrong to identify the date you last put your computer to sleep.) Haim is scared of this answer because it means that humans vary in personhood, but he fails to consider the degree to which we do so. Far from undermining the idea of human rights and opening the door to e.g. legitimized racism, this would simply emphasize the extent to which fully-developed humans are different than other animals while simultaneously forcing the recognition that we can't just treat other animals (many of which are more personal than some humans we can easily identify) like mere objects. To me that's not so bad: you keep the concept of universal, sweeping rights for almost all of us, and for the rest you still insist on significant protections. Whether Haim denies this possibility out of mischief or sheer stupidity (and I vote for the latter), he's asking the wrong question for this particular answer.

...kill? ...kvetch? ...lose? ...drum? ...salsa? What?

"Once we are clear that evolutionary biology, which discerns no point or purpose in natural processes, cannot answer this question, we are free to learn what we can from more modest, less far-reaching reflection on human nature. Normative thinking cannot, after all, proceed in complete isolation from what we think we know about the sort of creature we are. [A]lthough evolutionary biology thinks in terms of a natural selection that has no purposes, in many other ways modern biology is shot through with such purposive language. For example, the ability of living organisms to maintain a stable body temperature and balance of bodily fluids—homeostasis—is a teleological concept. We examine not only how this takes place but also why—to what ends—the living body works to sustain this balance. Likewise, if we ask what the acorn is made for, the answer is in terms of a natural end: to develop into an oak tree. Or, put more fully, to fulfill its nature by developing into a thing appropriate to its kind. "

Whatever it is I'm born to do, Gilbert Meilaender makes me feel like I'm born to cry and gnash my teeth. At the start he's all "biology is just a bunch of descriptive facts about the empirical world but ethics is prescriptive and not empirical," but then at the end he's all "nature reveals normative teleology" and then I start to mourn my renewed inability to ignore the stupidity of humankind. He wants to use this to help "us to think about the meaning of human aging," and that's certainly a thing many of us need help thinking about, so maybe looking at it that way will clear some things up?

"Among the twenty natural desires [Larry] Arnhart thinks we can identify in human beings is the desire to give and receive parental care. 'Parent–child bonding is naturally good for human beings'...Once we begin to attend to the parent–child bond, to the relation between generations, we have begun to think not just of life but of a 'complete life'—a life marked in some way by stages and movement, a life that has shape and not just duration, a life whose moments are not identical but take their specific character from their place in the whole. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine a 'relation between the generations' that does not include aging."

I'm beginning to sense a trend here, I think. Once again, I find myself having to agree with the beginning part - that is, the stuff about how parent/child bonding is good for us, both as parents and children. But the stages required by parent/child bonding are, quite simply, parenthood and childhood. As a matter of contingent fact there are certain intervening stages as well - adolescence, e.g. - but the only stages theoretically needed in order to have a parent/child bond are the stage where you're a parent and the stage where you're a child. The stage where you grow old and feeble, in other words, isn't in the picture. Also, I dunno if this is just me or what, but I actually find it quite easy to imagine an intergenerational relationship that doesn't involve aging as we currently know it. My father is of a different generation than I am just in virtue of having grown up in and lived through a different era, and he would continue to have grown up in and lived through a different era even if he were to stop aging tomorrow and live forever. One more try, maybe?

"[T]o take survival as our primary goal—however necessary at times in a seemingly Hobbesian world—does not express the full dignity of our humanity."

Okay, y'know what? Fuck it. I tried. If you want a more interesting spectacle, head over to the comments on yesterday's post, in which I am currently re-explaining as patiently as I can the exact stuff I said in the body of the post to the guy whom I wrote about.

Well, we've just seen a major natural disaster, which must mean that it's time for everyone to remind us that God has absolutely no responsibility to do anything about all the innocent people dying! First up, Jack Kerwick, PhD.

"Its unique doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation render Christianity’s God too personal for its monotheistic relatives, Judaism and Islam: the Holy Trinity affirms not just that God is personal, but that He is three Persons in One; and the Incarnation is the belief that God is not only a Person, but that He chose to become a human being. But it is this religion, and no other, that goes beyond merely acknowledging evil as a reality to ascribing it a place of near central importance. Furthermore, it is only Christianity that assures the world that although it is ridden with suffering, this suffering has been defeated by the God-Man, Christ."

Funny - I'm pretty sure if you ask the Japanese people they'll claim that their suffering has not been defeated. In fact, I think even Kerwick doesn't believe this: the only even remotely plausible interpretation for "defeating" suffering I can think of is "make suffering no longer intrinsically morally bad," but if that's the interpretation Kerwick is using then he need no longer talk about evil at all. Suffering, for him, would be at worst morally neutral, having had its badness magically taken away by Jesus. Evil, in other words, would no longer be "a reality" - or, at least, not in the case of suffering.

So that explanation sucks. Maybe Michael Potts, PhD, will be able to do better?

"[I]f natural laws must remain stable, why can’t God make a world with different natural laws in which earthquakes do not occur or are not as severe? One plausible answer is that the number of possible universes compatible with intelligent life with significant freedom is very small–perhaps even this universe only–due to the specificity of natural laws that are so finely tuned that a minuscule change in the laws of nature would result in no life at all or at least no intelligent life."

This might be plausible if it weren't, y'know, easily disprovable using what are for many people normal everyday experiences. If we're taking the current universe as a model for what universes must look like, then yeah, this may work (although Potts has, of course, no idea why natural laws would have to remain stable in the first place). But, in fact, we have no particular reason to use the current universe as a model. God, after all, is supposed to be all-powerful, not powerful-but-only-powerful-enough-to-create-universes-like-this-one. And we have evidence that simple, lawfully stable universes can indeed exist with the potential for intelligent life and without earthquakes - we catch a glimpse of one every time somebody boots up a Wii. Potts, I guess, would claim that simulated intelligent life isn't really intelligent life, but I think this is pretty obviously wrong. Life, first of all, is clearly just a formal matter: even grass is alive, and it would be obviously silly to say that grass has some kind of metaphysical Life rather than just a certain arrangement of (imperfectly) self-sustaining biochemical mechanisms. So if Potts wanted to make this argument at all he'd have to do it with intelligence, but then he's faced with a dilemma: either make intelligence formal in the same way that life is and admit that it's possible within a simple simulation, or else claim that intelligence is (basically) supernatural and ruin the whole stable-natural-law thing he has going in the current universe. And while it's certainly true that the stable natural laws of Wii Sports are orders of magnitude less interesting than the stable natural laws of our own universe, interestingness is pretty clearly not a moral variable, making this whole charade pretty difficult for Potts to maintain.

So much for western theorists, I guess. Maybe the Japanese themselves can do better?

"Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara apologized Tuesday for saying the tsunami that recently struck Japan is divine punishment for the country’s egoism...He had originally said the tsunami was needed 'to wipe out egoism, which has rusted onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period of time.'"

No, huh? Guess that's not too surprising. At least Ishihara isn't making our higher education system look like a joke, though, which at this point I'll count as a win. At any rate, d'you think maybe the real answer is that there's no such thing as being off the hook for helping people who need help? That's surely the response that I'd give - but hey, instead of a PhD I merely have a well-functioning brain, so I think you'd be easily forgiven for not trusting me.

And speaking of trusting people one ought not trust, did you know that the Republic National Committee is twenty-one million dollars in debt? It's true: the debt hawks, who won't even let public employees bargain for their own salaries, can't even manage their own books. Another interesting part of this story is that the RNC is hoping that its "big donors are coming back into the fold" - that is, as well as cutting some of its services, the RNC wants to fix its budget problem by increasing the financial burden on the wealthy. Odd, no?

Elsewhere, professional slimeball Dick Lugar wants to warn us about Libya, because "there’s going to be a situation where war lingers on, country after country, situation after situation, all of them on a humane basis, saving people" and, dontchaknow, we're in a recession. This, in case you're wondering, would be the same Dick Lugar who voted in favor of going to war with Iraq, which at the time was the second in a seemingly endless series of allegedly terrorism-related wars we'd entered into in the midst of economic troubles. It's also the same Dick Lugar who voted in favor of the unconstitutional PATRIOT act, and who now suddenly is interested in limiting executive power to the level specified in that selfsame constitution.

What's missing here isn't good thinking but consistency. The wealthy should be on the hook when things go south financially and we should stop blowing up other countries using our very expensive military, especially when we're blowing them up without having gone through the proper procedural steps (or, alternatively, having used the UN as a run-around for those steps). All of that is absolutely right, but that doesn't make me any more sympathetic to these people, because I know full well that these principled-looking behaviors are going to go right out the window the next time the person in office has an R next to his or her name. Basically, the Republicans are the Carmelo Anthony of politics, and I refuse to be the New York Knicks.* Obama may want to make me slap him upside the head, sort of like how Mike D'Antoni continues to make the same mistake with respect to his bench and his defensive strategy, but we must remember that it can always get worse. And, much like the Knicks, you'd think we would have no trouble remembering that, having just come out of such a period. Anyway, before I completely derail this post into NBA-land, let me just conclude by saying this: the 2012 presidential race is going to be a fucking horrorshow. Look forward to it.

*I am trusting here that this won't come back to bite me, but I feel pretty safe about it.

Something about this is just not right.

"[I]t can be perfectly rational for one's practical reliance to outstrip one's theoretical credences in this way. This happens, for instance, when I put my very life into the hands of a physician I know very little about. If I am in immediate danger of dying, I may even entrust myself to a physician whose competence or good-will I have positive reason to doubt, if another is unavailable...

I believe that, in the very same way Christian faith can be rational even for someone whose theoretical credence in the propositions of Christian theology is much less than 1 [i.e., someone for whom the truth of Christianity is much less than certain]. Specifically, according to Christianity, I have a very serious problem: sin. Christianity purports to offer a solution to this problem, a solution that will work only if I exercise faith, that is, if I practically rely on this solution without hedging my bets."

Isn't it interesting, before I begin in earnest, that this is another science analogy? Kenny Pearce isn't saying that priests are like really good interior decorators or compliance specialists or something more socially constructed - he's saying that they're like doctors. This may in part be due to the problems that doctors fix as opposed to interior decorators, but he could just as well have picked psychologists in that case. Anyway, I just think it's interesting, is all.

As for his argument, Pearce pretty much identifies the flaw himself: I only have a salvation problem according to Christianity. Dying people, on the other hand, almost always know that they're dying just from firsthand evidence like pain or bodily malfunction, especially if their death is potentially "immediate." Moreover, most dying people these days know that they're dying because they've been told that by doctors they do know and trust, and then those same doctors are the ones who would make the referral to the unknown physician. Christianity, meanwhile, makes its own diagnoses and then proceeds to make self-referrals, all the while offering no independent source of confirmation of its claims and no confirmable evidence of its success (or even failure). Maybe this is just me, but it seems like those two situations are just the slightest bit dissimilar in a way that Pearce may have wanted to account for. It's very different to go to a hospital to receive treatment from a licensed physician who's been recommended to you by trusted sources to fix a problem that you have good reason to believe, but what Pearce is describing is on the order of washing up on a deserted island with only one other person, who then claims to be a doctor and tells you to eat some suspicious-looking substance to fix a medical problem that you have no evidence even exists. Could you trust that person? Sure, you could trust anybody. But should you trust that person? I, for one, would not.

Turn, turn, turn...

"The title of this lecture, 'An Apology for Roger Ebert,' may require a bit of clarification.

I'm not here to offer an apology in the sense of regret for anything done wrong.

This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion.

It's a defense of Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who, a little over five years ago, annoyed our industry by declaring that 'video games can never be art.'"

I was fairly certain that Video Game Trash-Talking season had ended permanently, but I guess that'll show me. The rest of the posts in this series are these links here, but Brian Moriarty is actually going in a somewhat different direction. He's not right, mind you, but at least he's wrong in a new way.

"I'm here because of this sentence: 'No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.'...

It took many decades for photography and cinema to earn their places among the Hegelian fine arts of painting, sculpture, poetry and drama, music, dance and architecture.

Now, it's natural and tempting for us to expect that games will follow the same pattern.
But there's a big difference. Photography and cinema were new technologies.

Games are not new. They've been part of our culture for thousands of years. They're much older than the belles arts of the Renaissance, older than the representational art of the Greeks, older than the cave art of prehistory."

One of the ways he's wrong is, of course, that he apparently feels like his paragraphs should be bite-sized, which is a fantastically irritating way of communicating. Also, in terms of his substance, this particular argument is hilariously self-defeating. People were building houses (and, I presume, other sorts of structures) well before architecture "earned" its art status; people were telling stories before story-telling became an art; and people were sculpting things before there was such a concept as "sculpting." Moriarty loves him some history, but I can't see this as anything other than a vindication of my own dislike of the subject: we learn nothing from this silliness because everything used to be something else. It's also more than a little absurd to say that video games don't represent new technology, but whatever - the major fallacy here is Moriarty's one-sided view of history, which continues here:

"If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?

Are digital games somehow privileged, somehow more artistic than analog games?"

Again, I loathe arguments from history, but if you're going to make one you might as well do it right. No art form has ever entered its heyday qua art form by going minimalist. Music needed to go through a classical phase before noise showed up, painting had to become super-realist before it could become minimalist - and the same goes for dance, architecture, literature, and the rest. At least in the west (which is, after all, where Moriarty is writing), we build up and then tear down. If we want to locate the current state of video games (or even just games) in that kind of bell-curve-ish trend, we would have to admit that we're nowhere near the minimalist phase. Chess and go are, with all due respect, the game equivalent of cave paintings or nursery rhymes. Give it another few hundred years and then see whether or not there's a minimalist gaming movement, but don't jump the gun. If Moriarty has a point here at all, it's that art criticism is gratuitously navel-gazing - which, quite frankly, is precisely correct: art, according to almost everyone's actual behavior, is whatever got criticized as art. This is obviously a ridiculous working definition, but even people who recognize that fact get caught up in it, as Moriarty does above. In other words, this isn't a reductio ad absurdum of video games as art - it's a reductio ad absurdum of a whole school of aesthetic thought.

He comes a bit closer to the heart of the matter here:

"The identity of a game emerges from its mechanics and affordances, not the presentation that exposes them.

But can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances, rules and goals, itself constitute a work of art?

...'Everyone has their own taste,' right? 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.'

This commonplace was noted by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who strongly criticized it.

Kant's argument went like this: If you declare that something gives you pleasure, nobody can argue with you.

Subjective pleasure is absolutely in the eye of the beholder (assuming that the eye is the organ involved).

But if you announce that something is beautiful, you have made a public value judgment. You've identified that thing as source of pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone."

(Again, seriously: longer paragraphs, dude.) As far as terminological work goes, I'm pretty okay with this strategy. Call "beauty" public and "pleasure" private if you like, that's fine - but it does beg the question as to whether anything is beautiful as opposed to merely pleasant. Moriarty identifies Beethoven as an ostensibly beautiful composer, and while it's cute that he actually went ahead and provided an example it's trivial to prove that Beethoven is not a "source of pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone." Sadly, we just aren't wired strictly enough that we all love Beethoven (actually, the sad part is that we don't all despise the bad artists, but it's probably six of one and a half dozen of the other). Similarly, he holds up Ebert himself as an example of someone who has great taste - that is, who can readily and reliably identify beauty - but Ebert and I differ on Biutiful (it bored me silly), Black Swan (cf), Kick-Ass, and presumably many other movies. Even if it's coherent to place an allegedly objective measure (beauty) on a subjective one (pleasure), the evidence shows quite clearly that the only way to make sure that an artwork is loved universally is to kill off anyone who doesn't like it ("universally," after all, allows for some wiggle room).

Finally giving up with the dithering and heading for what I take to be his strongest argument, Moriarty concedes that games can qualify for the category of art and can even be pretty good art. It's just, he says, that it can't be

"[g]reat art, fine art, or the term I prefer, sublime art.

Art that deeply rewards a lifetime of contemplation. Art as cultural monument. Art that's good for you. The kind of art that, in Ebert's words, makes us 'more cultured, civilized and empathetic.'

...Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."

And now we're getting somewhere. Sublime art, he says, must be "ironic, ambiguous, troubling, or innovative." It must take one to the point of "transcend[ing] Will itself" and aid one in filling one's "need for reflection, for insight, wisdom or consolation." This, then, is the real battleground. If games - video or otherwise - can do all of those things, as well as make us more cultured and evoke the inexpressible, they can be art; if not, not.

Some of you may remember last month when I laid out some basic ground rules for constructing a moral philosophy. Indeed, some of you may even have questioned the utility of those rules - they were, after all, pretty darn basic. Well, here you go:

"Recognition of universal moral truths combined with a human desire to seek the good may be the best way to confront our prejudices. And our distinct individuality—religious plurality along with our competing and complementary traditions—may prove to be the best way to begin to understand our common humanity. Perhaps the tensions between unity and particularity, love of the good and love of our own, openness to transcendence and a connection to others, are integrated components of our human nature and are indicative of our fragilities but also our great possibilities."

I don't know exactly who wrote this - it's signed "Anonymous" - but she's just talking nonsense. She acknowledges that there are universal moral truths, so there's at least some positive aspect to her writing, but otherwise she fails to even accomplish the most fundamental of my steps, to establish (an) object(s) of value and identify the way that morality requires us to value it (them). Basically, this is morality by hand-waving: we should "confront" our prejudices - whatever that means - using universal moral truths - whatever those are - plus the human desire to seek the good - whatever the good is - and understand our common humanity - whatever that is - by combing, in some way or other, "our competing and complementary traditions"...and so on. The closest she ever comes to even beginning a moral system is to say that

"the inviolable worth and dignity of all people is an objective moral principle, and this principle provides us with a basis for how we treat other people. And it is through moral conduct (e.g., just treatment of others and concern for the common good) that we express our good character and sound judgment and exercise those virtues that, at their peak, lead to honorable and noble achievements and human excellence."

Unfortunately, this is basically moral gumbo. A little bit of Kant, a little bit of Aristotle, a little bit of Rawls - just throw 'em in the pot and keep tasting until it all comes together. She comes close to identifying something of moral value when she brings up "the inviolable worth and dignity of all people," except then she calls this a principle, which makes zero sense. And, given that the rest of this just reduces to "do the right thing, which is the thing that dignity requires," it's hard to see how there's any content here at all. This sort of thing may work for teaching morals to children, but only because children are easily confused. As a clear-minded way of doing ethics, it's an utter train wreck.

So that's an example of what happens when you don't even get started. Elsewhere, Francesca Murphy provides an example of what happens when you get started and, as a first step, run into a brick wall.

"Grace, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, 'does not destroy nature, it perfects it.' God’s grace works against our fallenness. But it does not eliminate our created human nature. It makes our natures whole. As carnal, embodied creatures, our desire to eat meat works in us at a more elemental level than desires for cognitive pleasures. Our carnality is at the rock bottom of what forms us as persons. Our fallenness, it goes all the way down too, so why not let God’s grace rebuild you from the bottom up?"

To begin with, not all of us are carnal (at least, in Murphy's apparent sense of "desiring to eat meat"). That, though, is a standard move of (especially religious) ethicists: identify a common practice or famous quote or some such thing and then act as though that cultural object exists because it connects to some deep, metaphysical part of what it means to be human. What's worse yet is that Murphy contends on the one hand that God "does not eliminate our created human nature" but also tells us that God would "rebuild [us] from the bottom up," including, as part of our created human nature, our "physical desires." I don't know about you, but "remove and replace with something else" sounds a whole lot like "eliminate" to me.

Finally, there's Giles Fraser, to whom I turn to demonstrate the importance of my rule #2.

"In the face of great tragedy, we are often desperate to reclaim our mastery over the unknown. Explanation helps us to reduce our anxiety and begin the process of giving tragedy some neat conclusion – so that we can mentally file it as a task completed. And yet, of course, one of the things that we learn from earthquakes and tsunamis is precisely that such mastery is an illusion...As Job demonstrates, it is possible to express faith as a form of trust and not as a reaching after answers. Faith is living by the promise and not by an explanation."

Fraser, it seems, has watched Inception a bit too much, as this is one layer of deepitude too many. While in this article he may in fact not want to work towards a moral theory at all, if that's what he wants he's really shooting himself in the foot. I suppose that he's giving us some things to value (human health, e.g.) and indicating some ways to value them (by doing the opposite of what natural disasters do, ostensibly), so that's good; and his psychology is not so terrible that we can reject it in the same way that we can reject Murphy's; but it's not legit to just throw up your hands and give up when the situation looks unavoidably grim. Tragedies, I think we can say axiomatically, happen, and part of what it means to be a tragedy is that any moral system is going to assign it a significantly lower value than non-tragedies. None of this means that a moral theory should simply not "[reach] after answers" when those answers are unpleasant ones; indeed, any so-called theory that does so is only a theory in the same sense that a car with no engine and two shattered axles is a car: you can see the overall shape of it, but it just won't work even if you should ever be dumb or desperate enough to try it out.

So, once more: morality is not just a matter of faith or whim. There are, as it were, rules, and it's not even all that difficult to see who plays the game better and who plays it worse. Granted, any of these three people may be perfectly good moral agents - hell, they may even be better than I am. But we won't be able to know that until and unless we get a good working moral theory with which to make that sort of evaluation, and none of these three is making any kind of progress in that area whatsoever.

Really? Is this really what we're doing now?

"The United Nations Security Council voted Thursday to authorize military action, including airstrikes against Libyan tanks and heavy artillery and a no-fly zone, a risky foreign intervention aimed at averting a bloody rout of rebels by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi...

Diplomats said the resolution — which passed with 10 votes, including the United States, and abstentions from Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India — was written in sweeping terms to allow for a wide range of actions, including strikes on air-defense systems and missile attacks from ships. Military activity could get under way within a matter of hours, they said."

Can we just stop with the wars? I mean, what, are we gonna get some kind of prize if we can slowly build up to being at war with everybody else on the planet? This is ridiculous - even granted that our (at least putative) reasoning is much more sound than it was with Iraq and plausibly more sound than it was with Afghanistan, we have two wars already! (Or one war if you're being technical, but still.) Oh, and also there's the economy and the budget and still health care - you might as well get used to "still health care" being on the list - not to mention all the stuff that's more directly related to war, like the torture and indefinite detention and such.

It's not that I don't feel for the Libyan people or that I have some kind of positive relationship with bloody routs,* but there are some seriously diminishing returns when it comes to spending our time and money (and, y'know, soldiers) trying to make other countries better by blowing them up. I think that smart, workable international interventions are possible, but in the absence of such an intervention the second-best choice is not the one where you lob missiles at people until they let you install an inevitably corrupt puppet leader who only manages to meet the absolute minimum level of decency and effectiveness.

I have to admit, I was really on the hope and change bandwagon, but this is one (of, in fact, quite a few) cases where I hope Obama changes direction. This is not good news.

*I make one exception here: if the routees are the Lakers, in which case the bloodier the better.