Rust Belt Philosophy

I mean, what the fuck.

"Do atheists need a bible? That is an obvious question to put to one who has just brought many ethical and literary texts together, to make a book distilling some of the world’s best and wisest thought about the human condition; and who has subtitled it ‘A Humanist Bible.’

...It would be odd to suppose that because a person is an atheist, he or she needs no books addressed to the big questions of life."

Does AC Grayling really think that his Good Book is the first or only atheological "book addressed to the big questions of life"? I wasn't ready to call him out for his hubris before - the project of collecting wisdom isn't inherently hubristic, I don't think; the fact that he failed just shows that he has a child's sense of wisdom - but now I damn well am. It's tremendously insulting to dismiss the world's canon in this way, especially when the level of the prose in his Good Book is fair to middling at best.

"When a tradition has a central text, like the Bible for Christians or the Koran for Muslims, it serves as the premise for belief and practice. Over time such texts acquire so great a status for the faithful that they become unquestionable; they even become fetishes, so that mishandling a copy of a sacred text can inflame devotees to violence."

And this is just silly. I know that Grayling goes on to say that it's the specifically religious character of belief that makes it possible for believers to become violent, but I hardly find that assertion plausible. I grant that religious belief is particularly vulnerable to seeing grave offenses where none exist, but certainly it is not the only sort of belief that operates in this way - if it were, we would be unable to explain the vast amount of blood spent on areligious political feuds, to name just one example. So if Grayling is really serious about this idea that beloved central texts catalyze gratuitous violence, it's incredibly strange that he went out of his way to forcibly insert a central text into the humanist tradition (especially since that tradition has been doing just fine without a central text).

I know that this is a minor story and all, but the more I read about it the more blindingly absurd it becomes. If I were Grayling, I would at this point think really hard about just not saying anything and cutting my losses, because it seems that he says more and more ridiculous things the more I read his interviews.

If you can associate 3-5 dead white guys with each panel, it's probably closer to 95%.

(Sorry, best pun I could come up with in 15 seconds of thinking about it.)

Outside of the real nutcases like Rick Santorum, the opponents of same-sex marriage typically only list two worst-case scenarios for the slippery slopes they like to invoke: incest and polyamory. I plan on writing a little bit on the latter in maybe a few days, so in the meantime I figured I'd warm up by frowning at one of the few dead white guys I actually like in philosophy.

"While often hostile to the Calvinist Christianity in which he was reared, David Hume’s essay 'Of Polygamy and Divorces' offers a vigorous and well-argued defense of marriage arrangements as they existed in England and many other parts of Europe from the early Middle Ages through most of the 18th century. His arguments have great relevance for us today as we struggle to cope with unprecedented rates of divorce and unprecedented ease of both entering into and exiting marriages and other intimate procreative relationships...

Hume begins his critique of polygamy with the challenge of a hypothetical defender. Having multiple wives, says the polygamy defender, is 'the only effectual remedy for the disorder of love and the only expedient for freeing men from that slavery to the females which the natural violence of our passion has imposed upon us.' It is by multiple partners alone—partners who can be used at will and played off one against the other—that '[we men] regain our right of sovereignty, and sating our appetite, reestablish the authority of reason in our minds, and, of consequence, our own authority in our families.'"

The writer here, Russell Nieli, obviously loads the dice in a number of ways, not least of which is his description of marriage as an "intimate procreative relationship," but whatever - I doubt that you, dear reader, are in any real danger of being suckered by that kind of manifest sophistry. More importantly, it's a bit sad that Hume's best attempt at understanding polyamory was to reduce it to a sort of maneuver in an ongoing gender war. While I don't doubt that there are polygamists (then and now) who would be accurately characterized by the description above, it's equally true that there are monogamists (then and now) who take marriage to be the get-out-of-rape-free card that they couldn't have when they were single, for example. A slightly better argument would focus on the extent to which polygamy as opposed to monogamy has, especially recently, been a facade for various nefarious purposes, but even then there's something amiss here: why do we have to do this using abstractions or statistics in the first place?

Returning now to the topic of the US budget, Thomas Donnelly is a twit.

In his budget speech last week, Barack Obama mounted his third attack on U.S. defense spending...But a nation cannot long secure itself or its interests if its defense 'planning' depends upon genius generalship, unending sacrifice by lieutenants, captains, and NCOs, and constant deployment of rapidly aging planes, ships, and vehicles. In war, you usually get what you pay for."

Defense equates to war? What we're doing (still doing) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya - that's defense? Cripes. I'd hate to see what would happen if we were actually aggressive.

"The path charted by the president is morally and strategically unsound. Obama argued that entitlement cuts would '[change] the basic social compact in America,' and vowed to defend the status quo. Yet he is prepared to take risks with the social compact between the civilian majority and the extremely few Americans—less than one percent of us—who risk their lives and kill our enemies in our name. The basic compact of the 'All-Volunteer Force' is not simply that people in uniform will be paid decently and their families cared for. It also presumes that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines will have the wherewithal to win whatever battle they are sent to fight."

I'll get to the real substance of this in just a moment, but it's also interesting to watch Donnelly spin a fantasy about the moral and technical excellence of our armed forces. We didn't win in Vietnam, we aren't going to win in Afghanistan, we completely failed to assassinate Castro,* apparently we've been drone-bombing Pakistan since 2004 with no real sign that we might be done any time soon - if in fact our armed forces have had "the wherewithal to win" all the battles we've been telling them to fight, the only possible reason for our failure is that our people aren't up to the task. Not that this is terrible or humiliating or somehow a sign of our impending military impotence or anything, but it does throw a bit of a wrench in Donnelly's propaganda machine.

At any rate, the argument he's making is that Obama's proposed defense cuts would be insufficient to fully fund our armed forces, but it's not like Obama's eliminating the defense budget altogether. There are, I grant, levels of funding that one can say are insufficient just by looking at the number - I would not, for example, be too scared of a twenty-dollar army - but I don't think Donnelly's argument is that we're going to end up with no military whatsoever. Which, y'know, is good: if he were arguing that, he'd be much worse than a twit. What he's arguing, I think, is that we're currently covering our costs but without much margin for error, so that any meaningful cuts will put us at risk. But there's a hidden assumption there, namely, that our military expenditures (or, at least, our needed/planned military expenditures) are going to remain constant. This would (in an ideal world) be sort of like questioning your friend's decision to cut her smoking budget right after she tells you that she's planning on quitting - you sort of get the feeling that Donnelly isn't really paying attention. (I say "in an ideal world" because, of course, it's not at all clear that we're actually going to quit it with all the military adventurism. Maybe the cuts will help to disincentivize that stuff, but I dunno.)

What I find most telling about all of this, though, is Donnelly's invocation of current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

"As I look around the world and see .  .  . more failed and failing states, countries that are investing heavily in their militaries .  .  . as I look at the new kinds of threats emerging from cyber to precision ballistic and cruise missiles and so on, my greatest worry is that we will do to the defense budget what we have done four times before. And that is, slash it in an effort to find some kind of a dividend to put the money someplace else. I think that would be disastrous in the world environment we see today and what we’re likely to see in the years to come."

So how disastrous are the proposed cuts? They're (apparently) just as awful as they were the last four times we did this. Quick - name the last four times the US of A faced a legitimate military threat to its existence. I'm no great student of history, but I'm pretty sure I only count two, neither of which really counts: the Revolutionary and Civil wars. So if these cuts are only as bad as past cuts have been, and past cuts have been approximately meaningless to the actual safety and security of the country, why should we be worried about this, again?

*Okay, I think technically this was the CIA, but it's so cartoonish and inane that I just had to put it on the list.

So when I first encountered the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property when doing research for yesterday's post, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to go check them out. It's like seeing the words "flourless chocolate" on a dessert menu, y'know? Just too tempting.

"With his ordaining wisdom, God brings all things to a good end, which is His extrinsic glory. However, just as it would be opposed to good human governance to intervene constantly in the activities of subjects, so also Providence or Divine Government normally lets natural causes follow their course even if, occasionally, this could give rise to some evil."

Yeah yeah, the natural-regularities defense to the problem of evil. But that's too complicated for a group that groups property together with tradition and family. Surely there's something else lurking here.

"Thus, God allows catastrophes to happen knowing that the suffering caused by them, be it from natural or human causes, can be trials that give rational creatures an occasion to gain merits through acts of patience, charity, dedication and even heroism."

Ah - the character-building defense. Much less subtle, but also a completely and totally different defense. That "thus," then, is a little bit weird. Maybe, a la the newest Leo meme, we can go one level deeper?

"Just as God rewards peoples on this earth for the good they do, He likewise chastises them for their vices."

Yes! Now we're talking: the Japanese tsunami didn't really happen because God didn't wanna mess with physics (because God must have messed with physics in order to punish them anyway) or in order to help develop the character of the Japanese people (as if the freaking nukes wouldn't have sufficed for that). More details, please!

"Only a person without a sense of sin would affirm that there are no reasons for God to be displeased with men.

Immorality and amorality have reached unparalleled levels. Even ancient pagans had greater notions of modesty, fidelity, honor and honesty than men today."

Now, now, American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property - don't be so coy! Tell us how you really feel.

"There is the breakdown of morality which has resulted in an incalculable number of divorces, abortions, and sexual deviations of all kinds, including an orchestrated campaign to favor and foster homosexuality.

Even worse, there is an unrelenting campaign of blasphemies and ridicule against God and all things sacred. It is an onslaught so crude and violent that the radical European anticlericalism of the nineteenth century pales into insignificance.

Judicial fiats are slowly but inexorably taking all references to God or religion out of public life and education.

Even Christmas, the most symbolic date in Christianity, is not kept sacred. Secular activists are accelerating their longstanding efforts to destroy the essence of the celebration by turning it into a merely commercial 'holiday season.'"

Gee golly, we must be really screwing things up here in...America. It sure is appropriate for God to punish the Japanese for all the stuff we're doing wrong here in...America.

Okay, you all get the point. I think I've worked this particular bug out of my system by now, so don't expect to see too much of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property here.

Shorter Amy Hall: "God? Yeah, he's basically the musclebound jerk from the old-school Charles Atlas comic book ads."

"Why did God allow evil to come into this world? Why not create everything in the state of perfection we will be in after this world comes to an end? I think the answer is that God had a goal in mind that is greater than the suffering, and that goal is the revealing of Himself to His people so that we will be able to fully express our pleasure in Him through worship, enjoying Him for an eternity.

In other words, we experience suffering and sin so that Jesus could die on the cross for us."

Shorter Ross Douthat: "Also, you have to say you like it when you get sand kicked in your face, or else you're gonna, y'know, get more sand kicked in your face."

"Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score."

It's hard to reconcile these two, I think. Without God around, morality is like "a children's game," which is a situation God saves us from by...fucking stuff up for everyone so it can show off how fucking badass it is.

...

I mean, I dunno. I feel like that's all I have to say about that.

And now for your daily dose of conservative are-you-shitting-me-ness, courtesy of James Wilson.

"Presumably, for the Brown students [who protested the fantastically sketchily-named "American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property"*], as for most undergraduate students I know, the only real, binding institution is neither family nor country, but the corporate/welfare State. The centralized technocracy that promises to order and regulate our lives, and indeed to keep us alive, is the only binding institution for them...

Their mockery is not directed only against those who defend marriage as a reality unalterable by human choice because determined by the dual-grip of natural law and divine sacrament. They are counter-protesting against anyone who proclaims anything in this world beyond the power and genius of State administration."

Yes, those damn kids and their damn rock music - er, I mean, political opinions! They're all just puppets of the State. Just, y'know, not the State of Rhode Island, where Brown is actually located: same-sex marriage isn't actually legal there. And also not the federal State, either: although the Obama administration is no longer defending the Defense of Marriage Act,** none of the three branches is in any hurry to make same-sex marriage a nationwide right. In fact, the gay rights movement is, as all civil rights movements are, inherently opposed to the "genius of State administration": if the State administrators were really all that beloved or worshiped, it's hard to imagine why we'd bother (or need) to have any rights movements at all. (Or, as Jon Stewart said last night, you can't blow kisses at the guy you're protesting.) So what the fuck does Wilson think he's talking about, again? I mean, besides the mildly disturbing imagery of being "bound" by one's country or "gripped" by divine command?

"Rather than raising children to 'succeed' in a future you cannot even imagine, raise them in the forms of piety to the most profound things you can know: to the generations of family who made them possible; to the natural community that may, if not ignored by the placeless, give form to their lives; and to the God who creates and governs all things, and in the thought of Whom alone can we find that which is most sweet and enduring."

Oh - well that's my mistake, then. I was looking for something besides an unvarnished call for brainwashed obedience to arbitrarily constructed ideals masquerading as ontologically fundamental components of reality, but it turns out that that's exactly what Wilson is asking for. You sort of have to wonder, in that case, why he bothers to identify a villain at all, especially since that villain (a State that autocratically implements legal protections for LGBT folks) doesn't actually exist in this case. Unless, of course, he's got something against kids and not just against queer people, which at this point I'm really not willing to rule out. Anyone who writes at a site called Front Porch Republic has to spend an awful lot of time looking at their lawn, and, well, you can take it from there.

*No, seriously, though: the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property. Or, in other words, the White People Society for Go Back Where You Came From, You Darkies and Queers. I mean, for crying out loud, at least have some subtlety.
**"Defense" again - think this is a coincidence? It ain't.

I mean that in the "revenue with elaborate costuming sense," incidentally, although I do have to admit that it's a convenient double entendre.

"I would imagine that most anybody familiar with (a)theist discussion has encountered a believer whom–when backed into a corner about, say, the unimpressive findings of various prayer studies–resorts to the rejoinder that 'God works in mysterious ways.'...Yet, when one confronts materialists with undeniable instances of 'this part' and 'that part' [of the brain] destroyed or missing, while 'this [cognitive] function' and 'that [cognitive] function' apparently remain intact, even up to the point of individuals with 50% to 75% of their brain mass missing, many people–perhaps even some of the same atheists who ridicule believers for using the 'mysterious ways' rejoinder–will respond that unlike any other organ in the human body, somehow, the brain knows how to remap itself in ways we don’t fully understand. IOW, the brain works in mysterious ways.

Is it me, or is that just a little too convenient, not to mention ironic?

I mean, how in the world can we falsify the claim that mind is entirely reducible to brain if materialists pull the neuroplasticity card every time we show an apparently intact mind with a compromised brain?"

cl's project here, although honorable, is sadly quite misguided, both factually and theoretically. Scientifically speaking, it's just false to say that no "other organ in the human body" readjusts itself to changing circumstances:

"In humans, the stomach has the job of storing and mixing food until it progresses into the intestine where digestion continues. As my stomach had been cut out, part of my small intestine was joined directly to my stomach in what is called a Roux-en-Y reconstruction. Without a stomach, my food passed directly from my oesophagus into my small intestine.

With time, I was told, the body would adapt; the small intestine would make a small pouch where food could be stored a little longer (mimicking the stomach), before it continued on its way. It is one of the human body's remarkable survival mechanisms."

This is the sort of thing that enables us to live without stomachs - yes, really, you can survive just fine with no stomach - and it's actually nowhere near as uncommon, ad-hoc, or magical-sounding as cl makes it sound. A second empirical flaw in cl's analogy is that there are brain functions that, once the hypothetically correspondent brain part went missing, have never been documented to come back - think of the corpus callosum. Even if all of the facts were on cl's side, though, the argument still wouldn't go through, for two reasons.

For one thing, the "mysterious ways" response is not even remotely falsifiable, whereas neural plasticity is at least in theory something that can be spun out into a detailed, testable hypothesis. Comparing the two, then, is not really fair, especially since it would be absurd to expect new scientific theories to be rigorously testable from their very inception. It would be embarrassing and pathetic if "neural plasticity" were just a hand-wave that nobody ever intended to investigate, but I don't think that's actually the case. Neural plasticity, moreover, is hardly the only defense available when hypotheses about brain/function correspondence fail: we can also just say that the hypothesis in question was wrong but that its failure has no real impact on the overall theory. Bear in mind, what we're trying to do with the brain is akin to monitoring the electrical activation patterns of a computer's hardware while Solitaire is running to see if we can figure out where it's installed on the hard drive - only the computer is orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've ever invented, the imaging technology is actually depressingly imprecise, and instead of Solitaire we're trying to look for processes that we still haven't even properly characterized. (And, yes, on top of everything else there's the possibility of plasticity.) To be perfectly frank, almost all of the proposed brain/function correspondences should be very tentative at this point in any case, so the discovery that one or more of them is wrong shouldn't really be grounds to reject or abandon the whole project.

A more interesting approach to all of this is the one taken by Paul Mealing here.

"Many people believe that emotion can be programmed into computers to aid them in decision-making as well. I find this an interesting idea and I’ve explored it in my own fiction. If a computer reacted with horror every time we were to switch it off would that make it sentient? Actually, I don’t think it would, but it would certainly be interesting to see how people reacted. My point is that artificially giving AI emotions won’t make them sentient.

I believe feelings came first in the evolution of sentience, not logic, and I still don’t believe that there’s anything analogous to ‘software’ in the brain, except language and that’s specific to humans."

As near as I can tell, Paul's argument is that "sentience, and therefore consciousness, evolved from emotions, whereas computers have evolved from pure logic." This reliance on evolution is interesting even if it smacks of a genetic fallacy, because (at least to my mind) it suggests a kind of extension or pervasiveness of consciousness that implicates other body parts besides just the brain (and/or, maybe, other brain attributes besides those that can be analogized to computer processing). The only problem is, I'm not really sure how this would work, and if I were ever to become sure how it would work I'm not sure how it would be impossible to construct something that worked the same way. That is, in some sense, the measure of knowing how something works, being able to build something that works the same way.* Whether that means synthesizing biological components that function like computers do or merely building more and more complicated sensory feedback mechanisms into the computers we already have, it certainly doesn't seem right to say that there's a hard wall between non-conscious artifice and conscious biology. And while it might not be really helpful or useful to actually do this because there's no real need for computers to be conscious, you know that the Japanese would go ahead and do it anyway.

So all in all I'm not convinced that any of this is more than a lot of color and flash. I do agree that it'd be nice if cognitive neuroscience were more advanced or if we had real-life examples of feeling computers, but in the meantime I fail to see how lacking either of those things forces us into any real skepticism about the idea that brains are like biological computers. Call me again in 20 years and we'll see what we say then.

*There are wrinkles here, of course, and it may be fun to work some of them out in the comments, but hopefully you get the basic idea.

Dear Anthony Esolen,

"She was dragged out of bathroom in a McDonald's in Baltimore and attacked by two women—both teenagers—and beaten nearly to death in front of a crowd of other customers and McDonalds employees. The attack only stopped after she had a seizure. A McDonald's employee filmed the attack and posted it to his YouTube account. (You can hear him laughing on the audio.) Other employees stood by and did nothing, other customers stood by and did nothing. One woman who tried to intervene—an older woman—was punched in the face. The McDonald's employee who filmed the attack—since fired—can be heard warning the attackers that the police were coming and they might want to get out of there."

That's what happened just recently to a trans woman in Baltimore, one of the cities that Esolen identified as having been ravaged by the sexual revolution. So Esolen, I've got a deal for you. You get to talk about how terrible things are for the people you care about when I don't have to read about people getting beaten nearly to death in front of a crowd of strangers just because they've had a specific kind of surgical procedure. Maybe then we can talk about whether or not the sexual revolution has gone too far, but I think we can both agree that it hasn't gone anywhere near far enough when sexual bigots are still nearly murdering people in broad daylight in one of the nation's largest cities. Yes, broken homes are bad. Yes, STDs are bad. Being beaten nearly to death is worse.

So in the comments to the recent thread about virtue ethics as a political solution for the intellectually lazy, the subject of salary inequality arose as a means of doing something about the economy. Let me now go into a little more detail about that.

"Michael Strianese, L-3 Communications

Compensation: $16.5 million

Stock performance: -17.2%

This major defense contractor's shares plunged in 2010 due to fears of military spending cuts, an alleged Air Force security breach, and public backlash against its full-body airport "porno" scanners. Even so, CEO Michael Strianese got a raise, raking in $16.5 million. Since Strianese became CEO in 2006, his pay has jumped 70 percent even as L-3's shares have seesawed. As the budget debate began heating up last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told defense contractors to start delivering cost savings lest the government force them to do it. In response, Lockheed Martin announced modest cuts to its executive compensation. L-3, however, gave its head honchos a 22 percent pay hike."

I know I've made this point before, but it really does bear repeating: CS Lewis is basically the poster child for migraine-inducing amateur philosophy. Seriously - he's one of the people whose recurrent appearances make me think that the cultural entity of philosophy is not primarily oriented towards making progress. I mean, this is just awful.

"As a classicist, Lewis knew about such traditional lines of reasoning pointing to an Intelligence behind nature. He also added some reasoning of his own, arguing in Miracles that, in order for human thought to be rational, it must be free: we must be able to form beliefs by a logical process that is not completely determined by physical processes in the brain. However, a naturalistic worldview, observes Lewis, assumes that matter and its operations are the foundation of all phenomena, including what we call rational thought. It is at this very point that he says Naturalism is self-defeating: it undercuts rational thought by subsuming it under physical causation and therefore removes any basis for regarding human thought as rational, and for regarding the naturalist’s belief in Naturalism as rational."

To be perfectly honest, this is such a tremendously flawed argument that it pains me even to rebut it. If rationality is just understood as logic (plus maybe some considerations about the proper ways to process evidence), there is no reason whatsoever to think that it is impossible for material mechanisms. I mean, for crying out loud: computers, which I think absolutely everyone agrees are not free and are really only governed by physics, run on logic!

The way that Lewis seems to want to escape this headdesk-worthy interpretation of his argument is to simply say, apropos of nothing, that rationality is logic plus freedom by definition. But why would we want to define rationality that way? The underlying intuition behind all of this appears to be the ought-implies-can thing, but it would be a terribly clumsy mistake to use that reasoning here. Although rationality also has a normative component when considered as a broad subject of human thought, that normativity has nothing to do with whether any given instance of reasoning is actually rational. When we ask after rationality, all we are trying to determine is the extent to which a line of thought processes the available premises correctly. Given this, the question of freedom is a total distraction - how the line of thought was generated says nothing at all about what that line of thought is, and rationality is determined by the what. We could equally safely examine a baseball pitching machine for its accuracy without having to worry that accuracy, at times a normative subject, is undermined or undercut by the fact of the pitching machine being a machine: whether or not it can choose how accurate to be, there just is a fact about the accuracy of its pitches.

That this sort of argument ought to be expunged from philosophy in the same way that phlogiston has been expunged from physics is made clear by the connection between this shitty, shitty argument and Alvin Plantinga's only marginally less shitty evolutionary argument against naturalism. Michael Peterson (chair of a philosophy department!), whose depressingly uncritical summary of Lewis's argument is the one I've quoted, sees the two as being related, and I have to say that I agree. And, while of course I don't have any problem with improving on the work of one's intellectual forebears, one also ought to be able to recognize when that work isn't worth improving on at all. Lewis's vision here is just plain stupid, and there's no good reason for us to pretend otherwise just because he published a lot of books and gets cited all the time. If this is the sort of garbage that philosophers let pass, then we have no right to hold ourselves up as being exemplars of anything other than gullibility.

In fairness, I can't do some of those things.

Shocking news this morning: a professor comes out in favor of his subject. Film at, well, now:

"I was in the middle of teaching the difference between knowledge and belief when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call from the dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Liberal Arts. The dean informed me that he was very sorry but, barring an unlikely immediate solution to the state’s financial crisis, the university had decided to eliminate the Philosophy Department...I actually wasn’t surprised. Philosophy has prompted confusion and anger ever since Socrates, one of the first practitioners of the discipline, was sentenced to death in 399 B.C.E. for 'corrupting the youth.' Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford."

Yes, you poor soul, you, you're just like good ol' Socrates. Talk about self-pitying. Todd Jones is a philosopher, though, so we should expect some really good arguments from him, right?

"I teach one of the core areas of philosophy, epistemology: what knowledge is and how we obtain it. People from all walks of life—physicists, physicians, detectives, politicians—can only come to good conclusions on the basis of thoroughly examining the appropriate evidence...Yes, it costs money to pay philosophy professors, but if that means a doctor makes a better diagnosis, a police officer fingers the right suspect, a politician crafts a better law, and our citizens reason better, then it’s money well spent."

This is a really nice example of what I take to be wrong with a lot of philosophy: all the hypotheticals line up just right but it never makes contact with the real world. The justification for a philosophy department, says Jones, is that you need it in order for a population to reason well. But does our population reason well? Evidence, I think, suggests not - at least, when "our population" is interpreted to mean "Americans." Jones can reply that the US is such a dumb country specifically because philosophy isn't used enough, but this doesn't address the point: in actuality, our philosophy departments aren't making us a well-reasoning society. If we're taking a strictly economic approach to this, then, it's hard to see how this argument works out in Jones's favor: Netflix, by somewhat silly analogy, is frequently worth the money, but if you just get one DVD and then let it sit on your coffee table for eight months then you ought not have Netflix.

So okay, hypothetical value can't make up for actual cost. Jones, like any good philosophy professor, has another bullet in his chamber.

"Yet what astonishes me is not that the immense long-term value of philosophy is so often unrecognized, but that many Americans think it especially problematic to find resources to fund philosophical training. It’s long been recognized that some tasks are best coordinated by governments, and that to succeed in these efforts, governments have to raise revenue from citizens. Since colonial times, Americans have recognized that education is one of the things that taxpayers need to support (and those were some lean times!). Sadly, over the last several decades, Americans seem to have grown accustomed to thinking that they can have roads, schools, fire departments, and Medicare without fully paying for them."

First he's Socrates, now he's a fire fighter! Why, Jones makes it seem as though philosophy professors are practically superheroes. This argument, however, still doesn't get to the point. Being able to pay for a Netflix subscription you don't ever use doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend that money on something else. Next!

"I spend my days making arguments (like the ones philosophers tend to study) in order to convince legislators, administrators, and community members that eliminating the UNLV Philosophy Department is a poor way to help solve the state budget crisis. Coming from a discipline that studies argumentation and evidence, how to make ethically sound decisions, and the ideas that have shaped the history of our civilization, I have a lot of good material to draw upon."

So, "Take my word for it"? Sorry, but no.

"But it’s certainly possible that all my efforts will come to naught and that I will soon join the many Nevadans who can’t pay their mortgages. My children seem especially nervous. 'Will I be able to keep my toys?' my eight-year old asks. I tell him that I’m working hard every day to prevent the cuts."

...really? Okay, now he's not even trying.

I highlight this article not, of course, because I have it out for philosophy departments. I think certain areas of philosophy could afford to be much smaller than they are now - aesthetics and religion, to name two - but I think that lots of academia is a pointless waste of time, so that's not really noteworthy. Rather, there are two things I want to demonstrate. One: even philosophy professors reason like putzes when their interests are on the line, and if you understand anything about academia you'll know that their interests are basically always on the line. And two: we've ceased to be able to talk about social issues intelligently, if in fact we were ever able to do so at all. Jones - who, it pains me to repeat over and over again, is a professor of philosophy - is essentially hanging his whole position on the premise that critical thinking is good for us, both as individuals and as a group. We need, he thinks, to be able to react to evidence well, engage with other people's thinking productively, and so on. And, yeah, we need those things. But does that mean that we need college philosophy departments?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I'm fairly certain that most basic philosophy could be taught to high schoolers, if not to kids who are even younger. Indeed, the really complicated stuff is the subject matter (i.e., content), whereas Jones seems to hype only the formal benefits of philosophy. That is, he's not saying that we need philosophy in order to disseminate information about compatibilism or Kantian ethics or any other specific philosophical theory, he's just saying that we need philosophy so we can be, generally speaking, philosophical. So why, again, does this have to happen in college? Why, in fact, would we even want it to happen in college? Not everybody attends college, and not everybody who attends college takes a philosophy course. Leaning on the college system to teach philosophical reasoning skills, then, seems like something that Jones should want to discourage, not to support. Indeed, viewed this way his argument marks him out as someone who really isn't paying much attention to educational issues in this country: as our grade schools have become less and less effective, we have come to see college more and more as a standard or basic part of a person's education and college degrees have become less and less meaningful. Pumping more resources into the college system will only enable this process to perpetuate itself without really helping anyone (well, anyone besides Jones and his poor, innocent children).

Jones, however, doesn't even mention the possibility of his becoming a high-school philosophy teacher, let alone using his expert knowledge and vast philosophical library to argue that leaving everything of importance up to colleges is a poor way to help solve our nation's education crisis. He argues instead that things should continue to be the way they've always been, only, y'know, better. This, then, is the real problem with philosophy departments and with the field of philosophy as we know it today: over and above its commitment to rational thought, it's about enshrining the same arguments and the same ideas that have been operating for ages. I won't go so far as to say that this makes Jones crazy, but you know what they say about people who do the same things and expect different results.

Not that way, though - I just mean that this is the third time he's appeared on this blog and that his three articles were hosted on three different websites. Esolen, of course, would never dream about getting around the other way.

"Look at Baltimore, look at Detroit, look at the fatherless families, look at the plague of divorce, look at the snarling contempt of one sex for the other, look at the prisons, look at the sewage of mass entertainment, look at the 'knowing' and jaded children, look at the venereal diseases, look at the sheer boredom evinced by the women’s magazines boasting the next hottest sex tip or five new and improved ways to get what you want out of your bedmate. The sexual revolutionaries have for too long simply begged the question. They say, 'We should be allowed to do this, because every sexual desire short of rape and (sometimes) adultery should be tolerated—no, encouraged, even honored in law.'"

It's funny - when Esolen needs to forget about cultural differences (as above) he does, and when he needs to remember them he does that, too. This is about as convincing as saying that we need to ban religious practice because look at how terrible things are in Iran and Saudi Arabia: Baltimore and Detroit aren't exactly a representative sample. And, of course, Esolen cites zero sources who say that "every sexual desires short of rape and (sometimes) adultery should be tolerated." It sure is easy to win arguments against nonexistent opponents, though, isn't it?

My favorite part, though, is how proudly unintellectual Esolen is. He says, for example, that it's "a plain fact that children deserve to be brought up by both a mother and a father" - and that's it. Nothing about the attributes of children in virtue of which they deserve this, nothing about the limits or contours of what is deserved (e.g. what does it mean "to be brought up by" someone?), nothing even about what counts as a mother or a father (and this is a harder question than you may think!). And, far from worrying about this, Esolen throws it in your face: it's a "plain fact"! "[O]nly madmen and modern educators would dare to" disagree with him! Say what you want, nobody will ever accuse Esolen of intellectualizing too much.

The real dig here, of course, is at same-sex marriage, but that's such a lost cause for his side by now that it's hard to believe that Esolen even bothers to beat it. (Again, not that way, apparently.) I mean, I know that he's only a PhD in English, but I'm pretty sure that even English departments require you to do things like cite your sources and break down complicated assertions. How Esolen learned these bad habits, then, I can only guess, but I suspect that it's related in some way or other to his personal life: if I spent a lot of time reading women's magazines and visiting Baltimore and Detroit, I'd probably be pissy and confused, too.

Censorship is not what Hollywood does when it refuses to throw money at sure bombs like Atlas Shrugged. Censorship is this stuff:

"China has been cracking down on dissent of late, as the recent detainment of artist Ai Weiwei suggests.

But the latest guidance on television programming from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television in China borders on the surreal – or, rather, an attack against the surreal.

New guidelines issued on March 31 discourage plot lines that contain elements of 'fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking.'"

First of all, fuck you, Chinese State Administration of Radio Film and Television. This is not cool. Second, moral ambiguity is a cornerstone of great narrative art. Anyway, not all radio, film, and television is fiction - what are you gonna do, ban morally ambiguous news?* "Absurd techniques" are another thing altogether, as I assume they mean absurd scientific (i.e., "western") techniques and not, say, fucking flying around and running on tree branches and shit.

And also, what's wrong with time travel? They say that "rewrit[ing] history...goes against Chinese heritage," but haven't they ever heard of stable time loops? I suppose the idea of a stable time loop is fatalistic and therefore might be outlawed on those grounds, but you can't really have it both ways, can you? Either fictional time travel retains the possibility of altering the past (which, allegorically, implies the possibility of radically changing the present and future) or not (which implies fatalism about the present and future as well as the past) - you can't avoid the question by getting rid of time travel because time travel is just a (maybe silly) artistic conceit!

It's distressing to see that this country, which allegedly is going to be our rival for the next eleventy-billion years, can't get it together on little things like not censoring innocuous escapist fiction. I mean, I have no particular stake in America as such, so it's not like I would be devastated were we to cease being the world's largest power or whatever. (Especially if we're going to keep electing centrist rhetoricians who go around acting like autocrats behind our backs, I might not even want us to be a power.) So it's not that I would be against China's rise under any and all circumstances - in fact, prima facie I support developing nations. But this is dumb, and it shows a real lack of positive momentum over there. Hopefully somebody comes to their senses soon so I can continue to enjoy the excellent work that Chinese artists are capable of - and, y'know, so they can have their rights and stuff.

*I know, I know: yes, probably they will. Still, though.

And speaking of virtue ethics, let's learn a little about the virtues, shall we?

"There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished, beliefs just because they don't comport with science...Our commitment to pluralism and individual freedom should motivate generosity in such matters and allow people 'the right to be wrong,' especially when the beliefs in question do not interfere with us. Nothing is gained by loud, self-promoting and mean-spirited assaults on the beliefs of fellow citizens."

That's Karl Giberson. This is Alma Acevedo...

"[Richard] Dawkins might [say] that he is grateful for the Milky Way and the Grand Canyon. Being grateful for a good, an event, or a state, however, presupposes a gift-giver. Those grateful for a promotion or applause, their health or their sufferings, are, albeit implicitly, grateful to the persons who brought about the event or state. 'Abstract' gratitude, therefore, is as meaningless as abstract piety, as oxymoronic as abstract repayment. Gratitude without a benefactor is as incongruous as a refund without a payer...We may be happy to be alive; but if also grateful to be so, it must necessarily be to the Giver of that gift."

...and this is Chris Stedman:

Oh, virtue ethicists - you're so silly! Even when you're professors of philosophy, like Raymond Hain is, you're just so adorably confused.

"The heart of 'new urbanism,' though not always expressed this way, is the claim that human beings are better off if they can perform their daily activities without the necessity and complexity of artificial transportation...I’m going to offer three arguments...which together, I think, give us a powerful defense of new urbanism."

"Powerful defense," huh? Yeah, that sounds like a professor of philosophy, alright. It's interesting that Hain defines new urbanism in the way he does because it excludes bicycles but permits horseback riding, which seems a bit funny (and not just because one can typically travel much farther on horseback than one can on a bike). I'll be a bit blunter than he is, then, and just say that new urbanism eschews motor transportation: bikes are okay, as I guess are horses if you can pull it off, but motorcycles, mopeds, cars, trucks, and so on are all out. The idea, in other words, is not to exile "artificial transportation" per se but to localize and condense life - which you should keep in mind as you continue to read. Anyway, Hain thinks that new urbanism makes sense because

"the communities of the neighborhood typically overlap, whereas the communities of the suburb do not. Though suburbanites still live, work, play, worship, and shop, there will be very few people, if any, with whom they will have more than one activity in common. We live with people other than those with whom we work, and we pray with yet a third, different community.

The most important feature of contemporary suburban sprawl, then, has little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with its fragmenting character. Suburbia makes possible and promotes a division between the various individual activities that make up our lives. But while our activities seem fragmented, we must find a way to integrate the various activities in which we engage so that our lives are a harmonious and unified whole. The task of integration, of recognizing the various human goods and pursuing them as a single human agent in search of happiness, is the central task of human life."

I would be very interested in seeing some kind of empirical data on this, because unfortunately Hain does not provide any. Speaking just from my own personal experience, then, I'm pretty sure he's full of shit: I've lived in neighborhoods and in suburbs, but neither one has been consistently well-integrated or poorly-integrated with regards to the various communities to which I belong. I certainly have found that the suburbs feel less well-integrated, but absent any kind of objective evidence for that feeling I can only conclude that it probably is, in fact, the aesthetics of suburban life that are the culprit. Even when I lived on an eminently walkable campus through four years of undergraduate work, it wasn't like all of my communities overlapped. If anything, the impression of having a unified community worked against my social circle, as we slowly learned that we weren't as integrated or overlapped as we had thought and then had to reconfigure ourselves with respect to one another. I grant that you can run some mildly plausible arguments that high-density living spaces will have more communal overlap than low-density ones - the law of large numbers might fit in here, for instance - but Hain (a) hasn't actually made any of those arguments and (b) would have to give me something more than just a mere possibility of increased social overlapping.

Assuming, though, that cities really do make for more actual integration of communities (rather than just seeming integration of communities), Hain is still up a creek without a paddle. He says, for his first argument, that we need integrated communities because "if we require the counsel of others in order to integrate these different aspects, we will need help from those who, alongside us, are a part of all the different activities that we must integrate." So, for example, if you want to figure out how to balance work, family, your chess hobby, watching three reality TV shows a week, and your life-long goal of learning Mandarin Chinese, you could only seek advice from another person who also has a job, a family, a chess hobby, a thing for reality TV, and who is trying to learn Chinese. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating - Hain actually thinks this; "what we need," he says, "is the perspective of someone else, independent of ourselves, who participates with us in the same activities and so can bring a fresh and different perspective to bear on our struggles" (my emphasis). The 'burbs scatter people too widely for this to work, Hain continues, but "if all our daily activities were within walking distance, many people would share several, and perhaps some even all, of the various common activities of which we are a part." Again, this is idle speculation and not very convincing, but what's added on is this bizarre assumption that (e.g.) only snowboarders can understand the challenges of snowboarding. Hain doesn't support this idea even a tiny little bit, which you'd think he might want to do given that it flies in the face of common sense, most people's actual experience, and reason.

His second argument isn't much better: morality requires virtue, he alleges, and that requires

"achiev[ing] the good in terms of the final end, the broadest context possible. For Aquinas, being prudent in this particular context might be nothing more than mere cleverness; it is only when I successfully order my pursuit of this good here and now into the overall pursuit of the final good that I can be called truly prudent. In order, therefore, to know whether or not I am acting virtuously towards others, I must know whether or not I am promoting the achievement of their final end. That is, I must understand how my particular act here and now fits into their life as a whole, and whether or not it promotes, in the end, their happiness."

It's interesting to watch Hain, evidently a virtue ethicist, produce a line of thought that says, in essence, that the ("final") end justifies the means. Whether or not he realizes just what it is he's saying, this argument is just as bad as the first: neighborhood-dwellers are in no more privileged an epistemic position than suburbanites are. This is true simply because knowing "how my particular act here and now fits into [another's] life as a whole" is only possible when one knows the other person in a fairly intimate way or else when one can trust the other person to endorse one's actions. The latter of these conditions can be accomplished just as well in suburbs as cities, obviously, and the former is just as difficult to accomplish in cities as in suburbs. (Actually, it may be even harder in city neighborhoods, as there will be more people one is required to get to know.) While I agree that we shouldn't base our actions just on "what appears good in a very narrow context," I see no reason to think (and Hain has given me no reason to think) that I will be able to see a broader context more easily in a neighborhood than in a suburb.

Hain's final effort to justify new urbanism rests on the idea that "it is much easier for us to act badly, and it is much harder to learn from the bad actions we do perform (and so to become someone who eventually acts well)" when we live in suburbs. It's not clear, however, just why he thinks this - at first he says that we're more likely to victimize someone when "when that person shares only a small fragment of our lives," but then he changes his tune so that the likelier victims are those who "we see only now and again, or perhaps hardly ever." The distinction between these two criteria, I hope, is a relatively clear one: I frequently see many people who I would nonetheless not count as sharing part of my life. It's important for Hain to get this straight because his ideal relates not to merely seeing people but to interacting with them as part of a community. If merely seeing people suffices to trigger the psychological mechanisms he alludes to, then, it would be overkill for him to require overlapping communities and all that stuff. And, yet again, Hain is ultimately trying to answer an empirical question (i.e., which sort of living arrangement has higher per capita crime, adjusted for relevant social factors) with armchair philosophy. The problem with this approach - I mean, besides the amazing hubris it takes to attempt it - is that Hain could be entirely correct in his armchair philosophy and still come up with the wrong conclusion simply because there are factors that neither he nor anybody else knows about. A neighborhood, after all, is not just a bunch of generic, featureless human prototypes moving in prescribed paths and seeing each other n number of times per day on average. Race, class, religious or political affiliation, and a whole host of other factors (some of which are even aesthetic) also play a role in our behavior, yet Hain accounts for precisely zero of these in his thought.

As with Amy-Jill Levine yesterday, I don't think the problem here is Hain's overall goal. I kinda like the idea of living in a place where I can bike anywhere I normally need to go - indeed, I live in such a place now. But new urbanism is both too powerful and too weak enough to achieve his (allegedly) virtue-ethical goals, and I think that that's where he gets into trouble. When you gather lots of people in a small area with the expectation that they're going to spontaneously form broadly overlapping communities, you're going to be disappointed: overlapping communities will happen, sure, but there are just too many available life activities for those communities to overlap in a really significant way. What's far more likely - and, from what I can tell, what actually happens in the real world - is that people form a large number of relatively narrow but tightly focused communities (which is the opposite of what Hain wants, i.e., a small number of really large communities). New urbanism, then, is likely to fly right on past Hain's communal ideal and end up in a place that's both highly communal and highly fragmented. Whereas this would solve the suburban problem of eliminating communities in favor of something more atomized, it would actually compress people too much, moving them from the suburban fragmentation of individuals to an urban fragmentation of groups. On the flip side, Hain also seems to have ignored one of the biggest phenomena of modern times: the internet. Online communities are almost definitionally geographically diverse, and clustering people closer together isn't really going to help that. Indeed, I'm not sure there's any way at all of ensuring that people choose local communities over virtual ones. Some anti-localizing forces, then, are just out of Hain's control.

Hain, then, might just need to accept that new urbanism's draws aren't the ones he wants to impose on it. It isn't going to draw everyone together into a single, unified community like (our image of) the olden days; it isn't going to give us a special vantage point from which to view virtue; and it isn't necessarily going to produce the environmental conditions that encourage virtuous behavior. Then again, Hain hasn't really even given us a reason to think that any of this matters. His concept of virtue is so utilitarian in nature that it's hard to see why we shouldn't just drop the facade and look directly at the consequences of these various social configurations - whether people end up with more or less integrated lives, say, or whether there's more or less crime. Trying to get to those more foundational goods by wringing virtue-talk out of everything seems like a bit of a runaround, frankly, and (if Hain's article is any indication) it'll only make us confused anyway.

Over at the Washington Post, Amy-Jill Levine asks, "Can we really blame religion for discrimination against women?" You can probably guess my answer, but I give Levine at least this much credit: she's wrong in a revealing and helpful way. After wasting some time demonstrating that we can't blame every religion for every instance of discrimination, Levine launches into her real line of argument.

"The Muslim teenager who chooses to wear a hijab, the evangelical wife who agrees to be 'subject' to her husband, the Orthodox Jewish woman who sits in behind a mechitza, the partition that separates men and women in worship, may not see themselves as oppressed and marginalized. To the contrary, many see themselves as honored by their tradition even as they honor it. The headscarf conveys personal modesty and religious identity. The wife may be subject to her husband, but the husband must love his wife 'just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her' (Ephesians 5) – the passage asks much more of the husband than it does of the wife. As for sitting behind the mechitza, it’s a great place to find women’s solidarity."

On the surface this is actually marginally compelling, especially since Levine herself finds that "the choice to be in an Orthodox setting works" even though it affords her fewer opportunities than she had in a more liberal Jewish congregation. Rather than talking in some hypothetical sense about women's experiences, then, Levine is working from her own life, which is a much more solid starting point because it's something that she's intimately familiar with. The trouble is that she cites the perception of women as a sufficient justification for non-intervention, when in fact perception is only part of the story. Solidarity, in fact, is a quite a good example of this: it could very well be the case that the solidarity of orthodox Jewish women is simply a result of not having that solidarity anywhere else, but that solidarity could very well also (at least in part) be a protective response to an environment that is, frankly, a little on the hostile side. This sort of thing becomes a much bigger deal when we start to talk about things like female circumcision (a.k.a. female genital mutilation) and divorce, but it's problematic even on the relatively benign level at which Levine approaches it.

Levine actually sums up the key aspect herself when she says that "[t]he issue is not constraint, but choice." On a surface reading - which, unfortunately, is probably the way that Levine intended it - this is blatantly contradictory: on a sort of ground-level view, constraint and choice are complementary notions and so there's no way to talk about one without talking (or, at least, saying something) about the other. A rather more intelligent way of thinking about the two concepts is to investigate which choices we can deny to our future selves without producing some real moral problem. So, for example, if I had the choice of attending a concert or a stand-up show, opting for either one would eliminate the possibility of seeing the other; perhaps more controversially, people who join militaries are often subject to extremely stringent restrictions on speech and conduct. There are many gradations between those two examples, of course, and they don't mark out the very ends of the spectrum, but they suffice to illustrate the point: more or less all of our choices constrain the options available to us in the future, and some of these constraints seem more acceptable than others, perhaps even to the point of being desirable. As I said, however, it doesn't seem as though Levine is thinking along these lines. Nor, in fact, can she get away with doing so: in order to evaluate an act of voluntary constraint in any interesting way, we have to have some evaluative measure other than the feelings, beliefs, desires, and so on of the person in question. This is because we would want to produce something with real normative force, something that can be used to judge not just an act of voluntary constraint but also the feelings, beliefs, desires, and such that motivated the act. In other words, we want to escape a purely subjective account of these choices and say something objectively true about them and their relationship to morality. That Levine is confused about this distinction and wants to reduce everything down to the subjective level can be seen in her compound claim that we should look out for acts of voluntary constraint that "prevent participants from exercising their gifts, or mandate roles that seem to them unnatural or harmful": the first part of the disjunction is objective and the second subjective, but she lumps them together as though they're the same.

What's really sad about this is that, unlike many authors who appear on this blog, Levine's fallacies aren't necessary to support her case. There's just no way to make creationism seem reasonable without resorting either to misleading reasoning or else straightforward lies, but Levine could argue with some plausibility that there just aren't any morally problematic acts of voluntary constraint - that, in essence, voluntariness makes it all okay. At the very least that seems plausible in the case of whether or nor she gets to sit with men in her religious service of choice, even if it does become somewhat hazier in the case of women who leave their every (major) decision to their husbands or women who enter into marriages that they then have no way to leave. Rather than actually investigating these issues and the various claims for and against an exception-less moral right to voluntary constraint, though, she settles for ad populum reasoning (some portion of women endorse it, ergo it's okay) or question-begging obfuscation (we "substitute extreme examples for the full panoply that is religious practice," she says, but she never tell us what makes for an extreme example). It's too bad, too, because this is actually something that we encounter on a fairly regular basis and in a variety of contexts, the issue of voluntary constraint. Although Levine certainly had a chance to use her life experience as a springboard to say something interesting and penetrating about the subject, this post of hers is unenlightening at best and downright misleading at worst.

I mean the purple dinosaur, although I guess Barney Rubble also qualifies. Really, I imagine that most Barneys would be more likable than this one.

"[Rob] Bell’s formulation that 'everyone will have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be' is one that resonates with me, and I think he’s on the right path.

I don’t believe that a just God would subject people to eternal physical torment for ever and ever, especially when in many cases people simply did not have an opportunity to learn of the Gospel in this life through no fault of their own."

Oh, but that's not very objectionable at all, some of you are probably saying. Yeah, okay - give it time.

"First, when you die your spirit goes to a sort of waiting room called the Spirit World. The righteous go to Paradise, but those who died without a knowledge of the Gospel or who were wicked go to Spirit Prison. The suffering they experience there is more mental than physical, consisting of guilt and anguish over their misdeeds in mortality...The other sense in which Mormons sometimes use the word 'hell' is as a reference to what they call Outer Darkness, which is reserved for Satan and his spiritual minions, together with a few human beings that qualify as 'sons of perdition.'

Although this would be close to the classical conception of Hell, the Mormon belief is that very few will go there, for the bar to be sent there is quite high. One must have a sure knowledge (beyond faith) that Jesus is the Christ, and then reject him anyway in the face of such a knowledge. This is Judas Iscariot territory and really beyond the capacity of the average person to achieve."

See? It'd be really fucked up and terrible for God to "subject people to eternal physical torment for ever and ever" (as opposed, I guess, to eternal physical torment that doesn't last forever and ever) for something that is "no fault of their own," but, y'know, a little physical torment is okay. Also, note the casual association of wickedness and lacking "a knowledge of the Gospel." Maybe this is just me, but irremediable ignorance seems like a paradigm case of something that absolutely cannot be wicked: it's not an active behavior but rather a default state, it's not something a person can change, it doesn't do any damage in and of itself, and so on. The whole just-God thing starts to look a little implausible, then, when that God would guilt-trip, say, ancient New Zealanders for never having heard of some guy who was born thousands of years after their deaths and on another continent.

It's also not great that the worst thing Barney can think of is knowing "that Jesus is the Christ, and then reject[ing] him anyway." I also might have a quibble about just what's within "the capacity of the average person," but c'mon - there's nothing to say about, I dunno, serial rape or torturing kittens or wearing flannel ironically? Satan's minions, the ones who end up in the Outer Darkness - which, incidentally, sounds more like a SyFy show than an actual theological concept - are just the people who are extremely rude to Jesus? To be perfectly honest, this is almost insulting: if I wanted to be really evil and I went around burning down people's houses while they're still inside and stuff, God would still just stick me in the Spirit Prison ("Coming this fall on the Discovery channel") for a while? I know that Barney wants to promote a kinder, gentler God here, but I'm just not buying it - and not just because of the kitschy high-fantasy landscape he's working with. If he's got enough critical thinking skill to see the contradiction in the traditional concept of hell, it's distressing for Barney not to apply that same talent to the embarrassingly cobbled-together view he's been taught. A little skepticism, one might say, can also be a dangerous thing.

Continuing now with the semi-regular posts about making morality something more than a matter of mere faith, here's Paul Zahl:

"If you’ve heard of George Bell, it’s probably because the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed his last words to Bell just before Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis, on April 9, 1945. What is less well known is that Bell was the public voice of conscience against inhumane tactics used by British Bomber Command against Germany during World War II...

He offered statistics on the number of civilian casualties, mostly women and children, that were being caused by the Allied bombings. He stated that an attempt to justify Britain’s inhumane carpet bombing smacked of the enemy’s philosophy — that Might is Right.

'Why is there this inability to reckon with the moral and spiritual facts? Why is there this forgetfulness of the ideals by which our cause is inspired? How can the War Cabinet be blind to the harvest of even fiercer warring and desolation to which the present destruction will inevitably lead when the members of the War Cabinet have long passed to their rest? How can they fail to realize that this [i.e., the tactics of Bomber Command] is not the way to curb military aggression and end war? This is an extraordinarily solemn moment.

'The sufferings of Europe are not to be healed by the use of power only. The Allies stand for something greater than power.'"

Like the prior entry in this series-ish thing I'm doing here, Bell's moral stance is far from clear. It has something to do with ideals, but also something to do with consequences - and symbology and "spiritual facts" (whatever those are) and who knows what all else. Zahl, one hopes, would help to clear this up. But, well, no:

"What would Bishop Bell have thought of America’s use of unmanned drones to bomb targets seen only on computer screens thousands of miles away — i.e., at Creech Air Force Base, in Nevada? For unmanned drone aircraft are an extreme case of mediated warfare, in which the combatant — the distant operator of the drone — is so far removed from the action that he or she can only have a highly detached sense of responsibility for the action...Bell’s point, in his context, was that aerial bombing was taking human responsibility out of the equation. The bishop kept pulling photos out of his pocket, which his anti-Nazi contacts had gotten to him, that told their story of the human torches, mostly women and children, that the British raids were creating."

Now we have "human responsibility" added to the mix - or maybe just a "sense of responsibility." Zahl ends his article by asking if, given a "pattern of justice to history, what our great grand-parents sometimes called the Providence of God, and will America be judged for its failure to question the use of unmanned drones?" This brings the total number of balls in the air to seven, I think: consequentialism, some flavor of divine command theory, justice, ideology, symbology, responsibility, spirituality. Quite clearly, this is not how to think about morality in a helpful, well-structured way.

Trying to make things at least a little cleaner, we can immediately reject Bell's (and, by extension, Zahl's) consequentialist concerns. While Bell may have had a point about the specific bombing program in place at the time, history has shown with startling surety that you definitely can crush a country's spirits by killing civilians. Whether or not that suffices to resolve the ethical question, it makes that aspect of this problem null and void: blowing people up is a way to "curb military aggression." Likewise, there's very little reason to be afraid of "the Providence of God." If Britain didn't go under for their firebombing (they haven't) and if we're not already screwed because of the atomic bomb,* it seems obtuse to worry about using drones in the middle east. Although I fully support the is/ought gap, continuing to support a moral argument that either produces false empirical predictions or else is premised on false empirical premises is just stupid. So that takes care of two of the seven.

Spirituality I'm rejecting out of hand for reasons that should be clear by now. Symbology is a dead end because there's no such thing as intrinsic symbolism. That is, morality needs to be determinate and objective if it's going to have any force, but symbolic interpretations of actions are only valid within perspectives. More problematically still, any interpretation is suitable qua interpretation: we can bring in other concerns if we want to bring it from the realm of pure interpretation into the realm of, say, reading the actor's intentions, but then it's no longer pure symbology. In order to worry about the symbolic implications of using drones, then, Zahl would have to pick an interpretation basically from out of the air, and that's not how morality works.

Ideology is somewhat better in that it at least provides something specific to push against, but it still doesn't tell us anything about morality per se. Ideologies, after all, are only worth following if they correspond to what's good to follow, that is, if they're good ideologies. Although Zahl and Bell are almost definitely correct to say that the American (or British) ideology is superior to the Afghani (or Nazi) one, that says nothing about why it's better - and nothing, therefore, about whether we're morally obligated to follow the part of the ideology that doesn't square with using drones. Even if we were to establish that the "good guy" ideology differed from the "bad guy" ideology specifically on the matter of drones - not bloody likely in the present case, but whatever - that still wouldn't be sufficient to conclude that drones are immoral. Citing ideology, then, just begs the question.

Of the remaining two (justice and responsibility), Zahl appears to only actually be concerned with one - unless, of course, a soldier's sense of responsibility figures somehow into justice. It would, after all, be ridiculous to say that actual responsibility is diminished or removed because a soldier uses a joystick instead of a rifle. And, to his credit, Zahl seems to realize this. Actual responsibility, then, was never on the table in the first place, and rightly so. Having established that, though, it's still a question as to how justice requires soldiers to feel bad about what they're doing. It could be that the psychological trauma of killing people balances out the harm of the killing itself in a way that fits with justice, although then it's not really historical justice.** Or Zahl could say, along with Bell, that we're less likely as a society (or as soldiers) to endorse (or follow) martial practices that make us squeamish, but that's a consequentialist concern and not really one related to justice as such. (It also probably fails the empirical test - Milgram and all that.) In fact, Zahl seems at once fixated on and dismissive of the supposed consequences of using drones. He seems to identify the wrongdoing with "the human cost of [using drones]," but then he also wants to say that there's something inherently wrong with using drones, such that the difference between drone-bombings and regular bombings is so huge as to tip the scales into anything-goes warfare. From a strictly consequentialist viewpoint, though, that's completely wrong: you're just as dead when a drone blows you up as when a regular airplane does.

If morality were just a matter of faith - a "scientific" discipline in everydaythomist's clownish definition of the term - none of this would really matter. We could point to all sorts of intuitions, signs, and omens that militate against e.g. drone bombings and then rest on those alone. The problem with this, as we've just seen, is that a moral system that lacks a proper foundation isn't really a moral system so much as a muddled collection of normative statements. If we're going to figure out the moral reality of drone bombings, we need moral boundaries to be clear and sharp, but Zahl only provides blurred or murky distinctions, and even some of those are just tricks of the light. I dunno about you all, but I think we can do better than that.

*Not to mention the native American tribes, slavery, the WWII internment camps, Vietnam, the war on terror in general, torture...
**Also it's odd to think that morality requires us to choose the less happy of two states of affairs, but that's more of a complaint with (one view of) justice itself as a moral axiom and not a problem with Zahl's thinking itself.

I thought I might have been a bit unfair to A.C. Grayling last week when I said that he might have intended his anemic Good Book to be universally applicable. Thanks to the link in Paul Mealing's last comment, however, I know that I should in fact have been even more critical:

"Drawing on classical secular texts from East and West, Grayling has 'done just what the Bible makers did', reworking texts into a 'great treasury of insight and consolation, inspiration, uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world'. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

Who does he think will read The Good Book? 'Well, I'm hoping absolutely every human being on the planet.'"

A "great treasury," he says. Hm. Well, I suppose he's right, at least in the sense that his book is a treasury and succeeds quite well as a treasury. Whether it's a treasury of any worth is, I think, another question altogether. And to say that it's a treasury that "absolutely every human being on the planet" should read is so laughable that you can't help but wonder if he hit his head at some point in the recent past.

The problem, I reiterate, is the same one that defines a certain paradigm of flawed religious thought, such as the thought that Michael Medved displays here.

"When Moses confronts Pharaoh demanding, in God's name, an end to Hebrew slavery, he never once invokes the prospect of mere release. The well-known phrase 'let my people go,' made popular by a moving spiritual developed by black slaves, never once appears in accurate translations of the Old Testament. The Hebrew text unequivocally orders Pharaoh to 'send my people out,' not to 'let them go'. The plea by Moses involves a purposeful, united mission with a pre-ordained destination, not merely a release of the slaves to follow their own inclinations...

Those who gather for a Passover Seder tonight (including increasing numbers of Christians who hope to reconnect with the Jewish roots of Jesus) have plenty to lose and so, to some, might look un-free. But the holiday delivers a deeper sense of liberation, establishing home ground within history, continuity and covenant, and reminding us that knowing what's expected of you constitutes the freedom that is most worth celebrating."

I rather suspect that Medved's conservatism ("history, continuity, and covenant") is not coincidental, but that's a post for another time. For now, it's sufficient to observe that Medved, like Julie Robinson before him, cites primarily personal reasons in support of his allegedly objective conclusion: it's his "sense of liberation" that's the proof, he says, of the fact that "knowing what's expected of you constitutes the freedom that is most worth celebrating." The discord between phenomenology and metaphysics is so damaging to Medved's position that it even overshadows his incredibly puzzling conclusion. We need not even ask how knowing what's expected of you constitutes freedom or why that freedom is the most valuable kind of freedom (or even just what it means for there to be different kinds of freedom) because, in reality, Medved hasn't given us anything more philosophically relevant than any random middle schooler's diary entry.

It's great for Medved that he can find this deep sense of belonging and fulfillment in his Judaism, but it's terrible of him to perpetuate the myth that everyone can find the same experiences in the same (sorts of) events. Grayling, if he's smart, will see this sort of thing and really start to worry about what it is he's done - Medved is not, I don't think, the sort of person with whom Grayling would like to associate himself. Even if his Good Book actually does contain the best of the best - which, again, I doubt; see the screencap in the previous post - there's nothing to say that the best of the best will be enough, either for future generations (who will live very different lives) or even just for our own (given the plurality of lives that we've already got). Although the content of the tradition differs between Medved and Grayling, the form apparently remains exactly the same: my tradition is what you need. I give Grayling credit for breaking out of the parochial mindset that says that traditions must be rigidly separated and that you can only dabble in one at a time, but the subtler reality is that a tradition is just one more thing that we humans continually remake for ourselves and therefore has no independent value (or even reality). Privileging a collection of traditions, then, does not move very far past privileging just one tradition; on a population level, the prerequisites for "insight and consolation, inspiration, uplift and understanding," contrary to what almost all of us have been taught, can only ever be described formally. Any attempt to weight those prerequisites down with meaningful content, such as Grayling's, is just a mistake, no matter how diverse its sources.