Rust Belt Philosophy

In a way, this seems to be the distillation of the modern philosophical process. Rather than developing his own position on what he calls evolutionary creationism, Ryan Pettey has constructed a view Junkyard-Wars-style, scavenging bits and pieces from other philosophers and assembling them into a semi-coherent whole. One of the dangers with this, of course, is that it really only is semi-coherent.

"Dr. Jeff Schloss: 'Well, why does God use history to achieve his purposes? Why not just have created everything right to begin with? And then, if it were made wrong at a point in time by Adam and Eve falling, why not just have Christ die right there in the Garden and have salvation? Why wait thousands of years for the revelation of Christ? And we don’t get to have the answer to that.'

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: 'That shows us that God is patient and subtle, that God is prepared to create through process, unfolding process, rather than through just divine magic decree.'"

I mean, these two bits don't really go together, do they? On the one hand, here's Jeff Schloss telling us that "we don't get to" know why God didn't just make "everything right to begin with," but then here comes John Polkinghorne telling us that "God is patient and subtle." How can those two things both be correct? It seems to me that if we don't get to have an answer, we don't get to know that God is patient and subtle as opposed to dickish and bored or bungling and incompetent. And look - if you want to avoid the appearance of "divine magic decree," using this concept of an "unfolding process" is not going to help because someone or something had to create the process (that is, its initial state and the rules which it follows in proceeding). Unless the process already existed and God is just using it - which would mean, incidentally, that God couldn't have done otherwise - all that accomplishes is to put the divine magic decree back a step.

"Dr. Jeff Schloss: 'If you believe that every kind of living organism was supernaturally created by God, then, in one sense, every organism is unique, and the cheetah is the fastest organism, and the redwood tree is the largest organism, and they are all specially and supernaturally and distinctly created by God; they are all unique. If you believe in common descent and believe in evolutionary theory, then there is a sense in which no organisms are unique to the extent that they can be explained by the common mechanism of mutation and selection. When we look at human beings, human beings do things that, as of yet, are actually not adequately explainable by the common mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection.'"

Yes, well, and so does almost every other organism. Organisms, it turns out, are really complicated. Why, then, are we focusing so intently on humans, again?

"Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: 'What Mother Teresa did on the streets of Calcutta is not evolutionary useful. It is taking limited resources and giving them to people who are dying. That is not, from a survival point of view, useful.'"

Ah. It's because we apparently have no fucking clue about how evolution works, is why. I should've known.

"Dr. Richard Colling: 'So when we talk about evolution, it is really not a matter of death and destruction imposed upon humanity and all forms of life. Evolution, from a geneticist standpoint, is really a game about probability and potential and hope and possibilities—the same thing that the New Testament says that Christians should be all about.'"

Or it could be both. In fact, let's go one step further: it must be both, because probability and potential and hope and possibilities are only available to evolution in virtue of death and destruction (and predation and resource scarcity and and and...). And, let's be honest, that "so" has no place being at the front of that sentence. It has nothing to do with the material that came before it. Sort of like this:

"Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: 'And when you come to think about it…if the nature of God is love, as Christians believe, then I think that is the way you would expect the God of love to create, not through just brute power, but by the unfolding of fruitful potentiality.'"

I for one have no clue why anyone would expect a loving entity to create "by the unfolding of fruitful potentiality" (as opposed, incidentally, to unfruitful potentiality...?) and not brute force. Like, if I go to a carpenter who carpents* me a chair using forceful methods like planing and sawing and hammering, I should conclude that the carpenter doesn't love making chairs? Certainly it's possible for carpenters not to love making chairs, but then again it seems pretty stupid to say that no carpenter has ever loved making chairs. And for those carpenters who don't love making chairs, I don't see how it would help any for them to replace their brute-power methods with subtler, Rube-Goldbergian ones.

And, come to think of it, are we even talking about something Rube-Goldbergian at all? Remember, Colling seemed to think that we were dealing with probability and potential, in other words, with chance. To call a chance happening an "unfolding" seems to me to be more than a little misleading. This is no small matter, either, because it forces Pettey to come up with (or, well - to find someone else who has already come up with) an account of what chance is.

In many cases we use statistical language as a shorthand for calculations based in ignorance: "35% of Americans hate Kobe Bryant (that bastard)" would really mean something like "if you tell me that someone is American and then ask me whether or not that person hates Kobe Bryant (that bastard), I can only guess not, but only because of the paucity of information you've given me, you jerk." Here there isn't really any chance involved: if we could get a precise enough sample set, you'd be able to guess every single time whether a person in that set hated Kobe (that bastard). It's important that we realize this because we frequently have the opportunity to improve upon the knowledge we have and so improve our estimates. One woman I saw at the hospital had an allergic reaction to a transfusion, which (I was told) was a 1 in 20,000 occurrence. With the statistics in mind, her doctors thought it couldn't possibly happen again and so transfused her again - at which point she had another allergic reaction and nearly died. Their mistake was to ignore the additional piece of information that had been given to them: in virtue of having had one allergic reaction already, their patient ceased to be a member of the general population and moved into a category of people about which more is known. If this is the way that Pettey thinks that "evolutionary creationism" works, then he has to ditch Colling because evolution isn't about possibilities or hope or any of that stuff. Just like this woman's reactions weren't bad luck but a genetic inability to receive transfusions, evolution wouldn't be up to chance but would instead be a series of preordained events, meaning that God would indeed be the direct author of the death and destruction we see.

If instead Pettey thinks that there really is some ineliminable uncertainty and indeterminism involved, he cannot maintain the idea that anything is unfolding. Whatever evolutionary good fortune we could be said to have would, in this case, just be good fortune and nothing more. While this would make it harder to pin the blame on the cosmic-architect God seemingly envisioned by Pettey, it would do so only at the cost of making it harder in equal measure to credit God for anything that goes right because there would be literally nothing God could do to make a difference. It would also make it even more absurd to say that God is "subtle and patient," because that subtlety would actually be the trivial consequence of relying on luck and that patience would instead be impotence. As for "loving," well - that gets at much more complicated issues than the ones Pettey has found a tiny quote to express.

Of course, either of those possibilities assumes that Pettey himself thinks anything at all. It's equally possible, I would say, that he isn't really doing any thinking here at all but rather only produces the illusion of thought by quote-mining for fancy phrases. For me personally this is more than a little disappointing because Pettey has (if unwittingly) hit on a number of very interesting concepts in this little philosophical mixtape of his. Without the willingness to investigate these ideas on their own terms (that is, outside the obviously bias-inducing context of "evolutionary creationism") or a proper understanding of science, though, the most he can do is to throw ideas around and hope that one of them sticks.

*Yes, I know this is not a word. Thank you for your concern, though.

First, something I was remiss not to mention before now: the World Cup! We're off to a 1-0-0 start after beating North Korea, but I was not terribly impressed with our play. Then again, the whole field has looked pretty rough - not a lot of good possession, poor spacing, defensive lapses, bad team chemistry, the whole works - so I think it remains to be seen which side can find their game first. (The second set of games will be a lot better than the first, I bet.) I think we have a lot of potential, especially because our keeper looks pretty solid, but if there's anything I've learned over the years it's that American teams with potential don't always develop into anything I actually want to watch or be associated with. Also, is it just me or have there been way fewer offsides calls in the women's tournament than there were in the men's?

And second, Google has a social networking thing now. If anybody has anything smart or interesting to say about this please let me know, cause I haven't used any social networking thing seriously for like 3 years now and I'm not really gonna start just cause it has Google's brand name on it.

I wonder because of this:

"It is impossible to understand Britain’s history, traditions, and common life without a grasp of what Christianity is all about. All sorts of things — from the names of our towns and cities, to pub signs, nursery rhymes, jokes, and everyday language — are rooted in a culture that owes its origins to the Christian Faith, which was brought to Britain when we were a province of the Roman Empire, and brought again when the pagan Angles and Saxons arrived and were converted in their turn...The Christian message has a place in the public square, and the school system is entitled to reflect that reality. Children have a right to be taught the best of our heritage, and to know about the great spiritual things that have inspired generations."

The scope of Joanna Bogle's proposition is somewhat wider than I'm familiar with, but I've seen this sort of thing before. Usually it happens in the context of English class, and in particular in the context of reading Shakespeare - we can't really understand what he was saying, the argument goes, unless we understand a lot about the religious framework he took for granted when he wrote. Of course, the same goes for lots of literary works, as references to the Bible are pretty standard fare in the western canon. Limited to English class, however, this sort of argument has clear boundaries. It's not necessarily helpful to go into all that detail about "the great spiritual things that have inspired generations" if all you want is to understand what "'sblood" means, for example. But Bogle wants to remove the argument from the moorings of any particular body of work, which means she has to explain where the limits are and why she places them there. (There must be limits, of course, because the school day is only so long and the amount of information out there is gargantuan.) In other words, I think she has to tell us what counts as a heritage for her.

For example, how much would she say children should learn about the period during which "the pagan Angles and Saxons arrived and were converted in their turn"? On the one hand, she could limit her focus on the inspired-generations thing, but she could also talk about how the Christians appropriated pagan imagery and theology in order to win converts - and how that imagery and theology is, in fact, still a part of modern Christian practice. When she talks (as she inevitably will) about the Christian commandments to help the poor and stuff, will she also bring up the long-standing Christian resistance to contraception? To gay rights? Would she bring up the religious components of the historical strife between the English and the Irish? I cannot help but to think that she would not - the whole bit about only teaching "the best of our heritage" is something of a dead giveaway. But why limit it to the good parts? Unfortunately, Bogle doesn't say.

The question, of course, isn't just a religious one. Here in the states we're constantly trying to get southerners to teach their kids the truth about slavery and the Civil War, which most of us rightly take to be a significant and undeniable part of our American heritage. (Germans, by contrast, seem to have absolutely no doubts about the importance of teaching the unsavory parts of their national history.) It seems to me - just on initial reflection, mind you - that these issues are decided mostly on the basis of how we want our children to think of themselves.

One way of looking at a heritage is to see it as a reflection of who we are. In this sense you can look at the arc of history as a just-so story wherein everything that has happened has led up to the present day, and therefore only relevant parts of our heritage are those that have been retained and that we still carry with us. Usually this view goes along with the judgment that we're pretty darn good these days even if we weren't in the past, meaning that the relevant parts of our heritage are the pretty darn good ones. It feels like that's the direction Bogle would like to go, as she specifically references currently-existing "names of our towns and cities...pub signs, nursery rhymes, jokes, and everyday language." This seems to me to indicate that she really only cares about the stuff that still exists, and so probably wouldn't care too much about trifles like the fact that Christmas trees aren't actually theologically Christian. There are two problems with this approach, though. First, obviously, it's not at all clear that we're pretty darn good these days. But also, it's equally unclear that this view is internally consistent. Bogle says that the basis of her argument is the existence of things like nursery rhymes and city names, but she simultaneously fails to recognize that things like nursery rhymes and city names are just cultural artifacts like anything else we create - that is, that what they are now is just what they are now and not what they used to be. To return yet again to my favorite analogy, Bogle would be mistaken if she thought that students of basketball needed to learn Naismith's original thirteen rules in order to understand the modern game. Those street signs and whatnot that have come to mean something different do mean something different; it  might be fun for history buffs to learn about their former meanings, but to think that their former meanings matter more than (or even as much as) their current meanings would be to remove that which makes a heritage a heritage, i.e., its being situated in a whole past cultural context (think about the plot progression of  Fiddler on the Roof).

So I don't think that that option works, because I don't think it does enough to understand that if we want in the interest of fairness to understand the past on its own terms we have to do the same for the present. An alternative is to look at heritage as a measure of who we were. The advantage here is that there's no need to try to drag obsolete artifacts forward and reinstall them in the present as though nothing important has changed, but the downside is that this view makes it harder to understand who we now are. As a moral teaching tool, then, this second interpretation of heritage can be challenged on the grounds that it presents either irrelevant information (in that it's no longer important for who we are) or else wrong information (in that it incorrectly identifies who we are). I see this more often in the American political context (Americans are exceptional, teaching about slavery undermines that exceptionalism, blah blah blah) but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it translated to Bogle's case as well. And, indeed, this version does make it harder to say who we are - but, I would argue, it does so rightly. History is a valuable in part because it allows us to learn from mistakes without having to make them ourselves, and it also doesn't hurt to hold ourselves up to behavior we know to be imperfect in order to see if we aren't maybe overlooking a few of our own flaws. None of that, however, is going to come easy.

Of course, this doesn't really go far enough in saying what a heritage is. Both of those interpretations still face interesting questions - for example, who exactly counts as us? But it's a word that gets thrown around a fair amount without much of an explanation of what gets included in (or excluded from) it or what purpose it's supposed to serve. Certainly Bogle hasn't done very much to explicate it, nor to smooth out the wrinkles in her view. But I don't think it's a concept we can just drop or reject, so we have to take Bogle's failure as a challenge to do better and not an opportunity to just ignore the whole thing and move on.

Well, looks like I won't be voting for Gary Johnson any time soon.

"'I believe in free markets,' he said. 'There is a magic to free markets. Department of Commerce might be a good one to eliminate. ... What we do in this country is pass laws that advantage corporations, individuals, groups that are well-connected politically—as opposed to creating an environment where we all have a level playing field ... access to the American dream.'"

You can have free markets and you can have a level playing field, but you can't have both. I've never heard of this guy and I don't think he'll be reaching a ballot box near me any time soon, but it is awfully tiresome to see this same old sleight of hand all the time. At least find a new lie, people.

Good grief...

"One SlutWalk supporter says 'no matter what a person is wearing', there is 'absolutely no excuse for violence, verbal degradation, rape, lewd comments, pinches, touches, grabs or come-ons'. What?! The lumping together of rape with come-ons, as if both are equally demented and unwanted, reveals the general distaste for unguarded and unpredictable sexual interaction that underpins SlutWalk. A leading SlutWalk organiser says 'society is too tolerant of the lewd comments and wolf-whistles that make people feel unsafe'. If anyone is belittling rape, it is these so-called sluttish feminists, who discuss rape and wolf-whistling in the same outraged breath, as if a builder saying 'nice bum!' is an act of unspeakable violence on a par with forced sexual intercourse. SlutWalk, it seems, is less about addressing the problem of rape than about challenging society’s alleged tolerance of - and therefore boosting its intolerance of – male sexual bravado."

There's a great deal that can be said about Brendan O'Neill's take on SlutWalk. I could, for example, investigate his mistaken assumption that rape and wolf-whistling aren't substantively related and so don't deserve to be talked about in the same breath. It would also be extremely easy to dismantle his rather silly claim that anybody involved with SlutWalk is actually "lumping together...rape and come-ons." But instead I think it's worth taking time to figure out why O'Neill might have taken recourse in the concept of bravado.

Just to give myself a starting place, I googled it and found out that bravado officially is a "bold manner or a show of boldness intended to impress or intimidate" or a "swaggering show of courage." Roughly speaking, then, I'd say that it's safe to consider (the complimentary sense of) bravado as a socially risky or bodily dangerous behavior that appropriately displays courage or bravery. O'Neill would agree that rape does not count as bravado (in this sense at least) presumably because it isn't appropriate whether or not it is courageous or brave. But what of "a builder saying 'nice bum!'"?

To be honest, I'm not quite sure how that either displays courage or is socially risky. Certainly if it isn't risky then it can't be an appropriate display of courage - the person could feel courageous, yes, but it would be erroneous of the rest of us to endorse that feeling in the absence of risk. But even if it is risky - say, I guess, that such a person risks being yelled at by the person with the nice bum - are such cases typically demonstrative of bravery? Having never been a "nice bum" yeller myself I suppose I can't say for certain, but I would have to guess not. I would, in fact, have to guess that if yelling "nice bum" required courage, it would essentially never happen. It takes some guts to offer to buy someone a drink or to ask them out for coffee, but pretty much anybody can yell dumb-ass things at a stranger who they know doesn't have the time or energy to offer any real resistance.

O'Neill, it seems to me, has confused the nature of civilized come-ons with that of uncivilized ones, i.e., harassment. "When women wear revealing gear in a pub or a nightclub," he says, revealingly, "they are definitely issuing a sexual invitation. And why shouldn’t they?" Well, right - why shouldn't they? Except, in O'Neill's own words, these women are protesting "unguarded and unpredictable sexual interaction." Is it really unguarded and unpredictable when women get hit on in clubs? O'Neill seems to think it isn't, and he's right - but then why does he think that it's even relevant? Maybe he thinks that all club come-ons are the same...but then he's even more of a dope than I'm making him out to be. (And he's an even bigger idiot again if he thinks that club come-ons are the same as cat-calls from construction workers.) The problem, then, is not that O'Neill is wrong altogether but that he has utterly misidentified (the sense of) bravado (that he intends). And that, I think, would be no surprise at all to the people at SlutWalk.

Or, what we're apparently still talking about, anyway - it's the burqa ban!

"[I]n a book entitled Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes, Katherine Bullock is incapable of separating the question of the 'veil' from broader issues in Western culture. Bullock contends with feminist theory, Muslim thought and practice, and politics to challenge what she considers the problematic assumptions of those who criticize the headscarf as oppressive."

Bullock is a political theorist, but the author who's quoting her, Mahan Mirza, identifies herself as "a specialist in Islamic studies." One important distinction between these fields will soon become clear, but in the meantime let's look at Bullock's reasoning.

"She identifies six themes that antagonists use to oppose covering. For them, the veil:
1. covers up (hides), in the sense of smothering, femininity;

2. is apparently linked to essentialized male-female difference (which is taken to mean that by nature, male is superior to female);

3. is linked to a particular view of woman’s place (subjugated in the home);

4. is linked to an oppressive (patriarchal) notion of morality and female purity (because of Islam’s emphasis on chastity, marriage, and condemnation of pre- and extra-marital sexual relations);

5. can be imposed; and

6. is linked to a package of oppressions women in Islam face, such as seclusion, polygyny, easy male divorce, unequal inheritance rights, and so on. (Bullock, 'Introduction.')"

As for (1), Bullock replies that the burqa "does not smother femininity." I assume she says more than that because she wrote a whole book, but Mirza stops explaining there. Or, well, she stops justifying there. The explanation actually goes on for a bit longer. but it happens to be an explanation of why Bullock is wrong: "According to the classical consensus, Muslim women are commanded to be modest and 'hide their beauty' except for when they are with an inner circle of males. This has always been understood by (admittedly mostly male) Muslim jurists as suggesting that something akin to the headscarf should be worn." So yeah: according to Muslims themselves, the point is to make women less feminine in appearance. Sooooo...basically the opposite of what Bullock is saying. The same thing goes for Bullock's second response, that this commandment "does not posit essentialized male-female difference." Mirza pretty much acknowledges that this is a one-gender-only requirement, which is not at all what Bullock is saying. So that's kind of a problem.

As for numbers 3 and 4, Bullock seems to misunderstand what is going on when people criticize the practice of wearing burqas. The Muslim view that supports this practice, she says, "does [not] consider the [mandated] role of stay-at-home-mother and homemaker oppressive" and is really only problematic "if one considers the prohibition of sexual relations outside marriage wrong." Whether or not this is even true is simply irrelevant: we're not criticizing the practice because we think it represents bad theology (although some people do argue this) but because we think the theology itself is false and morally hazardous. How Bullock thinks that she's addressing these points by referring again back to the theology is a real mystery; the same, of course, goes for Mirza.

Bullock then ups the ante for number 5, saying that burqa-wearing "is part of Islamic law, though a law that ought to be implemented in a very wise and women-friendly manner." The entire question here, I think, is whether the law can be implemented in that way. Her apparent optimism notwithstanding, Bullock doesn't seem to provide any reason to think so, nor does Mirza give her any help there. As for number 6, I'm not really sure why it's on the list to begin with, so I'm gonna give her a pass on that one.

So there's not a whole lot to work with in that part of the essay. But then Mirza goes off on her own, managing to do both much better and much worse than Bullock appears to. The good in Mirza's writing is her argument that "Muslim women are overwhelmingly more concerned about issues such as poverty, security, and development" than about the burqa, and indeed that many of them wear it for unproblematic reasons and in situations where the choice really is theirs to make. That's important because it demonstrates that burqa-wearing is not something that can only happen in the contexts with significant or notable oppression. (Not that we should need to have this demonstrated to us, of course - it's just a piece of clothing, for crying out loud - but the demonstration is there just in case.) The other part of the argument I would have liked for her to make is to say that the truly unacceptable instances of burqa-wearing (i.e., those that involve coercion) are already illegal. Even if burqas are drags on the progress of feminism and/or oppressive in some ways for the women who wear them, we correctly let people do stupid, self-injurious, and retrograde things to themselves all the time. Making an exception in this case would thus either require us to retool our whole legal system or else to give a good reason why this should be the exception, and I don't think anyone who supports the ban has done either of those things. That legal or political philosophy never makes an appearance in Mirza's article is, I think, a sign of her hyper-intense focus on religion qua religion: as a specialist in Islam, she seems only to care about what Islam has to say about itself. Bullock, one would hope, would have something slightly more pertinent to say.

So that's good, but not very good. The bad in Mirza's thought, meanwhile, is really really bad:

"Women may cover for any number of reasons. Someone might be wearing a scarf or a veil as a hippie, or a Nun, or might be cold, dressed as Zorro or as a Ninja (as my wife has sometimes been lovingly called by our nephews), or may simply be a practicing Muslim woman. Others may be masked in a veil of plastic surgery. Are we going to single out only one of these kinds of women as 'oppressed'?"

Um, well - yeah, we kinda are. Cause, in fact, there are a whole bunch of relevant differences between wearing a burqa and dressing in order to avoid having one's face freeze off, even if the former is happening in a developed nation with a solid set of civil rights. How Mirza figures she can get away with comparing burqas to Halloween costumes is just baffling - one can only think of how she would have reacted if a PZ Myers or someone had made that same comparison in the service of an atheistic argument. Anyway, she would have been better served to stick to the nun thing, but then she would run up against the slight problem that people do find the Catholic church to be oppressive and so would no longer be able to allege any inconsistency.

So although we're (apparently) still talking about this, we're also (unsurprisingly) not saying anything too brilliant. Then again, there's nothing too brilliant to be said: again, any extremely oppressive behavior is already illegal in the countries that are considering this ban, and anything less oppressive than that couldn't be criminalized without introducing a huge flaw into the system (or just changing the system altogether). And if we want to talk about oppression instead of criminalization, we have to start by acknowledging that we're probably not gonna get a real reliable answer if we just look at the same system that's requiring this behavior in the first place.

Leah Libresco has surely hit on something here, but from all appearances it is not the thing she thinks she's hit on.

"I was brought up by atheists. My mom is from a long line of secular Jews (who managed to get kicked out of half of the countries in Europe for printing banned books just ahead of the general Jewish purges) and my dad likes to call himself an 'alumnus of Catholicism.' And if I decided I was going to convert, I'd break their hearts, along with the hearts of almost every good friend I have who is an atheist (a pretty large percentage).

Unless I became a miraculously good evangelist/apologist, I wouldn't be able to make a good enough case to all these people that I wasn't just being stupid. And if there's any vice I embody, it's pride. It'd be very hard for me to know I looked gullible or just plain weak. I've enjoyed a reputation as someone who keeps her head in a crisis, who manages to put aside emotion concerns and think logically. If I were a convert, I don't see how they could trust me as a thinker."

Case 1: Ken Connor.

"Anyone with a basic grasp of the ideological identities that characterize modern American society know [sic] that there are certain 'hinge' issues that tend to serve as electoral litmus tests for many voters. A woman's 'right to choose', for example, is the political sacred cow for the Liberal, well-educated urban feminist demographic. For those who identify with the gay community, a candidate's position on same-sex marriage is often of central import. For the Hispanic community it might be issues involving immigration policy, for African Americans, matters of race relations. And of course, there are certain political viewpoints that are assumed by all to be non-negotiable. A candidate who embraced discrimination based on race, sex, or religion, for example, would be roundly condemned by all side [sic] of the political spectrum and deemed disqualified from running for office, regardless of their intellectual or political qualifications."

"At this point, it's difficult to tell who among the Republican candidates possesses the rare combination of wisdom, humility, and leadership necessary to break the poisonous cycle of big-government intervention and lead us out of this mess. Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have undeniable leadership and economic appeal, but the former has troubling gubernatorial baggage and the latter..."

"Embraces discrimination based on religion, and so I roundly condemn him and deem him to be disqualified from running for office"?

"...isn't widely known."

Uh.

That's it? That's the only criticism that can be leveled against Herman "no Muslims allowed" Cain? With this it's trivially easy to see that Connor's bluster about the iron will of the single-issue voter is a sham: Connor himself is his own counter-example. Yes, plenty of people say that they're a one-issue voter or that they have a position that they simply can't compromise. But if Ken Connor can bring himself to endorse a religiously bigoted candidate, I bet feminists will find a way to vote for someone who's imperfect on abortion but shines in other areas.

And, case 2: Anthony Esolen.

"The sexual revolution is a house built upon sand. It is founded upon a lie...What the naked body 'says' when man and woman expose themselves to one another, not as patients to a doctor but as lovers, can be paraphrased thus: 'This is all of me. I am entirely yours. I am giving you what is most intimately mine. You are seeing me, and touching me, as no one else now can. I love you.'"

Now, we know already that Esolen is a lunatic, so this shouldn't exactly come as a surprise. What this teaches us is that Esolen, a PhD in English, has never read Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, or any other of the slew of (especially female) authors who've written about what sex actually "said" at various points in history. Normally I'd have to go find examples of how Esolen's innate-body-language thesis is bullshit, but, as with Connor, Esolen saves me the trouble and does it himself.

"Although in one culture to nod means 'no' while in another it means 'yes,' the meanings we express with our bodies are not entirely arbitrary—indeed, are in some ways not arbitrary at all. The smile, the laugh, the embrace, the bow, the kiss, are universal."

Lessee, that was the smile...

"While most often, smiling is perceived as a positive emotion, there are many countries that perceive smiling as a negative expression and consider it unwelcoming. Too much smiling can be viewed as a sign of shallowness or dishonesty. The Japanese may smile when they are confused or angry. In other parts of Asia, people may smile when they are embarrassed. People in other cultures may not smile at everyone to indicate a friendly greeting as people do in the United States. A smile may be reserved for close friends and family members. Many people in Russia consider smiling at strangers in public to be unusual and even suspicious behavior."

...the laugh...

"Understanding how laughter communicates helps to explain how individuals respond to laughter in intercultural situations...Laughter, therefore, is not a universal language, though it is used similarly within all cultures. Rather than providing a pleasant means of communicating, laughter is risky, open to misinterpretation, and a reminder of cultural differences."

...the embrace...

"Unlike a kiss, a hug is not usually undertaken as part of a ritual or social act. However, it is a custom in Spain and, by proxy, in Latin American countries for male friends to hug (as well as slap each other on the back) in a joyous greeting, such as on a New Year. A similar hug, usually accompanied with a kiss on the cheek, is also becoming a custom among Western women to convey a joyous greeting and sorrowful parting. Also, in recent years it has become a practice amongst some teenage girls to greet and farewell each other with a hug...Several cultures do not embrace as a sign of affection or love, such as the Himba in Namibia."

...the bow (this one, I thought, was particularly stupid; everyone knows how finicky bowing is)...

"In European cultures — aside from bows done by performers on stage, such as at the curtain call — bowing is an exclusively male practice, and females instead perform a related gesture called a 'curtsey' or 'curtsy.' The depth of the bow is related to the degree of respect or gratitude...Bows are the traditional greeting in East Asia, particularly in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. However, bowing is not reserved only for greetings. Bowing is a gesture of respect. Different bows are used for apologies and gratitude, to express different emotions, humility, sincerity, remorse, or deference, and in various traditional arts and religious ceremonies."

...and the kiss.

"The act of kissing on another person's lips has become a common expression of affection among many cultures worldwide. Yet in certain cultures, kissing was introduced only through European settlement; prior to this, kissing was not a routine occurrence. Examples of this include certain indigenous peoples of Australia, the Tahitians, and many tribes in Africa...Christopher Nyrop has identified a number of types of kisses, such as kisses of love, affection, peace, respect and friendship. He notes, however, that the categories were somewhat contrived and overlapping, and other cultures often had more kinds, including the French, with twenty and the Germans with thirty."

Literally every one of his examples (including sex) not only can be but in fact is used differently in different cultures; it is, I think, difficult to imagine a way for him to be more wrong. Maybe sex ought to say that thing that Esolen thinks it says, but (a) it's hard to see how that could work for laughing, kissing, and so on, and (b) the reality is it that it doesn't say that thing that he thinks it says. The problem for him isn't that he misconstrues sex but that he misconstrues communication because he thinks that sex is the more salient of the two - because, in other words, he's fixated on sex. Any sort of communication is incredibly complex and there is an almost unlimited variety of ways in which two people could communicate, and it's because of this sort of lack of boundaries that it's silly to guess that there's any kind of strict, content-rich laws governing communication. Of course, it's even more ridiculous to guess this when all of your examples are wrong and can be easily proven to be wrong in twenty seconds of internet research, but this is just another example of why good reasoning skills are important: if you can't appreciate the need for fact-checking and good background research, you don't really have any right to expect your results to be anything but a comedy of errors like the ones produced by these two men.

Oh now you're just shitting me, Brent Bozell III: With A Vengeance.

"The mass-marketing of profanity just won't stop. Now it's topping the best-selling book list -- in children's picture books. You might have heard by now that there's a 'subversive' little bedtime book for adults. It should not be read to children. It's called 'Go the F-- to Sleep'...

An ungenerous person would point out that some of these hostile bouquets of 'radical honesty' sound like verbal abuse. Most parents have these selfish feelings inside their own heads. But if you heard a parent say to a small child, 'F---- your stuffed bear, I'm not getting you s--,' you'd probably think they could use a parenting class or two."

Yeah, it's called a joke. It sounds like verbal abuse because it's a joke about - you guessed it - verbal abuse.

"Is it getting too serious to decry a book like 'Go the Bleep to Sleep'?"

Yes! Yes it is! The authors of this book did not intend for it to actually be read to children, and the number of people who would buy this book and even consider reading it to their kids is almost certainly small enough to count on one hand. And, y'know, the sort of person who would do that is going to be the sort of person who would swear at their kids anyway; this book, in other words, isn't gonna put the idea in anyone's head. Indeed, part of the joke is that it may not even be possible for a book to put the idea in anyone's head: the mere experience of parenting is enough, seems to be the message.

But look: it's a joke. Of course child abuse isn't funny. But do you know what is funny? Jokes about child abuse. Here, watch:

Q. What's the difference between a dead baby and a trampoline?
A. You take your shoes off before you jump on a trampoline.

See? Funny! It's not funny because I spend my time jumping up and down on dead babies or because I want people to jump on dead babies or because I think people are in danger of jumping on trampolines with their shoes still on cause they spend so much time jumping on dead babies that their force of habit will be too much for them to overcome. It's funny, in fact, because I expect that nobody would ever jump up and down on a dead baby, just like Go The Fuck To Sleep is funny because the demographic who would buy it would never let loose a string of invective at their children. Cause, you know. It's a joke.

If Bozell is looking for something to decry he can start by looking in the mirror, because this is pathetic. Somewhere a journalism major is working at a Wendy's because somebody has seen fit to retain Brent Bozell as a paid editorialist, and this is what he comes up with? For shame.

Dear RJ Snell,

Color me unimpressed.

"In recent articles in Public Discourse and First Things, Matthew J. Franck reports on the portrayal of defenders of traditional marriage as irrational bigots motivated by fear and hate. In a Washington Post piece, he writes, 'Clearly a determined effort is afoot … to anathematize traditional views of sexual morality … as the expression of "hate" that cannot be tolerated in a decent civil society. The argument over same-sex marriage must be brought to an end, and the debate considered settled.'

His articles reveal how odd it is for one group to fiat the end of debate by declaring a particular set of arguments unworthy of consideration; or, more peculiarly, by declaring that these arguments may not be considered without thereby revealing one’s own status as bigoted, hateful, and offensive."

For one, this is obviously not odd. If Franck and Snell were instead arguing against interracial marriage (or, worse yet, for the re-legalization of slavery), it would be unbelievably easy for the rest of us to dismiss their arguments by fiat and to rightly declare them bigoted and offensive. This not-oddness is the first point of evidence that points to the utter insincerity of Snell's sudden and overwhelmingly convenient development of standards. Snell, if you don't recall, has a habit of doing flagrantly subversive things like wildly misrepresenting his opponents and conflating the interests of the dead with the interests of the living, so this new-found devotion to the rules of fair play and civil debate is very hard to take seriously.

The second, and I think damning, such piece of evidence is this:

"[T]he approval of homosexuality found in our day is not founded on any actual acceptance of the practice but out of a desire in our age to break down every barrier to sexual license so that the libido may find any satisfaction it should crave without the resistance of law or custom. This I have called the 'culture of atomic eros.' The typical denizen of our day tolerates the homosexual aberation not because he finds it good or acceptable, but because he needs to convince himself that it is harmless and morally neutral so that he may also view his own, different indulgences are harmless and morally good. He is logically consistent enough to know he cannot have his cake if others may not have their pudding. Thus, my accusation makes bold to claim not only that the arguments in support of homosexual activity or the recognition of homosexual unions are bad arguments, but that the arguments themselves are not in earnest. Other motives lie behind them that can be traced back to, on the one hand, a desire for absolute sexual lawlessness under the guise of 'autonomy,' and on the other, a modern need to idolize sexual pleasure as the final cause of human life, an enslaving god of endless becoming to replace the loss of belief in the God of Being — our therapeutic religion of eros."

That's James Wilson, here playing the role of dramatic foil. It is not, I don't think, particularly difficult to name the similarities between Wilson's tactic and the tactic employed by those people who Franck and Snell criticize: both have made their stand on discrediting their opponents rather than doing a whole lot of work to discredit their opponents' ideas. Of course, there are some historical differences, most relevantly the total modern dominance of the pro-equality arguments over the pro-tradition ones, but you would have to be either blind, stupid, or malicious not to see that Wilson is the conservative answer to the liberals that Snell and Franck find so bothersome.

And, in fact, both Wilson and Snell's targets are probably wrong when they pretend to have ESP. Liberals most certainly are supportive "of homosexual activity [and] the recognition of homosexual unions"; Wilson could not be more wrong, then, in saying that our arguments "are not in earnest." Likewise, it's a mistake to think that all bigots are hateful bigots (although I rather suspect that the percentage of hateful bigots is a good deal higher than the number of strictly self-interested liberal perverts). The point here, however, is not which side is right or wrong - we know full well that Snell is on the wrong side of this debate. It is, in point of fact, that very knowledge that he finds so unfairly burdensome. Rather, the point is to realize that Snell is operating in total ignorance of the oppressive techniques that his side of the debate has used for literally centuries and continues to use today.

This ignorance need not be strategic: part of the problem with situations like this is that we are constantly surrounded by and so numbed to the presence of the dominant (in this case, conservative) narrative. But this only goes to underscore the lack of seriousness in Snell's self-proclaimed interest in fair play: step #1 of engaging in honorable debate is knowing your side of the conversation inside and out, and that means taking account of the rhetoric as well as the substance. Those who can only bring themselves to carefully scrutinize their opponents are pretty obviously not actually interested in fairness or rigor, and at this point it would be hard to deny that Snell is one such person. Even after being revealed as a pretty thoroughgoing sophist, though, even Snell can retreat to the claim that he must be allowed to speak for the sake of reason itself - and, unsurprisingly, that's exactly what he does.

"Fair criticism aims at truth, at a judgment of what is the case. Offense also demonstrates a commitment to the truth, and thus both criticism and offense share a commitment to truth as an intrinsically valuable aim of human action. Both the critic and the offended party, then, seek truth as a value, and their seeking of truth demonstrates that truth is valuable for everyone like themselves, that is, for all humans...I can sympathize with those communities that view themselves as subordinate, and I can understand why they might resent arguments and criticisms made from the majority culture, but to comply with their request for equality in the way they have requested it would be to render them unequal, and that is a wicked thing to do."

Here Snell is attempting to unite bigots and liberals in the pursuit of a good that both groups hold in common: rational debate in search of truth. Again, it would be a mistake to reject this claim on the grounds that one side or the other doesn't actually care about truth and so there's no common ground to be had. Granted, some people really don't care and will readily sacrifice truth if they think that doing so will serve their purposes (think Andrew Breitbart or William Craig), but the majority of people will at least be able to convince themselves of their own sincerity. Instead, what Snell needs to realize is the reason why we are no longer interested in debating his side. Put concisely, he has nothing left to teach us.

The easiest way for debate to be instructive for a given person is, of course, for that person to be wrong and change their mind as a result of the debate. Snell, however, simply cannot offer this to his liberal interlocutors, because in this particular case we are entirely in the right and he is entirely in the wrong. There are, however, more subtle and interesting ways of learning that are consistent with debating someone you know to be mistaken (this blog, I hope, offers such learning at least some of the time). That is, to make my usual analogy, you can learn something about running a good offense by watching the Chicago Bulls' activity, spacing, and crisp ball movement, but you can also learn something about running a good offense by watching the Miami Heat run isolation plays for 48 straight minutes. In order for this to work, though, the wrong side of the debate needs to be wrong in an interesting way, and if that was ever true of anti-queer bigots it is certainly not true anymore. At this point in the game we know all the moves - it is, to use the technical term, solved. Appeal to a divine command theory that's increasingly bankrupt even on its own terms; appeal to a historically mythological cultural "tradition" of marriage, the family, or sex; appeal to scientifically disastrous and philosophically untenable ideas about natural kinds. When all of those are found to have major factual and theoretical holes, distort sociological statistics about child welfare and/or public health; play at guilt by association; prophesy doom and destruction; offer up sad but irrelevant distractions. And then, once all of that falls flat, attempt to wipe the slate clean by claiming that everyone else is obligated to take this cavalcade of stupidity seriously for the sake of debate. There's precious little enough here to begin with, and the bigots (hateful or otherwise) haven't added anything new in years.

For Snell, then, the question is this: at what point can we stop the debate? Unless he wants to say that we really are obligated to take seriously those people (and, yes, there are still those people) who believe that black people are inferior or that women's rights ought not be equal to those given to men, Snell can't simply say that there's a debate to be had and so we must have it; he must, in other words, at least consider the possibility that his side really is as thoroughly unsupportable as we claim it is. But, having considered that, what can he offer? That people with respectable jobs and lots of letters after their names are on his side? Please: Rand Paul thinks we should arrest concert-goers and there are still PhDs arguing for a young universe. As we've just seen, Snell can't say that he has an ace up his sleeve - he's played all his cards already. So at what point do we give up and stop pretending that this is anything other than a manufactured debate driven by special interests who will do whatever it takes to protect their discredited and distorted view of reality? The less Snell gives serious attention to that question, the less reason we have to give him a place at the table.

So I'm a blogger, right? And one of the downsides of blogging is that there's nobody else to do fact-checking, spell-checking, or indeed any other kind of -checking for you, unless your readers really have nothing better to do with their time. So I guess I don't actually know what the precise role of a traditional journalistic editor is, but I should certainly hope that someone is responsible for making sure that things like this don't happen.

"[O]nce you start to set up a system of bureaucratic safeguards, as proponents of assisted suicide (for admirable reasons) usually prefer to do, you find yourself placing the life-or-death decision as much in the hands of doctors and psychologists as in the hands of the would-be suicide himself. In effect, assisted suicide empowers a selected group of experts to pass a final, irrevocable judgment on the [patient]...It turns medical professionals into soul-readers...

This is why I think a legal and cultural presumption against suicide is actually more modest, in a sense, than the alternative of allowing physicians to assist in voluntary euthanasia. Absent a totalitarian police state (and not really even then), a presumption against suicide doesn’t usually prevent people who really, really want to kill themselves from finding a way to do it. But neither does it empower any authority, whether public or private, to claim that they know the last word about any human heart."

For all of Ross Douthat's ability to turn a phrase, his facts are, well, not. The first paragraph is by far the easier to dissect: if he would just look at the way medicine works already, Douthat would know that medical professionals are already required to be "soul-readers." Suicide, after all, is hardly the only way to choose to die. Every time a fatally ill patient asks to stop being treated - to be, in one common phrasing, "allowed to die" - doctors (and, if necessary, psychologists) "pass a final, irrevocable judgment" about the patient's state of mind. Actually, technically speaking this happens every time any patient (or surrogate) makes any decision - we just don't tend to think about it much when the patient refuses non-critical care (like painkillers) or accepts the care that's offered. But if we're being honest, doctors face the choice of whether or not to trust their patients' decisions all the time, a process that necessarily involves making at least an implicit judgment about their patients' mindsets.

So that's a bit of a problem for Douthat, that you basically can't run a medical system without asking docs to be "soul-readers," and in particular to be "soul-readers" in life-and-death situations. The whole point of Douthat's anti-suicide society is to avoid judging others - as he says, to avoid "empower[ing] any authority, whether public or private, to claim that they know the last word about any human heart." Cardiologists aside, it seems both that Douthat is once again already too late to the game and, worse, not helping things any. State officials already judge people's hearts constantly: parole boards, juries, and judges are just three examples that come to mind, and I'm sure there are many more. Douthat's (claimed) position makes it hard to figure out how he would react to these - he says he's against soul-reading, but what's his idea for how to have a criminal justice system without a distinction between premeditated murder and manslaughter? And, on top of that, refusing to provide any legal choice in the matter at all doesn't actually prevent officials from claiming the last word on human hearts. Quite obviously, a blanket prohibition against suicide is essentially an act of mass soul-reading. Such a society declares that it knows that most suicidal people don't really mean it; and/or that if suicide is worth it for any person then it's also worth seeking in a way that is far from reliable and could easily leave that person worse off than they were before; and/or that the burden of suicide on the rest of us is greater than the burden of life to suicidal people; and/or so on. I know that this judgment doesn't happen on a person-by-person basis, but that's the kind of morally irrelevant semantic shell game that works great for newspaper editorials and terribly for real philosophy: if the judgment itself is what concerns Douthat, he should be more worried about a mass judgment that fails to account for particulars, not less.

I know that journalism is pretty much a dying industry and all, and I also know that most editors just don't have the logical chops to deal with the more complicated flaws in Douthat's position - that's fine, I don't need them to police opinions for me. But at the very least they could try to provide the basic facts of the situation, specifically that medical professionals already "soul-read" all the bloody time and that their doing so is only a fraction of all the instances in which public representatives do the very same thing. I mean, journalists who get their facts wrong have to offer corrections, right? (And by that I mean journalists who get their facts wrong.) That doesn't seem to be happening in this case, which sort of makes me wonder why we're bothering to keep journalism alive in the first place.

We are, thanks to a certain popular turn of phrase, accustomed to the idea that people will typically rate their own situation as worse than an alternative just because it's an alternative. As it happens, though, we sometimes see the inverse phenomenon as well: people occasionally rate their own situation as better just because it's the one they're currently in. We saw an example last week when Beth Haynes griped about the impending death of the medical cowboy, but it turns out that this is hardly a new phenomenon in bioethics. Take, for example, this excerpt from a 1997 article by Luke Gormally.

"Euthanasia undermines the dispositions we require in doctors and is therefore destructive of the practice of medicine

The practice of medicine cannot flourish unless doctors are so disposed that they inspire trust in patients many of whom are extremely vulnerable. Doctors will not inspire trust unless patients are confident that doctors are for no reasons disposed to kill them; have no inclination to ask whether a patient is worth caring for or treating, rather than asking what care or treatment might benefit the patient.

But the practice of euthanasia systematically undermines both of the required dispositions. For it disposes doctors to kill certain of their patients, and it inculcates a disposition to think of some patients as not having worthwhile lives."

One of the tipoffs that something is going wrong here is that Gormally is attempting to answer an empirical question with pure armchair reasoning. As tempting as it is to use abstract rationality to determine when people will, say, trust an institution or maintain a disposition, the only way to know for sure is to use empirical evidence. This needn't be evidence of the actual situation, but at least Gormally should be able to point to some psychological or sociological findings to back up his claims. If he can't do this, there's no reason to think that his position can withstand contradictory but equally unempirical considerations - for example, that (especially "extremely vulnerable") people will fail to trust their doctors if euthanasia is not allowed because euthanasia is quickly gaining popularity. Thus, absent any consideration of data or even just of possible flaws in his reasoning, Gormally's case can look strong even if it lacks any substantive support.

The kicker for all of this is that Gormally apparently takes it as a premise that "the practice of medicine" as we know it is a good that we must sustain: his problem with permitting euthanasia is not that he thinks medicine as such will simply cease to exist altogether as a result but merely that he thinks medicine will change. But this is precisely the topic of the debate. Advocates of euthanasia want change in medicine because they think that the practice as it currently exists is morally inferior to what it could be, so Gormally can't just say that they're wrong because they're proposing a change. At least if he intends to avoid begging the question as to why the current practice of medicine is superior, he must instead engage the arguments put forward by the other side. Granted, he does this to some extent in the rest of his article, but the section quoted above adds nothing to his analysis because it reduces to "we shouldn't change medicine because changing medicine would require us to change medicine" - it's just empty talk. In fact, the very next section in his article puts the lie to this change-is-bad attitude: in it, Gormally advocates for an increased reliance on palliative care for the dying, which (believe you me) would have been a huge shift in medical practice in the late '90s (and actually, it's still kind of a revolutionary idea today). It is, of course, well within Gormally's rights to feel threatened by the idea of legalized euthanasia, but he needs to retain enough equanimity not to attack it in such an obviously question-begging way. There are lots of not-stupid responses to the idea of assisting a person's suicide, but that ain't one.

Today's question for readers: does Robert Bishop, professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, know what he's talking about here?

"The ends of freeing people from what [Jerry Coyne] considers to be false beliefs and irrationality mask the adoption of lower intellectual standards as means to achieving these ends. Although rhetorically effective (perhaps only with the atheist choir!), the cost in intellectual integrity is high and quite damaging to the reputation and understanding of science (and to atheism!)."

My guess is no (my emphasis)...

"[Today] we come to another great moment of tension between Christian readings of Scripture and science. This issue [of Christianity Today's] cover story, 'The Search for the Historical Adam,' reports the claims of recent genetic research that the human race did not emerge from pre-human animals as a single pair, as an 'Adam' and an 'Eve.' The complexity of the human genome, we are told, requires an original population of around 10,000.

Christians have already drawn the line: there must be an original pair of humans endowed with souls—that is, the spiritual capacity to relate to God in the special way Genesis describes. In 1996, John Paul II stressed Pius XII's dictum that 'if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God.' And institutional statements of faith, such as Wheaton College's, set limits by affirming that original couple's existence: '… God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race … in his own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.'

...At this juncture, we [the editorial board of Christianity Today] counsel patience. We don't need another fundamentalist reaction against science. We need instead a positive interdisciplinary engagement that recognizes the good will of all involved and that creative thinking takes time. In the long run, it may be the humility of our scholars as much as their technical expertise that will bring us to deeper knowledge of the truth."

...but hey, I'm not the one who feels triumphant enough to exclaim things parenthetically. I'm just sayin', though, no scientific journals are out there publishing editorials about how scientists need to be patient with these new genetic findings because science doesn't need another conflict with Christian doctrine.

We first met Raymond Tallis in March of this year, when he said something very strange about mental representation. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but it turns out that this confusion about representation is actually kind of a big deal for Tallis.

"A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity.

...Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent first because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object to the light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas your perception of the object refers or points from you back to the object. The referential 'pointing back' or 'bounce back' is not 'feedback' or reverse causation, since the causal arrow is located in physical space and time, whereas the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a field which is not independent of but stands aside from physical space and time."

Okay, so...I agree that no material theory of mind can include reverse causation. But, um, why are we even talking about that, again? Tallis calls intentionality "that in virtue of which an object is revealed to a subject; or, rather, that in virtue of which the experiences of a subject are the revelation of an object," but it turns out that he actually doesn't mean this. Or, well - maybe he means it, but if he means it he doesn't know what he's saying, because he goes on to say that "you could have the same experience of the glass, even if the glass were not present, by tickling the relevant neurons." How could this possibly be correct?

If you could have the very same experience of a glass in the absence of a physical glass (i.e., one that includes intentionality), then intentionality cannot be "that in virtue of which the experiences of a subject are the revelation of an object": there is, in that case, no object to reveal. On the other hand, if the experience doesn't have intentionality then it isn't "the same experience." So that's one problem for Tallis, that he wants to have intentionality be a subjective part of our internal experiences but also refer to something outside us. The bigger problem, though, is that he's making a big mistake about what it is we perceive.

We've known for centuries now that we don't directly perceive anything like glasses. Rather, what we perceive is the sense impression that things like glasses make on us - no sensory input from a glass, no perception of an actual glass. The trick, though, is that we do directly perceive something, because we have perceptions (at some point the mediation has to end and something has to appear directly to our awareness). Since it can't be an object like a glass, we're left hypothesizing that the thing we directly perceive is (in what I recall being Berkeley's word, though I could be mistaken) an idea of a glass, which has in turn been produced either by an actual glass, a memory of a glass, neuron-tickling, or some other voluntary or involuntary mental process. Tallis seems to be dimly aware of this when he says that "the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness," but then he takes the incredibly bizarre step of alleging that such an arrow could only run in a counter-causal manner for materialists. Quite honestly, I have no idea why he posits this - his reasoning is, at any rate, certainly not clear from his writing. At any rate, though, the inference is mistaken, and is likely not one that any mind-as-neuron theorist would accept. In order to have a neural representation of a glass, the glass first has to be summoned from somewhere - as I said earlier, either from a real glass or from some recollection of a previously-experienced glass. So far, then, the causal arrow is only moving in one direction: light hits off a glass, is absorbed by my eyes, the eyes send some signals to the brain, and the brain puts together a picture of a glass. Now that the picture exists, the brain accesses it in a way that produces a conscious awareness of the glass - and still the arrow is only moving in one direction. There is, of course, a question about how the brain does all of this, but that's a scientific question in the same vein as asking how it is that an fMRI machine produces a picture of a brain. There's nothing here that indicates reverse causation, and it's not at all clear how Tallis could have come up with such an idea if he had actually read and understood the view he criticizes.

Although this argument obviously pertains only to the philosophy of mind, Tallis makes an error that is instructive across the board: he wants to have a definition that is simultaneously descriptive and normative. Intentionality, you'll recall him saying, is what happens when a person experiences an object as an object. If you experience a glass but you think it's a mirage, on this definition there is no intentionality; likewise if you experience a glass as an object but no glass exists. But he also thinks that intentionality can be "mistaken, because it is of an object that is not in fact physically present before you." The conflict here should be obvious: if intentionality is defined so that it only happens when it's not mistaken, there's no sense in saying also that it's something that can fail on its own terms. That would be like saying that someone who is revived by CPR has died wrong or has screwed up the dying process. And should he choose in the face of this to abandon the claim that intentionality only happens when an actual object is present, he'll no longer have any reason at all to pretend as though reverse-causation is happening: in that case, he would have to posit that reverse-causation not only happens but happens without there being a cause in the first place, at which point I don't think anybody could take him at all seriously. So while there is still a good deal of mystery in the area of how minds work, I don't think we can get anywhere interesting without being realistic about what minds can accomplish (i.e., they can't perceive reality directly) and about what kinds of definitions are appropriate to use.

As I made my way through this article by Chris Tollefsen, the following line kept popping up in my head: "life is for the living, and so is death." I'll provide the link and the context for that in a bit, but first I have to let Tollefsen speak his piece.

"One of the more subtle arguments for denying human dignity and moral worth to the severely disabled or dependent could be called the 'No Benefit' view. It holds that any patient who is in a persistent vegetative state or suffering from dementia and is no longer capable of pursuing human goods also cannot be benefited by the action of others...Those who care for the radically dependent or disabled are motivated in part because they want to avoid a future in which their charges are ignored, abandoned, mocked, or starved. Rightly, they recognize all these possibilities as bad for their charges. Instead, they attempt to preserve the patient’s life in a loving way, in an attractive environment, surrounded by loved ones, in an atmosphere of at least some joy, laughter, and music. Even if their charge has no active ability to reason, the caregiver still recognizes the attractiveness of this possible future, and the possibility that it is a real benefit not only to the caregiver, but also to their loved one."

It is only four paragraphs into his discussion and already Tollefsen is beginning to slip. Twice he describes something as "attractive," surely an odd choice given that he means to discuss something fundamentally moral and not just a matter of mere taste. In addition, at the end of this section he slips in the admission that he is talking at least in part about what "benefit[s] the caregiver" - again, a rather strange thing to point out if he wants to convince us that he's really focused on the caregivee.

Nor does the weirdness stop there. Tollefsen proceeds to argue that not-conscious humans can benefit from care because "pregnant mothers can readily imagine a situation in which their unborn children are unloved, unprepared for, and done violence to"; because "adult children, siblings, and spouses often see themselves as maintaining a previously existing relationship with a patient"; and so on. The point, he says, is that we can seek and achieve "the general good[s] of sociality and solidarity" with such humans because "an understanding of how a particular human being has lived through time is essential to understanding the way in which certain goods will, and will not, be of benefit now for that person." That is, taken in the context of whatever "previously existing relationships" a non-conscious human had, he thinks we can pretty easily identify "forms of good his caregivers should now pursue for him." The key qualifier here is, of course, the last one, for him. Tollefsen says (albeit indirectly) a great deal about ways that the rest of us can benefit - by making ourselves comfortable with familiar behaviors and objects, by imagining counterfactual present and future scenarios, and so on - but it's actually very hard to tease out the specific benefits that he thinks can accrue to a human with no awareness or feeling.

In part, of course, this is due to Tollefsen's characteristically miserable logic and utter paucity of reasoning skills. This argument, for example, is stupid in an almost wonderful way:

"[I]t is absurd to think that a snapshot of, for example, an infant tells us everything about that child’s capabilities or goods, in abstraction from how human beings typically develop through time. Indeed, to treat a child in accordance with such a snapshot idea would require that we abandon practices that make no sense from that perspective, such as talking to children who do not yet understand what is being said; yet these practices contribute in essential ways to the development of our children’s capacities."

The only reason that children benefit from being talked at is that they are, at that very moment, developing language skills. That they do not understand, in other words, is totally irrelevant: the snapshot view (if it contains enough information) will in fact tell us either that the child is developing or isn't developing, and from that information alone we can determine whether it makes sense to continue talking. Similarly, when Tollefsen asks us not to "mock a permanently unconscious patient by dressing him as a clown, or using him as a door stop," he neglects to consider the fact that we have the same kinds of intuitions about corpses even though everyone knows that a corpse isn't harmed by wearing silly clothing. These errors, however, are only surface-level, I feel; they are, to be a bit flippant, the cheesy poster art covering the giant holes in the wall. At the heart of the issue, it seems, lies a simple case of the fallacy of composition: individuals cannot be identified with the whole.

Tollefsen brackets his article with two references to human social dynamics, saying at the beginning that we must learn to categorize non-conscious humans "as persons united in a moral community with those of us who are, at least at the present moment, fully functioning" and at the end that we have to "recognize that those human beings are a part of our human community" (bold mine throughout). This is what really tipped the scales for me, because it is such a clearly warped presentation of the same intuition that led Dale Smith to produce that quote from earlier.

"I see no point in addressing death from the perspective of the person who dies. I would like to make the radical suggestion that life is for the living, and so is death. From the perspective of sense, experience, and feeling -- the perspective that's worth evaluating and trying to hone -- death involves the chasm in our lives formed when one of us dies, leaving a diminished 'us,' by which I mean the authentic 'us' of our everyday interactions, not some abstracted humanity-wide 'us.'"

If you go back and re-read his piece, it's apparent that this chasm is precisely the thing that Tollefsen is trying to fill. He even explicitly recommends that families try to continue their standard "way of life, for example—styles of dress and decoration, forms of communication, jokes, religious symbols, and the like," even to the point of celebrating holidays with the individual. It's very tempting, of course, to see this for what it isn't rather than what it very obviously is: under normal circumstances such behaviors would lead the person in question to feel relaxed, happy, loved, and so on, and the crushingly obvious absence of those feelings is just psychologically difficult to accept. Denial, so they saying goes, ain't just a river in Egypt. But if Tollefsen's recommendations just amount to an attempt to restore "the authentic 'us' of everyday interactions" to our previous state, he shouldn't shrink from evaluating them on those terms. Insofar as he hopes to achieve such a restoration in the case of, say, a brain-dead father, he can only fail; insofar as he hopes to forestall the brokenness of that father's children, however, he can most certainly succeed. And that's nothing to be ashamed about or try to paper over in such a pathetic fashion - people need comforting when they see a familiar body breathing in a bed but breathing is all it's capable of. Unfortunately for Tollefsen, however, a lie (or, putting it more gently, a fantasy) does not become true just in virtue of being comforting.

Here's today's piece of synchronicity for you, dear readers, courtesy of Mark Vernon...

"[R]ational theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, who are also big on apophaticism, show that it's quite straightforward to talk about something only by saying what that something is not.

Imagine you have lived all your life in a landlocked country, where there is no talk or sight, let alone comprehension, of the sea. There's not even the word. Then, one day, you venture across the horizon and after a long journey reach the end of land. And you see it. The sea. Astonished, you contemplate the view for a while and then you head back to your fellows. You try to describe what you've seen. It's not land, you begin. It's not hilly or mountainous, you continue. It's not possible to walk across it. It's not covered with grass and trees. It's a bit like that lake, only it has no apparent bounds and it does weird things like approaching the land and then retreating from it, day by day."

...and Peter Kreeft.

"The simplest and most basic example of [intuition] in morality is the Golden Rule, which is often expressed to small children by the formula ‘How would you like it if we did that to you?’ This is an appeal to the moral imagination, which is concrete, rather than to moral reasoning (either in the form of a definition, a defined universal principle, or a deductive argument from a principle to an application of it). Without this moral imagination, no moral reasoning is possible for us. In other words, we are not angels.

This first step is not sufficient for moral philosophy; of course. We also need to (1) rise by abstraction to universal principles, (2) define them correctly, and (3) deduce conclusions from them. But though not sufficient, it is necessary, like the foundation of a building; for we are neither angels nor computers but human beings with moral experience and imagination and the innate power and habit of moral understanding and judgment, moral ‘common sense,’ which makes instinctive judgments about moral experiences.

These judgments are not infallible, of course. But they do see moral truth, moral reality. They are like physical vision in those two ways...These instinctive intuitions and judgments are not infallible, of course, and logic can often reveal our errors. This is what Socrates did, and four cheers for his doing it. But any argument that begins by contradicting our moral common sense is almost certainly going to be wrong."

Vernon, sadly, does not seem to understand the proper usage of the word "only": right in the middle of that silly thing about the ocean he says that it "approach[es] the land and then retreat[s] from it," which conspicuously lacks a negating term. Also, it's entirely unclear if the rest of his description actually says anything meaningful about the ocean - that is, if he has succeeded in proving his point. Even in the case that he does, however, the analogy is off in an important way: if you're near enough the ocean to see it, you will be able to say things about it in a positive fashion and you'll almost certainly also be able to experience it in other ways (for instance, you'll likely be able to smell that watery smell). But the whole idea about apophatic theology is that negation is the absolute limit. That is, unlike looking at the sea (by virtue of which you will automatically have firsthand experience of the sea's shape, color, light-refracting tendency, and the like), experiencing God (or whatever is supposed to be going on) will not allow you to say anything about God. And, in fact, it's only in virtue of the positive experiences you have of the ocean that you will be able to speak of negations. Without trying to walk on it and discovering that you instead sink (a positive description), for example, you won't know that you can't walk on it; without noticing its flatness (a positive description), you won't be able to say that it isn't hilly or mountainous; et cetera and so forth. So that sight analogy seems to be quite misguided.

Kreeft, meanwhile, is missing (or, to bring some cynicism to the party, hiding) a large part of the debate. See, I'm colorblind, which means that I see greens when other people see yellows. (The odd part about this is that I only fail red/green colorblindness tests with any regularity.) It's perfectly legitimate, then, for someone to begin a sight-based argument by simply disagreeing with my experience - at least, when that experience is of a color on the yellow/green boundary. Kreeft, then, is wrong to say that any argument is likely to be wrong when its first incarnation is a straight-up clash with moral common sense. If we take his argument seriously, he should instead say that arguments are likely to be wrong when they conflict with moral intuition only if the conflict doesn't also come from a person's moral intuition. My sight, after all, can be disputed on the grounds that someone else sees something different; comparing sight to moral gut sense, then, should mean that moral gut sense can be disputed on the grounds that someone else's moral gut sense differs.

But, of course, it's not clear why we should take Kreeft's position all that seriously to begin with. I don't think that moral intuition is like sight, and even if it were I don't think that we'd have any way of knowing that. I also find it a little odd that people never compare intuition (moral or otherwise) to other senses, such as taste or feel. Those are also reliable, one would think, so why not use that as the reference point? Whatever the answer may be, I was never convinced by this comparison and I remain unconvinced. Especially because we have no check on our moral intuition that's even semi-independent until the next generation comes along, this idea of moral feeling as a sixth sense is just not a safe one.