Rust Belt Philosophy

I know it's not November yet, but I couldn't resist!



1. The Good, The Bad, And The Queen - "Green Fields"
2. eels - "Fresh Blood"
3. R.E.M - "Sponge"
4. Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire - "Satisfied"
5. Bright Eyes - "No One Would Riot For Less"
6. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Spell"
7. Bill Callahan - "All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast"
8. Yeasayer - "Sunrise"
9. Calexico - "Nom De Plume"
10. Nick Drake - "Three Hours"
11. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Carry Me"
12. Counting Crows - "Ghost Train"
13. Sufjan Stevens - "In The Devil's Territory"
14. The The - "Love Is Stronger Than Death"
15. Jason Lytle - "Yours Truly The Commuter"

Okay, Ron Radosh, I'll bite: how must they?

"The problem today is a lack of confidence that opportunities still exist, and will be there in the future. The next election will be fought over these competing visions. [Paul] Ryan points out that Obama 'is barnstorming swing states, pushing a divisive message that pits one group of Americans against another on the basis of class.' As a result of this dishonest argument, Obama’s popularity is slowly rising. Meanwhile, the Republican nominees are fighting each other and leaving a void that Obama can fill. Republicans, following Ryan’s example, have to start addressing the serious problems Americans are facing. They must emphasize, as Ryan does, what has made us exceptional in the past, and then present a clear picture of how to get back on the path to prosperity."

Um...okay, so what has "made us exceptional in the past"? And how do we "get back on the path to prosperity"?

"As Ryan says: 'We know all too well that too many Americans are hurting today.' It is in these periods, when times are tough, 'when the pie is shrinking, when businesses are closing, and when workers are losing their jobs,' that the American idea is tested. To deal with these problems, President Obama engages in disingenuous arguments based on the concept of class warfare and the emphasis on egging on those in trouble to try and deal with their problems by squeezing the rich."

Huh? I thought you said you were going to address income inequality, but this just looks like attacking Obama.

"Ryan, better than any other Republican, articulates what every candidate should emphasize: the way to prosperity and to create opportunity for all is to promote economic growth combined with fiscal restraint in a manner that benefits all Americans, including those hurting today."

Sure, fine, but how do you "promote economic growth" and what sort of "fiscal restraint...benefits all Americans"? Tax cuts? Tax hikes? Less regulation? More regulation? Less government investment? More government investment? Stronger social safety nets? Weaker social safety nets? Give me something, man!

"Ryan points out that we must stand against 'corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.' Put in this way, we have a winning argument that appeals to those who are suffering with the promise of restoring equality of opportunity, rather than mandating equality of results, which will make us all much poorer."

...

You're shitting me, right? That's it? That's practically Obama's campaign slogan, you twit! No wonder conservatives don't have substantive criticisms of Obama anymore: at least as far as their propaganda is concerned, they agree with him! As I said before, this may have come at too high a cost, but at the very least it looks like we can credit Obama for retreating far and fast enough that even the Republicans don't want to pursue him any farther. We'll have to see if it works, of course, because the substance of the Republican position has been secondary to its style for a long time and Paul doesn't look like he's interested in changing that at all,* but it sure will be interesting to see what happens when the debates roll around.

*"Divisive," "pits one group of Americans against another," etc.

As you, dear reader, may or may not be aware, I consider argumentum ad thought experiment to be a fallacious method of reasoning. However, I'm not sure that I've ever provided an in-depth explanation of why I hold that position. Recently at Camels With Hammers, Dan Fincke wrote a post that will give me the opportunity to do just that.

"Thursday, Jerry Coyne mocked Templeton for funding a post-doc studying issues related to Ockham’s account of foreknowledge and how people’s decisions in the present could affect God’s beliefs in the past. Arrogantly and unjustifiably treating Ockham like a moron not worth studying, Coyne quotes the summary of the recently approved plan to study his theory of foreknowledge and then trashes it...Coyne is missing the point. In short, it does not matter whether there actually is a God. There is still philosophical illumination from exploring the implications of a hypothetical omniscient knower for our understanding of things like the connections between belief, causation, and time."

Though I have not read either the original Templeton thing or Coyne's criticism of it, I have had an experience that I feel can do the job, namely, that of debating Emmanuel Rutten (professional philosopher) in the comments to this post. As in Fincke's post, Rutten's argument dealt with God's ostensible omniscience and some supposed consequences thereof; and, as in Fincke's post, I roundly dismissed Rutten's argument under the belief (to which I still hold) that Rutten is a moron not worth studying. Those of you who are interested in reading my exchange with Rutten can certainly do so in the comments to that original post, and indeed two readers braver than I are still attempting to draw a concession from him (and good on you, Paul and Patrick), but the main points of my skepticism were actually echoed by Ophelia Benson in the comments to Fincke's post, so we'll start there.

"If the hypothetical is sufficiently outlandish, doesn’t that complicate its ability to illuminate? An omniscient knower seems to me to be so impossible and so unlike anything real that we’re acquainted with that playing around with it could be more muddling than illuminating...Verbose [Stoic, who also disagrees with Coyne] assumes that 'would violate free will' means [free will] is not pre-determined – but why assume that? (And why capitalize 'He,' either, and why choose a personal pronoun, and why choose the male personal pronoun?) Verbose immediately gets into bizarre contortions because of the weirdness of the 'omniscient knower.'"

Neither Benson nor I say that there aren't interesting concepts to be investigated in these discussions. I completely agree (as, in all likelihood, does she) that we need to have a developed "understanding of," in Coyne's case, "the connections between belief, causation, and time" or, in Rutten's case, the connections between intuition, rationality, truth, and knowledge. What we are disputing is that these arguments can get us there.

In Coyne's case, as Benson observes, there's something funny with assuming that God is accurately described by the male personal pronoun, especially in combination with the premise that God is omniscient. Since we don't have any evidence (firsthand or otherwise) of an omniscient male (or even an omniscient person), the concept of an omniscient male personal entity should make you pause for a moment. Similarly, in my discussion with Rutten, the notion of certain intuitive knowledge was proposed, only with no apparent attention given to the details of what certainty, intuition, or knowledge actually meant. The relevant theme here is not that God is involved, although this sort of thing certainly does seem to happen more frequently when religion is brought up than in other areas. Rather, the relevant theme is that the non-skeptical authors - i.e., the ones who find value in the thought experiment - take certain very important concepts to be black boxes.

What I mean by a black box is something that cannot (or, at the very least, need not) be further investigated. This may be slightly confusing because the black boxes in airplanes are meant to be opened up and examined (though, of course, the "black" boxes in airplanes are often not black), but the concept I want to use is the engineering one, where a black box "is a device, system or object which can be viewed solely in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge of its internal workings." Black boxes in this sense, in essence, are things that you can only judge based on their outside appearances and that appear to be simple and undifferentiated. While black boxes in this sense can be okay to have in various real-world situations, it doesn't seem to me that they're very safe at all for use in philosophy.

Intuition, for example, is not something that just happens, spontaneously and on its own. It, like any other human experience you care to name, has complex cognitive components and, in fact, may be nothing more than components of that sort. To pretend that it is functionally identical in all cases and cannot be understood on a deeper level than our experience of it, then, is naive at best and duplicitous at worst. Yet this is exactly the pretense under which Rutten operates: when I expressed doubt that intuition could be used to know certain things* or to know things under certain circumstances,** he took that to mean that I was giving up on intuition altogether. Benson, I suspect, was pointing out another black box when she mentioned free will. Like intuition, philosophers can have a tendency to assume that free will just has certain properties (such as being incompatible with predetermination) and that anybody who questions those properties or tries to explain them in a more nuanced way is being overly scientistic (or otherwise pedantic). There is, however, no good reason to assume that intuition looks like this...


...instead of this:


Indeed, there's every good reason not to assume that, starting with the fact that we can't really study "things like the connections between belief, causation, and time" without understanding what those individual things are in the first place. When we philosophers engage with these kinds of thought experiments, we often get too caught up to notice that we've veered off the map altogether. What, for example, would it mean for an omnipotent being to have intuitions in the first place? What would it mean for a non-physical, not biologically based mind to know anything - or, for that matter, to exist at all? Moreover, when we talk about the intuition or knowledge or such a thing, how can we be assured that it is like our intuition (which, you will note, belongs to beings who evolved, whose minds are at least based in matter, and who are not omniscient)? Just having the same name is, of course, no guarantee of (sufficient) similarity: human feet, horse feet, and duck feet all differ from one another substantially (and we're all evolutionarily related!).

These questions, and especially that last one, matter not just because they bear on the question that the thought experiment is supposed to answer (e.g. is every fact possibly known) but because that answer almost always comes back to us in some way. That is, Coyne and Benson are indeed arguing about time and causation and belief, but they aren't just arguing about those things. Their positions matter for how we conceive of free will (and therefore morality), how we conceive of our own knowledge (can I ever really know what you're about to do?), and so on; Rutten, meanwhile, tried to set up his argument so that basic intuition was always reliable and knowledge could only count if it was 100% certain. None of these matters are cleanly separated from other philosophical topics, and none of them can or should be determined through mere armchair philosophy. The things around and within us are not just video game sprites or cartoon background images that have no real content and are only what we see of them, so we cannot pretend that they can be manipulated in any way our minds can conceive. It is therefore not scientism to argue against the possibility of divine intuition, just as it isn't scientism to be skeptical of the possibility of giant ants terrorizing our cities. As I learned on Bill Nye (in an episode I sadly can't find online), giant ants would collapse under their own weight; and, as I learned from studying the science of minds as well as from my own experience,*** intuition is not a simple, one-dimensional feeling that is either always trustworthy or always deceptive. Scientism, in short, is not insisting that philosophers either build from the ground up or use only what we know exists. Instead, the refusal to let people cut-and-paste together a potentially incoherent (especially scientific) concept because we know that concepts are not infinitely malleable is an act of rationality and a sign of clear thinking. And, although it's not a guarantor of sound logic, it sure is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

"Exactly as [Giambattista] Vico feared, we take the scientific standard of truth to be the sole and universal standard of truth; whatever is not scientifically verified, we assume, is not really true. One symptom of this intellectual disease is that the modern mind indulges in the recurrent fantasy – played out every day in Psychology and Sociology Departments across the land – that an application of scientific methodology to human experience will somehow provide us with conclusive and substantive knowledge about ourselves."

Mark Signorelli may not be a fancy philosopher like Rutten or whichever hack the Templeton Foundation paid to write a fluff piece about God's omniscience, but this is the only alternative to the so-called scientistic view (and, as you can see, is advertised as such). If things like free will and intuition and knowledge and rationality are really so wide open to manipulation that we cannot restrict them using the findings of science, then we can forget about using science to learn anything "conclusive and substantive...about ourselves" - because, after all, how could we know that we worked in any of the particular ways that are (on this view) all compatible with the science? Signorelli's view - the anti-"scientism" position - is not just wrong. It is a rejection of the very possibility that we can make progress in understanding the reality of what it is to be human. Signorelli and his fellows are, of course, free to ignore the findings of disciplines like sociology and psychology and to decry those of us who think that our intuitions are not somehow partitioned off from everything else that goes on in our heads, but they should do so only at the cost of their own image. Contra Fincke, we should have no hesitation when it comes to dismissing philosophy that operates in a scientific realm of its own fantastical definition.

*E.g. that Godel statements are provable under certain axiom sets.
**E.g. when not investigated or refined.
***In a pickup game of basketball I was playing one night, I was standing underneath the basket and getting ready to run off a pick set by one of my teammates at the edge of the lane. The person with the ball was still standing at the top of the key and, I thought, had not yet checked the ball in, so I just kept him in the corner of my eye. Somehow, though, we had checked the ball in, and since I was standing more or less wide open under the basket that guy passed me the ball. Without really seeing it or even knowing what I was doing, I intuitively caught it and put up a reverse layup that went in, which was about when my consciousness caught up. As John Fontanella says in his book on basketball physics, "A game is played mostly via reflex. It is during practice that time is available to develop the skills and reflex necessary in order to play the game." To say that intuition (reflexive reasoning) is reliable while trying to sever its connection rational thought and observation (reasoning practice) is therefore a very bad mistake.

When looking to analyze the thought of others, it can be hard to walk the line between wrongly ignoring their motivations entirely and wrongly maligning their position because of their motivations. Support for global warming theories is often chalked up to a desire for funding, and antagonism towards global warming theories is likewise often alleged to be the kind of opinion that only oil company money could buy, neither of which is a tremendously helpful observation when it comes to actually figuring out if global warming is a real thing or not. But to disregard people's mindsets would also be a mistake, as Bob Laird awkwardly demonstrates.

"Like all who attempt to redefine marriage to suit an activist minority, the [Obama] administration doesn’t appear to understand the important role natural marriage serves in securing the health of a nation. A recent study, 'The Sustainable Demographic Dividend: What Does Marriage and Fertility have to do with the Economy?' focused on the marriage of one man and one women, the children resulting from that marriage, and the role of this natural family in sustaining economic growth. Its four key findings, cited from the executive summary, are:

1. Children raised in intact, married families are more likely to acquire the human and social capital they need to become well-adjusted, productive workers.
2. Men who get and stay married to one woman work harder, work smarter, and earn more money than their unmarried peers.
3. Nations wishing to enjoy robust long-term economic growth and viable welfare states must maintain sustainable fertility rates of at least two children per woman.
4. Key sectors of the modern economy—from household products to insurance to groceries—are more likely to profit when men and women marry and have children."

Of these four points, only one can reasonably be said to apply to gay men or lesbian women, and that's the first one.* The other three basically reduce to, "Gay men would marry and impregnate women, and lesbian women should marry and have children by men." Since Dolan's language consistently puts men in active roles and women in passive roles (even when they're giving birth, it's the "welfare states" that must "maintain" their birth rate, as if somehow the women themselves were to be conscripted), I have to believe that he takes men to be primarily (if not entirely) responsible - which, in turn, sort of makes it seem like he's trying to guilt-trip gay men into fucking women. The logic of his argument, of course, is mutated and misshapen at best: if there are way too few married families, we can't plausibly blame that on a tiny segment of the population as tiny as the LGBT crowd; and it certainly won't help increase the number of married families to tell certain people that they can't get married at all. But viewed in the light of his apparent desire to chain gay men to women, it all makes a lot more sense. The question then becomes: why on earth would he want gay men to end up with women? Doesn't he understand what it means to be gay in the first place?


And, well, maybe he doesn't, which is why we can't just ignore his motivation altogether. If Laird or people like him oppose equality because they still (somehow) don't understand what it means to have a different sexual orientation or don't accept the fact that some people do have different sexual orientations, that suggests an obvious way forward for those of us who are not deranged in those ways. This kind of analysis isn't always helpful for various reasons - see today's second post for an example - but we shouldn't try to zealously to avoid an ad hominem attack that we intentionally blind ourselves to the problematic attitudes or beliefs that underlie our opponents' positions.

*And, in fact, this one counts in favor of allowing same-sex marriages. If you want "intact, married families," you'd better allow marriage.

You may or may not know about planking - if you don't, here:

"'Planking' (or the 'Lying Down Game') is an activity consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location."

I know that's a real thing because I've seen about a zillion pictures of people doing it, and also because it was on The Office this one time. But are these spin-offs also real? We've got owling...


...(headless) horsemanning...


...and queuing...


...among others. This has to be fake, right? People are trolling me right now, right?

Yesterday we saw David Harsanyi accuse the Occupy Wall Street people for wrongly fearing capitalism. Capitalism can do no wrong, he said, and so these fears are Luddite in nature. To provide just one example, here's his take on automation:

"[T]ake President Barack Obama, who earlier this year—and not for the first time—claimed that 'structural issues with our economy' have nothing to do with politicians. The problem, in his opinion, is that 'a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient,' making the workforce smaller. 'You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.'

Those aren't structural issues; they are productivity issues. And rather than kill jobs, efficiency drives output and growth and improves performance and the quality of goods and services—along with our lives."

Efficiency - in this case, taking the form of automation - cannot kill jobs, Harsanyi is saying. It can only be good for the economy and so for all of us, and anybody who thinks otherwise does so only out of misplaced fear (or an ulterior agenda). Readers of this blog, I trust, know enough to see through the holes in this argument on their own: that increased profit only helps a wide range of people if it gets redistributed; that an improved economy does not necessarily "lift all boats"; that an economy with no local jobs (such as grocery store cashiers or airline counter people) necessarily sends its money elsewhere and must therefore trust other places to send money back; and so on. But what of Harsanyi's attempt at character assassination? Must one hate capitalism in order to point out these realities?

In a word, no.

"For the typical American, the past decade has been economically brutal: the first time since the 1930s, according to some calculations, that inflation-adjusted incomes declined. By 2010, real median household income had fallen to $49,445, compared with $53,164 in 2000. While there are many culprits, from declining unionization to the changing mix of needed skills, globalization has had the greatest impact...The phenomenon that free traders like me adore has created a nation of winners (think of those low-priced imported goods) but also many losers."

Steve Rattner, free trader and adorer of the capitalist system, is pretty clearly not a Luddite. Rather than trying to end capitalism or even restrain it, Rattner only wants more of it; "[t]he prospect of Washington lurching into the private sector," he says, "is terrifying." If the government wants to help at all, he continues, it should "[ease] access to public financing markets and reform...the patent and regulatory apparatus" - in other words, back off and let the market do its thing.

So if a self-proclaimed and actual supporter of capitalism recognizes that capitalism can harm people, maybe it's not unreasonable for critics of capitalism to say the same thing. And maybe, given that capitalism can harm people, it's not unreasonable for the people who it has harmed to try to make it less harmful in the future. Maybe, therefore, people like Harsanyi could stand to cool it with the falsified narratives just a tiny little bit.

And the magical thinking continues:

"Opposition to post-war architecture tends to focus on aesthetic concerns. And, certainly, much of it is appalling ugly, almost to the point that merely looking at it fills you with despair. But its mostly deeply pernicious effect is surely the way in which it has affected people’s behaviour, by forcing them to live in an environment which is cold, desolate and practically inhuman."

We looked at almost this exact same claim last month and it wasn't very convincing then, so why should it be convincing now? Especially since the author in this new article quotes a better explanation himself:

"[T]he proximity of riot activity to large post-war housing estates may not be the result of social housing in itself but the type of social housing: most post-war estates have been designed in such a way that they create over-complex, and as a result, under-used spaces. These spaces are populated by large groups of unsupervised children and teenagers, where peer socialisation can occur between them without the influence of adults. This pattern of activity, and the segregation of user groups, is not found in non-estate street networks."

See? This has nothing to do with being "cold, desolate, [or] practically inhuman," nor with being overly commercialized or fragmented. I'm not saying that design is always neutral, but functional design (the way that the space can be used) matters way more than aesthetic design ever could, and other factors matter even more than that. (When's the last time you saw a riot in a rich neighborhood?) Making neighborhoods prettier is not by any stretch equivalent to making them safer, more vibrant, more politically involved, or whatever else you may want them to be. Especially in the context of other things - racial tensions, economic troubles, what have you - it is positively silly to think that we can solve our social problems by rebuilding our cities to look more like villas.

Following on these two posts from earlier this month, I'm beginning to wonder if the religion/atheism thing isn't in large part a matter not of what to believe but how to believe. For instance:

"[E]ven to talk about ‘secular knowledge’ and the ‘integration’ of science and faith is to buy into a problematic bifurcation of knowledge. The basic assumption lying behind such a distinction is that the world of knowledge can be divided into two discreet realms. On the one hand we have the world of secular knowledge, the goal of which is pure objectivity, which is governed by reason and humility, and which finds its ideals embodied in the practice of science. On the other we have the world of religion, which has a completely different set of goals and ideals. Religious knowledge is based upon faith, for the goal of religion is fidelity to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Bible as inspired by God and revelatory of God’s truth."

There are, of course, quite a few people who, unlike Mark Mann,* want to spread specific ideas and who are not happy to accept things like evolution. But Mann, I think, represents a class of religious believers who are sort of baffled and offended by the fact that "scientistic atheists like Richard Dawkins" continue to criticize them. This group, in which I include good ol' Andy Sullivan, has a very nuanced (some might say gratuitously nuanced) view of religion - again, Mann:

"There is no ‘Christianity’ that stands or ever has stood as a whole against science or reason. Whatever Christianity IS it certainly is an incredibly complex movement, and throughout its history there have been multiple ways that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, science and theology."

"Same goes for science. Is it truly or purely a secular pursuit? What are we to make, then, of the countless religious individuals who have been scientists and who have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos? Did they do so only by some kind of compromise between their faith and secular forms of knowledge? Again, the historical evidence would indicate quite the contrary. Take, for example, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific discovery (c. 750-1200). For Medieval Muslims there was no such thing as a secular realm, much less secular reason or knowledge."

"I went through a struggle...came to the conclusion that—though certainly not useless—the 'objective' arguments I was utilizing to 'prove' God or Christianity were actually creating a plausible argument for doubt. It is the truth of Christianity confirmed by my subjective experience with Holy Spirit and revealed to me by God in the objective form of scripture that liberated me from the necessity of these arguments as grounds for belief. And this is hardly against reason."

David Harsanyi is surely onto something here - just not, as is usual for people featured on this blog, the thing he thinks he's onto.

"The Luddites, as you all know, were a 19th-century social movement that protested, often by violent means, the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution on their lives, fearing that it would leave them without their jobs and destroy their communities...So global warming skeptics—call them anti-science if you like—are not Luddites. Luddites have an irrational fear of development in a seemingly chaotic world. This is capitalism. Today's Luddite fears that we have too much energy, too many people, too many choices, too much bad food, too many cheap knickknacks. Today's Luddite believes that the free movement of money and economic productivity are immoral and that if your slice is too big, someone else's slice has to be too small."

I mean, yeah - global warming skeptics are anti-science, but the rest of that is really worth thinking about. For instance, Harsanyi uses this idea of a Luddite to conclude that the OWS protesters are wrongly

"demoniz[ing] big oil, big food, and big pharma [because] when the multinational firm GlaxoSmithKline announces, as it did last week, that it has come up with the first effective vaccine for malaria, you can bet that it would never have happened in the system they propose. And if the vaccine is successful, the company will have done more good for the world than a million marches about the evils of capitalism could ever hope to produce."

At first this seems like an entirely fair point. GSK did, in fact, come up with a malaria vaccine, and companies frequently come up with really awesome and even morally great products, and this really does seem to stem from our capitalist system. But Harsanyi takes it too far when he talks about who does "more good for the world," because, to be brutally honest, he doesn't have the slightest fucking clue how to make that calculation.

Malaria just so happens to be a convenient example for him because malaria predated capitalism, but not all problems fall into this category. As Jason Antrosio observes in a truly excellent post at his Living Anthropologically blog,

"For much of the world’s population, capitalism has already been–and continues to be–a miserable failure.

Of course indigenous response has varied; there have been those who have profited tremendously from capitalism; people have ingeniously appropriated capitalist products and styles; people have not just been pawns in the system but have actively influenced and altered that system [but on] balance capitalism has at best been a mixed bag, at worst catastrophic. And this fact applies not just on the edges of capitalism but at its heart–after some periods of relative stability and apparently fine-tuned management of the business cycle, we are back to lurching from crisis to crisis, in ways not seen since 1929 or the times of Marx and Engels."

It would be easy and fun to point out the flaws that Harsanyi hopes to cover up with his Luddite analogy - flaws like the pervasive poverty, oppression, pollution, and corruption that exists even in the most advanced capitalist societies. It would even be easy and fun to point out the flaws in the prevalent capitalist theory of economics, say, by pointing to the recent behavior of CitiBank (which called the cops on customers who were trying to close their accounts) or Bank of America (which responded to customer complaints by attacking their character). But d'you know what? I don't have to: the Luddite analogy itself does the job for me.

The problem with the Luddite movement was not, as Harsanyi implies, that they had an irrational fear of something inherently good. They had an irrational fear of development, yes, but that fear was irrational because they underestimated their own capacity to harness that development - which, not coincidentally, is exactly what the OWS protesters are asking for. The Luddite movement was a response to the Industrial Revolution, as you may or may not be aware, and as it happens the Industrial Revolution wasn't all peaches and cream (or, steam power and textile manufacturing). Companies were more than happy to use child labor, to enforce any manner of working conditions, to pollute with abandon, and so on, and it would be just ridiculous to say that anybody who protested those sorts of behaviors is irrational. But with government intervention, labor movements, and other social controls, people managed to limit the damage done by businesses (at least to some degree), so that today we have things like mandatory time off and overtime laws and child labor laws and anti-pollution laws and so on. Development in the economic sense is not always an unvarnished good; really, it isn't even always an overall good. To protest development, therefore, is not automatically irrational, especially if you're in the group who has to live with the resulting black lung or unlivable wages or what have you. What's irrational is to pretend, either out of fear of capitalism or out of love of it, that development is an unstoppable force that cannot (or should not) be made to serve the interests of all.

In addition to straw-manning the OWS protesters by misrepresenting their cause, then, Harsanyi is subtly making his own position better off by connecting it to a fairy tale. Capitalism, contrary to the picture he paints, is not something that we must trust to run itself. The OWS protesters, therefore, are not wrong because they bear too similar a resemblance to the Luddites. Quite the reverse is true: the Luddites were wrong because they weren't similar enough to the OWS protesters. Today's capitalist "Luddites" are not economic anarchists the way that the original Luddites were technological anarchists; rather, they're economic reformers in the same way that the original Luddites should have been. For Harsanyi to pretend otherwise indicates one of two things: either he's intentionally characterizing the movement by its most extreme (i.e., least representative) elements, or else he's such a thoroughgoing capitalist cheerleader that he can't even acknowledge that the success of the Industrial Revolution (and, indeed, of any economic movement you care to name) was just as much due to the social restraints on capitalism as it was due to capitalism itself. Neither of these is real good, and the fact that the prouder elements of our society are still making these arguments is worse yet. Because we're in desperate need of some education, and history can be a powerful teaching tool - but only if it isn't distorted and fabricated to fit a dangerous political agenda.

Yesterday we saw how some proponents of absolute rights get confused when those rights are missing certain prerequisite conditions, so to continue the very-mini-series today we're going to look at one of the mistakes that virtue ethicists make when it comes to discussing their own theory.

"What is the relationship between a person and his or her acts?...A long tradition in Western morality (and beyond) has employed the concept of virtue to serve this role. A virtue is a good habit, and a vice is a bad habit. A habit in this sense is not a mindless repetitive activity, but a stable disposition to do some sort of action (eating, making decisions, facing difficulties, e.g.) in a certain sort of way (bravely or cowardly, e.g.)."

Not to me, mind you, but to people who like the idea - people like Robert George and Melissa Moschella:

"Parents are responsible for bringing new people into the world, bound to them by blood and, ordinarily, deep feeling. These people are incapable of developing their uniquely human capacities on their own, giving parents an obligation to their children and to society to help them reach maturity — one that requires attending not only to children’s physical and emotional needs, but their intellectual and moral growth as well.

Parenting, especially in moral and religious matters, is very important and highly personal: while parents enlist others’ help in this task, the task is theirs. They are ultimately responsible for their children’s intellectual and moral maturity, so within broad limits they must be free to educate their children, especially on the deepest matters, as they judge best."

This is the main thrust of George and Moschella's argument that certain sex ed classes "violate parents' rights," and what's disturbing about it is that this argument fails even before we get into the details of what those classes teach.

If my gut reaction is right, the path of least resistance here would be to question their definition of the "broad limits" within which parents should be given free rein. Since this appears very much to be nothing more than standard right-wing scaremongering, George and Moschella can probably be shown to have wildly exaggerated the extent of the depravity in these classes - or, failing that, one can probably argue that George and Moschella's boundaries are just too wide to begin with. But even if these objections would succeed, they're unnecessary. Before that stuff even comes up, George and Moschella give the game away with just two letters: S and O.

In that last sentence in the blockquote, they link parental responsibility to parental rights: parents "are ultimately responsible for their children," they begin, "so...they must be free [i.e., they have the right] to educate their children." This language marks a relationship of dependency, at least within the confines of George and Moschella's argument. If parents have such-and-such a responsibility, they are saying, then they must also have a corresponding right. Very well: then why do they insist that parents have that right even when no corresponding responsibility exists?

You will note that, in virtue of putting sex ed in school curricula, society at large is taking responsibility for ensuring that children have a certain level of education. Parents, in other words, no longer have that responsibility, any more than they have the responsibility to teach their children about chemistry or history (or, say, to protect them from bodily harm while they're at school). George and Moschella may well be correct to think that parents traditionally had this responsibility, but that does nothing to show that parents currently are responsible in this way. But this means that George and Moschella are bereft of the first part of their conditional: contrary to their bald assertion, parents are not "ultimately responsible for their children's intellectual and moral maturity." And, of course, without the first part of the conditional the second part cannot be obtained - which is to say that George and Moschella cannot actually get to their conclusion.*

They might reply that social or state intervention doesn't displace the original responsibility of the biological parents because the latter is a permanent and indelible feature of reality, but then what would they say about adoption? Or children who are taken away from abusive parents? Or children whose biological parents are surrogates? Surely there are at least some cases where the responsibility either is wholly transferred to others or else never existed in the first place.

Not that this should be surprising: George and Moschella are trying to derive some kind of universal, eternal moral conclusion from contingent facts about biology and anthropology, and that's a well-known mistake. Things like our biology and the structure of our society change over time, and those changes are morally relevant. Even if they weren't, the mere fact that they change should be enough to warn us against trying to make them the basis for an unchanging truth; again, without the antecedent term in a conditional you cannot obtain the consequent. I therefore say again that rights have to be understood as a shorthand way of referring to situations where the potential for harm is so small if the "right" is enforced (and/or the reverse: situations where the potential for harm is too great if the "right" is not enforced) that it is better to enforce it all the time than to even attempt a case-by-case evaluation. It would be perfectly acceptable (though still not necessarily convincing) for George and Moschella to argue that there is relatively little harm in not teaching kids about sex (and/or the reverse: that there's great harm in teaching them), but for them to pretend that a temporary state of affairs has generated an invincible and everlasting moral authorization is absurd.

*Not that I think the conditional is a good one in the first place. Professional athletes are ultimately responsible for playing the game, but coaches rightly restrict the ways in which they are allowed to do so.

Amateur philosophy, one is inclined to think, would look something like the writing of Marc Barnes (as quoted by Leah Libresco):

"If Beauty can indeed be maintained to be an Infinite, Supernatural Existence, then God is Beauty. For there cannot exist two independent infinities. An immovable object and an unstoppable force cannot meet. Another way of saying this is that God is infinitely beautiful, which...is the same as saying God is Beauty."

And indeed, as Barnes demonstrates, amateur philosophy often is like that: buffoonish, shallow, simple-minded, and above all badly written. Libresco dispatches Barnes with thoroughness and precision over at her blog and I won't repeat that here, but I will say that one probably expects professional philosophy to be all of the things that Barnes's writing is not - that is, to be elegant, well-grounded, and so on. If only that was actually the case.

"Take the following metaphysical principle, connecting possible worlds, knowledge and truth: 'If it is impossible to know that p, then p is necessarily false'. This principle seems cogent. For, if a given proposition p could be true, then, plausibly, there is some possible world in which some subject knows that p is true. In other words, if in *all* possible worlds *all* subjects do not know that some proposition is true, then, plausibly, that is because that very proposition cannot in fact be true."

Emanuel Rutten, like Barnes, eventually goes on to talk about God. But, also like Barnes, Rutten's argument dies at the first premise. This idea that unknown truths are actually false is patently ridiculous: certainly there are tons of facts that we, in this universe, will never know, and it seems extraordinarily hard to dream up a way for us (or anybody like us) to know some of them. Moreover, Rutten's justification for it is, well, buffoonish, shallow, and simple-minded: plausibly he could be right? That's all he has to say, "If I think about it for a second or two my idea doesn't seem totally outlandish?" Since when is that a justification?

The rest of his argument, if you care to read it, is self-undermining and question-begging simultaneously (hard trick to pull off, that), but we shouldn't even need to go into that much detail. Just like we don't need to investigate the concept of beauty (and show that it has no independent existence, say) in order to know that Barnes's argument fails, there should be no reason to follow Rutten any further than his goofy starting point. And that, dear readers, is a really big problem, because if professional philosophy can't do any better than the dim bulbs who populate the internet then I fail to see why we should keep it around.

I'm not real sure who would look at this little pond and go, "Oh boy - industrial waste water! I'll just jump right in!" Apparently, though, they felt the need to warn people against doing that, so...that tells you something about the intelligence of the human animal.


Speaking of animals, though, it looked like there were deer tracks near the water, which to me suggests that they'd had some to drink. They didn't look mutated to me, but you never know. They could be Chekhov's deer.


The aforementioned hauntable mansion.


This time I also noticed a couple of random boxes set into the hillside, both of which appeared to be empty.


Why, you might ask, would anybody build two very sturdy but relatively small boxes into a random point of the hill? I have no fucking idea.



This building, I am sure, is empty, but for the life of me I can't find a way in. Some extra ingenuity may well be required if I'm ever to get photos of the inside.


So I went and looked in some new rooms in old buildings instead.


I like the biohazard plastic sheets that are still strung up here. Gives the place a very sinister look, in my opinion.


This, however, is probably the most interesting thing I've found yet. You may think that it's just a random sticker above a light switch, but think again. Whatever this "Improfidigit" thing is, Google has no search results for it. And these little stickers are everywhere. So to me this is a pretty big mystery. Anybody have any ideas?



Beard man liked to collect fruit stickers, apparently.




In one of the old buildings I had somehow missed this series of test rooms (one of which is picture above) with automatic sliding glass doors and security cameras inside and out. That, to me, is Portal all over, although I was somewhat disconcerned to see a door marked "Emergency Exit" that just exited out into the hallway. Tell me: what kind of emergency is there where you can escape it just by leaving the room? Something is very odd about these rooms, methinks.


And it doesn't make it any less odd to know that they had an airlock.


My favorite sign so far:



Wherever this door went, I was not about to find out:


Likewise for this conspicuously available maintenance tunnel:


Granted, I know where to go now in case I run out of gameplay objectives in the main building, but that's probably a ways off.




Anyway, it turns out that there was a similar stretch of testing rooms in another building I'd already been in, like this one that had something to do with ion etching:


But these are even crazier! Look at this - if there's a problem in these rooms, they want you to evacuate the whole building:


To give you a sense, here's a little diagram I made using Google maps. The red outline is the building and the blue star is the approximate location of that sign:


Granted, maybe they didn't need to put this apparently extraordinarily dangerous thing at the intersection of the two wings of the building, but even so.


It also seems as though it may have been dangerous just to watch this stuff happening? Cause the rooms had this weird yellow-tinted glass on them:


And, again, emergency exit doors that opened into...the hallway.


I also tried to complete my circuit of the perimeter, but it turns out that I'd inadvertently saved the most horrifically overgrown part for last.




Can I take this moment to say, by the way, that shoes are awesome? My pants were not really tough enough to withstand the evil, malicious plant life on this side of the complex, but the soles of my shoes handled it amply well. So thank you, anonymous inventor of footwear. You were awesome.



Cause, y'know, everyone sees a hole in the ground covered by a metal plate and thinks, "Okay, time to go in there!"



I also found a cage for keeping zombies in...


...and a nice big room to have a boss fight in...



...and even a weapon.


So, seriously, stocking up on green herbs looks like the next step.



I'm not sure how many of the "Not an exit" signs I've shown here (you can see one in that same picture with the ladder, four pictures up), but the entire complex is practically littered with them. They tend to show up on doors that lead to stairs, which would be fine (if maybe suboptimal) if they didn't also stick those exact same signs on this door:


Because, you see, that door does not lead to stairs. It leads to a twenty-foot drop onto concrete:


User-interface-wise, that design decision absolutely sucks.

Anyway, last (for now), does anybody know if this is a real thing, a levelator?


Or is that a silly typo for elevator? Or what?