Liberal Fascism and the "Who Cares?" Objection

Goldberg has several times in the book and on the book's blog (here, here, and here) handled the objection that says, "Who cares if contemporary liberalism has fascist antecedents? The books doesn't really prove that liberalism itself is fascistic. Or if it does prove that, it has to back-peddle with this qualification that liberalism is 'nice' fascism. So, at most the book is a trivial historical footnote."

Goldberg seems most concerned with exposing the hypocrisy and ignorance underlying the frequent claims of liberal that conservatives are fascists. He also puts his finger on the heart of the matter here, though he doesn't go far enough:

Moreover, a major point of the book is that we are constantly looking in the wrong direction for incipient fascism or totalitarianism or whatever you want to call it. Fascism was popular. It was seen as the wave of the future. The totalitarian temptation endures in every human heart, but we are trained to believe it can never come from "the good guys" (i.e. liberals and progressives). It must only come from the shiny-booted villaims[sic] of the right. Not only is this childish and ahistorical, it is very dangerous.

Here is where I think Goldberg is close to the mark but doesn't quite get the force of his book's analysis "liberalism" and "fascism," He should have said this:

Liberalism is a form of fascism. Fascism is evil. Therefore, liberalism is evil.

By "evil" I mean that, whether liberals realize it or not, if they had the political system they wanted people would be much less able to live good lives than they would in a conservative society. Of course, to say that liberalism is evil sounds unhinged. We've all been semantically hoodwinked, in the ways that I've pointed out in the last few posts. But when you consider that the book shows that liberalism is a form of fascism and fascism is evil, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion. As for "nice," this is window-dressing. There are flavors of fascism (Nazism, Bolshevism, the "nice" kind), but not degrees. This is because totalitarianism doesn't come in degrees.

UPDATE:
Let's go into some detail here. This is a key point.

I claim that, thanks to Liberal Fascism, there is a interesting philosophical analysis of liberalism in the offing: liberalism is evil because it is a form of fascism and fascism is evil.

Let's take a closer look at the criticism of this analysis: the "So What" argument. This is the argument that, although the premises - the history presented by the book - are true, the conclusion follows from them only in a weak and uninteresting sense. Liberalism has fascist roots only in the sense that it shares with fascism the goal of a large, powerful, and omnipresent welfare state in which all subjects of the state attain freedom and happiness. (Etc. See the "vision of fascism" and the definition of fascism in posts below.) Liberal fascism is a kind of fascism that renounces the violence, brutality and oppression of the kinds that the term "fascism" usually connotes. So, Goldberg's book shows that "fascism" can be analyzed into (a.) liberalism and (b.) the evil kind. It's a true but arcane piece of history, nothing more. It's not interesting, because it shows precisely that liberalism isn't the evil kind but the "nice" kind. Then, for Goldberg to trumpet his thesis as interesting shows only that he doesn't even understand it himself. Furthermore, the fact that he defends it against this criticism so often by saying that at least the book takes to task those liberals who call conservatives fascist proves that even he knows there is no philosophical substance in the book but only a correction of the historical record. Okay, so liberals have to eat crow on this point. So what? There is no philosophically or politically interesting sense of "liberal fascism" but only a modestly interesting historical point to it.

There is the criticism. It's a good one. A inchoate version of it may be found here, where Arnold Kling has assessed Goldberg as a troll as much as anything else. A succinct statement may also be found in Goldberg's mailbag (already linked above.)

The problem with the criticism is simple and direct:

The evil of fascism lies not in its accidental violence and brutality. It lies in its essential totalitarianism.

Brutality, murder, and incarceration are evils. But they are common and not unique to fascism. And any American not smitten by liberalism or cowardice is willing to suffer them, rather than endure totalitarianism. Let's put it this way. Totalitarianism is the far greater evil than brutality because unlike the present and finite instances of brutality it may or may not use to achieve a stronghold, it stretches far into the indefinite future, making possible incalculably many instances of future brutality and preventing even those lives that it does not brutalize - which are many more in number - from being good lives. Fascism is evil because it eliminates the conditions of the pursuit of happiness. Do we really need to prove this to ourselves? No, let us count it as another sure premise in Goldberg's argument.

So, the criticism from "So what?" turns out to be a red herring. It attempts to divert our scrutiny of the evil of fascism from fascism's essential evil to the accidental evils of the violent form of fascism. "Liberal fascism" therefore stands as a term with deeply philosophically and politically interesting meaning, which it takes Goldberg 400 pages to flesh out. The analysis that Goldberg has in the offing - he hasn't said whether he agrees with it - is sound. In my view it is the reason the book is a momentous work.

Conservatism and What Goldberg's Liberal Fascism Accomplishes

Goldberg's book shows that there is no reasonable interpretation of "liberal but not fascist" that makes sense, given the usage of the term "fascist" in the last 100 years and the nature of fascism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is not logically compatible with fascism. So, the book is a piece of philosophical analysis: it analyzes the meanings of the terms "fascist" and "liberal." Whereas a book of straight history or political science would attempt to uncover causes of events and ideas, Liberal Fascism looks at logical entailments provided by the meanings of those two terms.

The thesis is highly non-trivial. In other words, it is far from obvious that liberalism is fascistic. It is interesting to consider why it is not obvious. The hypnotic power of fascism enables liberals, who live in a time when "fascism" connotes evils of various kinds that no liberal would consciously prefer to embrace, to be fascists while believing that they are not fascists. The hypnotic state is able cleanse the fascistic mind of any impression that its purposes are pernicious. Even the loss of its own name has been necessary in order pull this off, fascism has not spared this expense. It lets the liberal mind reason that, as fascism is full of evils and liberal projects are not evil, therefore liberal projects are not fascist. Instead, as the liberal mind conceives it, those people who make themselves obstacles to the creation of a new liberal society are precisely the fascists. This is the hoodwinking that fascism can administer to a mind made vulnerable by its resentments and hatreds and excited by unity and change. Fascism can make itself seem to be where it is not and not to be within oneself.

Communist fascists have propagated the appearance of an association between fascism and conservatism by labeling enemy fascists "right-wing." Long ago, "right" may have meant conservative and therefore opposed to totalitarianism, and by entailment, opposed to fascism. 20th Century communist fascists used the term "right" simply as a smear to label their competitors: Hitler, Mussolini and conservatives. The semantic hoodwinking was masterful and complete: if fascism is somehow conservative, then of course liberals can't be fascist. Indeed, it was ingenious. It was brought of by the destruction of the meaning of "right." For "right" is now settled into its new semantic space, no longer meaning "conservative opposition to fascism" but instead the oxymoronic pseudo-meaning of "conservative/fascist." It is impossible for a term to mean anything when it is so incoherent. This is why "right" is now a meaningless term. The fact that it doesn't appear to be meaningless only shows that the conceptual confusion is deep and not obvious.

This is why liberals can't see so easily that it is liberalism that is fascist and conservatism that is anti-fascist. There is nothing the conservative can do to rectify matters, besides laying out the facts and hoping they sink in. To this end, there is Goldberg's book on liberalism. But one also needs to come back again and again to retell the nature of conservatism, laying bare its incompatibility with fascism and the delusions of the mind that believes otherwise.

Conservatism has political and moral levels. This is enormous territory, but here are some salient points.

The political philosophy of conservatism is the preference for a government that is as small as possible while still able to fulfill its roles as military defender of the country and provider of a few other services that it is more prudent to have the government provide than to have the private sector provide. Conservatives can deliberate over which those few are, but the point is they be few in number and of kind that does not require an intrusive government. Conservatives need to maintain a large set of values and they realize that big governments are likely to inhibit that maintenance or even crush it utterly.

The moral level of conservatism pertains to that set of values. There is a large set - a heritage - of values that conservatives cherish as required for a decent society and as tending to produce good lives better than alternative sets of values. These values compete quite frequently, requiring deliberation and trade-offs in the plethora of particular cases in which they apply. (Please search my archives for more on the moral level of conservatism.) The conservative moral vision implies the following.

1. It likely to be wrong-headed to prefer a new value over the traditional set of values. The egalitarians' economic equality is an example of such a new value. The preference for the new value disastrously inhibits the extent to which the traditional set of values can be fulfilled. Liberty and self-reliance, amongst a variety of other values, are neglected in favor of the new value. So, not only is the new value's genuine worthiness no good grounds, the costs of maintaining it are enormous.

2. It is wrong-headed to fetishize one of the traditional values at the expense of the rest. Deliberation over the set of values that we want to uphold is not a matter of using one as a trump. Libertarians take liberty to be such a trump, but there is no good argument that shows that liberty should be taken as a trump. Bleeding-heart liberals say that they take poverty relief as a trump value (and if they divest themselves of all their wealth, they really do.) But no good argument shows that poverty relief is not a trump value.

This is the lay of the philosophical land. If you get the lay of the land, you can see that the championing of self-reliance is not a ruse aimed at perpetuating slavery, and that "self-reliance is slavery" is Orwellian. And you can see that conservatives are not fascistic for their belief that some values are better than others, or their belief that deliberation over them requires that the government be small and out of the way. If you get the lay of the land you see that there is nothing fascistic in the conservative view that the policy of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor will be unjust because it will often entail taking from the innocent and giving to the vicious and because it will erode the self-reliance of the poor. Whether or not you agree with conservatives about these things, you can see that they are not ruses made up by conservative fascists intent upon subjugating the poor. It couldn't be that, as "conservative fascists intent upon subjugating the poor" is as full of incoherence as can be. It is meaningless verbiage.

Hypnotic states induced by anger and excitement and nurtured by masterful orators with forceful personalities can make one believe impossible and incoherent things. One such hypnotic state can make one believe that the champion of small government is the totalitarian, while the advocate of an all-encompassing welfare state is anti-totalitarian. Thanks to Marx, this hypnosis, which has poisoned our world for the last hundred years, has also been equipped with a powerful shield against any reasoning that might unravel it. This is the reflexive tendency to dismiss conservative arguments simply as deriving from the enemy's counter-revolutionary impulses and therefore to be dismissed out of hand as unneedful of consideration or comparison with the arguments for leftism - as poor as these are - accepted by the fascist. The fascistic mind's delusional and hypnotic state is therefore also durable. This is why it is rare to see a liberal who has a good grasp of what conservatism is. In order to get a good grasp of it, he must have let fall away a tenacious hypnotic state without which it is hard to remain liberal.

Take the Quiz!

Internet quizzes are fun! Try this one. Make a check mark on a piece of paper for every “yes” you answer.

1. Do you have a deep sense of discontentment with the way your society is organized and the way people in it lead their lives?
2. Do you want to be part of the creation of a better society by leaving old conservative ways behind as obsolete, as outmoded, as supported by rich elites to secure their power, and as ignorantly maintained by benighted lower classes who don’t understand that they could have a better world?
3. Do you think that people who don’t want to be part of the movement toward a new society, or who claim that such a project violates their rights to be left alone to do as they please, are obstacles to social justice?
4. Do you feel excited when inspiring speakers and experts in science, technology and social justice explain how we can create a new and better society?
5. Do you think the government should be doing much more to create better lives for people and that it has its hands tied by moneyed groups with narrow interests?
6. Do you think the government should step in to control big business and the distribution of wealth, so that no one is allowed to be well-off while anyone else has to struggle in poverty - so that we can all be more devoted to a less self-interested, collective social action?
   
7. Does the excitement you get by contemplating moving toward a new society make your present personal interests (school, career, hobbies, family, etc.) seem hum-drum or somewhat meaningless?
   
8. Do you have any fascist tendencies?
   

If you answered “yes” to at least two of #1-7, then you have fascist tendencies. The more yeses you answered, the stronger your fascist tendencies are. If in addition to some yeses in #1-7 you answered “no” to #8, then you are in a hypnotic state.

UPDATE: Another quiz? Oh, boy!

1. Do you have a vision for society in which everyone can rely upon himself and be independent of the government for his welfare?
2. Do you think the government's main purpose is to protect its citizens and not to create good lives for them?
3. If you were magically made president with an agreeable Congress, would your instinct be primarily to maintain security and enforce the law, rather than to redesign society in a way that you would prefer society to be?
4. Is the thought of letting the Federal Government take over the management of the health care system repugnant to you?
5. Do you like the American Founding Fathers and feel either antipathy or nothing at all for those American leaders who created big government and the welfare state?
6. Are you liberal (in today's colloquial sense of the term, meaning "on the left")?
   

If you answered mostly yeses to #1-5, then you don't have much in the way of totalitarian tendencies. If, in addition to mostly yeses in #1-5, you answered "yes" to #6, then read A Case for Conservatism or Liberal Fascism and answer #6 again.

Thanks, Libertarians. Also, Some Miscellany

Dwelling on the pervasiveness of totalitarian viewpoints these days has made me realize that, um... well... okay. I like libertarians. There, I said it. Thank you, libertarians. I'm glad there is you. I'm a conservative, and it seems I've posted enough in the last five years on this ol' blog about how you shouldn't fetishize liberty the way you do. After all, you share with conservatism an understanding of what is at stake between totalitarianism and individual liberty, and you strongly champion the latter in a world in which so many people are hypnotized by the former. Did I mention I'm glad there is you? I am. Every time I think of you. XOXO!!

Some notes:

I'll be posting on Goldberg's chapter on the New Deal this weekend. I love a book in which each chapter is richer than the last, and so far, this book delivers. The reason it will be read twenty years from now is that it is well argued and full of factual support, insightful at many points, highly non-trivial, and true. What's the genre of the book? Applied political philosophy. It's a philosophical analysis of "liberalism" and "fascism," using historical data. Historians and political scientists will be too quick to criticize it, just as the ichthyologist I mentioned a post or two back was looking at things a level or two in abstraction below his interlocutor. The book is philosophical analysis, not history or political science.

My series on war and moral responsibility continues. A post on Michael Walzer's article on Dirty Hands is coming right up.

Finally, this is a philosophy blog. I hope you'll dip into the archives. The posts there haven't aged. Unfortunately all the comments got deleted by Haloscan or somebody a year or so ago. But it's all good, as the kids say these days.

Liberal Fascism Chapter Three

I've given my definition of "fascism" (totalitarianism with cult of personality) a couple of posts below. I would also say that fascism has a vision:

We're all marching off to create a radically new society in which the maladies of human society are wiped away, the worker is not deprived of his wealth by capitalists, and everyone fulfills himself in a collective that is designed by men of action and innovation who intuitively know the will of the people. Anyone who stands in the way will be eliminated or forced to bend his will to this project.

The rest is details. There are socialist, militarist, pacifist, and bureaucratic varieties, there are varieties in which the state and big business act as partners, and there are varieties in which the state owns all business. There are fascist police states that brutalize deviation of thought and individuality of action, and there are states that use a more subtle way of compelling compliance of will by hypnosis or causing their people gradually to become slothful and dependent upon the state. There are fascist states that eliminate intellectuals and ones that elevate them. There can be "top-down" fascist states spearheaded by and elite, and there could conceivably be "bottom-up" decentralized ones in which every man is a bully.

It is best not to get lost in the details, but much to the chagrin of the reader, Goldberg's Chapter Three reveals the terrible truths about Woodrow Wilson, "the twentieth century's first fascist dictator." There is no point in retelling them here. They constitute one of the darkest stories in our history. Instead, I'll note that Michael Ledeen has laid out quite a few objections to Liberal Fascism, and in particular, he objects to Goldberg's characterization of Wilson.

Ledeen argues that Wilson was not a fascist because he was not a one-party dictator. However, Mussolini was a fascist leader at times when he was not a one-party dictator. And I don't see any contradiction between "there are two parties in the state" and the vision and definition of fascism that I have offered. There may be some practical reason perceived by the fascists for the need of two parties. Perhaps there is a labor party and an intelligentsia party, or a military party and a labor party. The Ledeen article, while instructive, is composed of non sequiturs to the effect that since X lacked detail #472, he wasn't a fascist or wasn't a leftist, or since Y lacked detail #83 he wasn't a fascist. What is so obvious is that X and Y share the vision and the definition of fascism.

Ledeen is like the ichthyologist who has forgotten that what he is studying is fish and not an irreducible plurality of carp, haddock, herring, etc. Goldberg has claimed that Mussolini, Hitler, and Wilson were all fish. Ledeen points out that they were demonstrably different kinds of fish in unobvious ways, thereby missing the obvious.

UPDATE: Yikes. Richard Jansen, in a comment on Ledeen's post, recites quite a few Nazi socialist platform planks, concluding quite judiciously:

Of course other elements were involved: ein folk, ein Reich, ein fuhrer, but socialism was strongly in the mix.

It is unfortunate that Ledeen responds in this way:

Racism is the core of Nazism, these economic/social "principles" are epiphenomena. I don't know a serious scholar of Nazism who thinks otherwise, frankly, except the Holocaust deniers, who are 'serious' in a sick way.

That's sophistry. First, the claim that Nazism was socialist does not entail holocaust denial. It appears to me that Ledeen has at least obliquely associated Jansen with holocaust denial. Second, it is impossible to be epiphenomenally socialist and yet not socialist. Perhaps Ledeen meant that the socialism was "not essential." But what would count as evidence that Nazi socialism was not an essential part of Nazism? What sort of thing is a Nazism that doesn't champion the socialist platform Jansen recites? Who knows. But we have a term, "genocidal anti-semite," and we shouldn't confuse it with "Nazism." In any event, Ledeen offers no substance. He should rethink his reply and emend it. It's unworthy of him, to put it mildly.

UPDATE: Goldberg has more. Welcome NRO readers!

Notes on Goldberg, Liberal Fascism Chapter Two

Jonah Goldberg is aware of the semantic slipperiness of the "right" and "left." In speaking of Hitler as having "destroyed the Left," leaving "the Right" to remain, Goldberg reflects, "But ask yourself, how do we normally talk about such things?" In other words, Goldberg knows the terms can deceive.

Unfortunately, he goes on to argue that Hitler was on the left, not the right, assuming that conservatives are on the right, not the left. But there is no interesting sense in which conservatism is to the "right" of any ideological center. And "left" and "right" have such a deep history of being used to draw distinctions between competing fascists that "right" cannot be properly used to label conservatism. "Right" is a vacuous term properly used only in the speech act of calling one's fellow socialists to the task of opposing an enemy. It's a demented term, and for conservatives to continue to use it impairs their ability to reason about political matters. Left and right are, by inalienable senses of the English terms, progressivistic. They signify motion away from the existing frame of reference. Inevitably, if you say that you are on the right, you connote the notion that you have some cockamamie plan for taking our society and moving it away from its existing values to somewhere else, somewhere to the "right."

I know that I am starting to sound like a broken record on this point, but if you think I'm dwelling pointlessly on mere semantics that don't matter, I suggest you consider the title of Goldberg's momentous book.

Goldberg seems to know that something is amiss here. After defining "left" as "the party of change" and "right" as "the party of status quo," and arguing that Hitler, since a revolutionary, was on the left and not the right, he says, "If we put aside for a moment the question of whether Hitlerism was a phenomenon of the right, what is indisputable is that Hitler was in no way a conservative...." But there is the rub. If it is clear that Hitler is not a conservative and debatable whether he was on the right, then it follows that "right" and "conservative" do not mean the same thing. Moreover, conservatism and Hitlerism share no points of political philosophy, and therefore they can't even be two different species of the right. What they do share is that they have been subject to the brickbat, the speech act, "right," being hurled at them by certain fascists who call themselves "left." When it seems possible for one to consider Hitlerism and one's own conservatism as potentially of the same family of political views, then one has been hoodwinked and cannot tell who one's ideological opponents really are.

Goldberg himself puts his finger on this distinction between mere labeling of a political competitor and genuine naming of an ideology. He recognizes that "the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing." He says of Hitler's hatred for the communists and Jews who he thought had betrayed Germany during WW I, that it "was not - as communists themselves have claimed - grounded in a rejection of socialist policies.... It was bound up inextricably with a sense of betrayal of German honor pathological anti-semitism." Goldberg shows that Hitler embraces socialist policies. So, Hitler didn't disagree with socialism; he merely opposed those socialists labeled "communist," favoring those labeled "nationalist." Yet, Goldberg still wants to infer from this that Hitler was not of the right. Finally, Goldberg stumbles hard over the difficulty:

But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism And right-wing socialists are still socialists.... [W]e in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

Goldberg knows there is a Soviet hoodwinking here, but he still spends pages arguing about whether or not Nazism shares with conservatism a place on the "right." In short, there is no good sense in which a conservative can use the word "right." It's only non-misleading usage entails that the speaker is a fascist.

There are other insightful passages in this chapter on Hitler in which Goldberg sees that "right" is merely a label used by one leftist against his leftist enemies. This is why it isn't cogent for him to maintain that conservatism is on the right. Again, I emphasize that this isn't "mere semantics" because when the fundamental terms of the philosophical terrain are left to remain obscure, one cannot say precisely what one's philosophy is. It isn't obvious how "conservatism" should be philosophically defined. I've given the problem a good deal of thought over the years, as has John Kekes. I find it impossible to reconcile any of the best thoughts about conservatism with any meaningful sense of "the right." I would never say that Goldberg is on the right. He shouldn't say it of himself.

Goldberg's Liberal Fascism Chapter One

The upshot of this chapter on Mussolini is that in the case "leftism vs. fascism" in Italy, "the distinction was hardly a difference." But socialists and fascists fought tooth-and-nail in Italy? Tell that to Leon Trotsky or my cousin Sheldon Harte, Trotsky's secretary. The ice pick in Trotsky's forehead and the bullet in my foolish cousin's back refute the inference that anyone who brutalizes a leftist is anti-leftist. Mussolini was a leftist as surely as the monster who killed Trotsky and Sheldon.

The chapter demonstrates that Mussolini never moved fascism "from left to right," even when his Fascist party lost to the socialists and he reformulated his slogans from "socialist" to "populist." If you've read the chapter, consider this bird's eye view of some of the concepts involved.

A political philosophy can have a variety of implementations. There can even be two vociferously opposed political parties that espouse the same political philosophy but advocate different implementations. Consider that the rhetorical exaggerations of the differences delivered by leaders of the opposed parties - leaders with megalomaniacal and hypnotically persuasive personalities - can propagate very distorted views of each party's position. Indeed, each party's leader is prone to aver of the other that his party is so different as to have reached the point that it doesn't espouse a genuine form of the political philosophy it is supposed to espouse. He might even announce that the opposition's philosophy is precisely opposed to his own party's philosophy. "If the Fascists don't want to implement a socialist totalitarian state using the techniques and low-level platform planks that we Socialists know are the true way to get to the goal, can't we be forgiven for suspecting that they are not socialists at all? Populism? A capitalist ruse!" You see the kinds of confusions and the tricks that were in play. It can result in ice picks and bullets in the back of "traitors" to socialism.

The confusion between philosophy and its implementation, along with the violence, fear and cult of personality that are found amongst both the fascists and the socialists of the 1920's, explain why it could be that fascism would become deeply semantically cloaked in anti-leftist garb and remain there for decades.

The fascists wanted militarism and government control of the economy for the stated purpose of achieving the socialist totalitarian goal. So did the leftists. If you can't understand this, then you can't think about what is at stake in America today between the left and conservatism.

Let's take an even more general bird's eye view of the semantic history. In one region of the terrain below we have squabbling megalomaniacs who yearn to be dictators of a socialist totalitarian state. Each loudly denounces the other as a power-hungry enemy of the working class. They oppose one another, though not philosophically. In addition, they use handy labels to distinguish themselves: "socialist left" and "fascist right," labels which seem to draw a philosophical differences where there in fact is none. In another region of the terrain, called "Liberty," we observe a philosophy according to which the individual is to rely upon himself for his welfare and to be protected from governmental (and other) infringements upon his liberty to pursue happiness as he sees fit. In Liberty there is no totalitarian project, dream of a general will, or utopian urge to consign traditional, common-sense values to the trash heap. Rather, Liberty must perpetually refute this philosophy and repel attempts by the totalitarians to subjugate Liberty. We gaze back again upon the totalitarian terrain, and we notice one of the two competitors - the one labeled "fascist right" - has died. Now, if the modus operandi of the totalitarian who remains - "socialist left" - has been to denounce anyone who opposes him as a power-hungry enemy of the working class and to distort philosophical differences beyond recognition, we should not be surprised when he denounces Liberty in this way. Why should he tell the truth, after all? It isn't in his interest. The philosophy of Liberty gets smeared, therefore, as "fascist right."

Thus does it become possible for the mind to believe that Liberty's attempt to conserve its basic philosophy is the reaction of those with "rightwing fascist" tendencies to the left's attempt to create "social justice." Mind-numbingly stupid beliefs such as this can indeed be embraced because class envy and cults of personality have hypnotic power. When a society has been semantically hoodwinked in this way and then grows wealthy, slothful, and uninterested in clinging to the values self-reliance and individualism that it has long maintained, it can slide neatly into the control of precisely the fascist state that it is so dimly sure it is being careful to avoid.

UPDATE: Goldberg explains. Also, title of post changed from "...Chapter Two" to "...Chapter One."

Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: Reflections on the Introduction

When a people loses important components of its language it loses ability to think about the objects of those lost terms. "Fascist" (as a meaningful term) has been all but eradicated from the language and as a result we are unable to think through certain important and deplorable facts about our political situation. Goldberg’s book recovers “fascist.” For this it is a work of lasting value.

To me, “fascism” has always meant utopian totalitarianism with a cult of personality. “Cult of personality” can taken as either a people's hypnotic obedience to a totalitarian leader of forceful personality or just a “general will” to which every member of a nation is compelled to bring his own will to compliance. If this is a reasonable sense of “fascism,” then Goldberg is right that the French Revolution was fascist, as well as Nazi Germany. Stalin was also a fascist. Liberal Fascism intends to demonstrate that liberalism (today’s soft leftism, not the classical liberalism of yore) is also fascist. It is.

Let me offer a taxonomy of political theories that will show how this can be so:

1. Libertarianism (minimal state, liberty as the value that trumps all others)

2. Conservatism (there is a large set of traditional values that have proven worth maintaining and over which we are perpetually obliged to deliberate in order to make the tough and sometimes tragic decisions about how to maximize the fulfillment of as many of them as possible; the state should be very small, so that the determinations of this deliberation – and not a general will or utopian disdain for the perpetual task of deliberation over the set values - can hold sway)

3. Totalitarianism (state power is pervasive, complete)
3.1. Fascism (as defined above; the state should control the capital)
3.1.1. Leftism (Marxist fascism; the state should own the capital)
3.1.1.1. Communism (the state, the people, and the general will will become one, and private property will be eliminated)
3.1.1.2. Socialism (the state should control the capital)
3.1.2. The Right (there is no such thing as the right)

Now, any outline point that had only one subheading was to absorb that subheading. Unless there was more than one species of a genus, the single species was to be absorbed into the genus itself. And, upon inspection, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between 3.1 and 3.1.1, as far as political philosophy is concerned. Therefore, fascism and leftism are the same thing. Hitler was a leftist. Stalin was a fascist. And vice versa. The parsing? They were having you on. There is no taxonomically salient difference between the two. They were competitors selling the same goods, pretending they were different. And there is no such thing as 3.1.2.

No, there is no such thing as “the right.” It is an epithet coined by Stalinist fascists to disparage competing fascists. Goldberg's book discloses the fallacies that have smeared the term “fascism” into semantic oblivion. But he hasn't noticed that “right” is a genuinely meaningless term, one which, unlike “fascism,” is semantically unrecoverable. What was the fallacy that produced it’s vapid place in our contemporary forum?

Conservatism has opposed and competed with fascism/leftism continues to do so. Meanwhile, the fascists who got labeled “the right” died out before the 20th Century was even half over. The fascists labeled “left” won and survived. They are around today. True to the Stalinist tradition, they label their remaining competitors – conservatives - “the right.” After all, if you have a vacuous but useful epithet lying around, you may as well use it. Dimly, unaware of the linguistic subterfuge, conservatives accept the appellation. After all, why wouldn't a conservative want to be labeled as exactly opposite, by some measure or other, to fascism/leftism?

By the meaning of the English word, “right” is off to the side of something. It is not on center: at the prudentially rational sweet spot where the many moral values we hold are all countenanced and given place in deliberation. Old conservative values are in the middle (and I don't mean "moderate,” a term that means "only slightly smitten by fascism/leftism.") They are in the middle of all the good values which, by debate (which we do not ever want to stop) and tragically prudent reasoning, we can fulfill only partially, and never all of the values completely. By saying that conservatism is to the "right," we lead the mind to assume that it's off on some vector away from this middle, with the left at the opposite end. But this is a perfectly incorrect model of the philosophical terrain. Stalin hoodwinked us. He made us unable to think about what we really believe.

Replace the left-vs-right model with a web of values, like a spider's web, with a center, a sweet spot where those decisions lie that best fulfill as many of the values as possible (a sort of satisficing or net satisfaction optimum, where there is the best resonance with as many of the valuable strands of the web as possible.) Fascism and leftism are represented by the space outside of the web and on the same plane as the web, where one has traveled along any of the radial strands away from the center and left the web. The various trajectories by which one can leave the web are the flavors of fascism. Hitler is at, say, 3:00 far outside the web, having traveled along the strand that represents the value of lifting the German people out of their misery. Lenin is at 10:00, having traveled along the strand of regard for the welfare of the lower and working classes. It's all statism and general-will-oriented anti-individualism, in which one no longer makes any effort to hit the sweet spot of values. It's all fascism. And it's all leftism. In no sense is the center of the web - conservatism - to the right of anything.

Some upshots and asides:

• The libertarian has seized upon liberty and tried to pull it above the plane of the web, wrongly thinking that holding it above all other values is the right political philosophy.
  
• Various "moderate" positions, all incorrect, lie on the web. However, they do not lie at its center, but rather at varying distances from it, and, to various slight degrees, suffering from the hypnosis that is fascism. The fact that they are labeled "moderate" is yet another semantic hoodwinking perpetrated by fascism. There is nothing moderate about being only slightly smitten by fascism.
• Conservatism is by nature a big tent, with various bickering amongst conservatives about where exactly the center lies.
• By labeling conservatism off to "the right" and opposite to fascism, the fascist can bring his audience to believe that conservatism opposes the only strand of value remaining in the fascist's tenuous grasp (the relief of the plight of the poor, say, or the amelioration of the suffering of the German people.) It's a brilliant semantic hoodwinking. Because in no way is conservatism opposed to relieving the plight of the poor or ameliorating the suffering of the German people. Those are precisely strands in the conservative's own web.
  

In sum, I'd say that, just by the looks of Chapter One, Liberal Fascism is a momentous book that will prove to have lasting value. By demonstrating contemporary liberalism's fascist commitments, Goldberg has revealed it's location at the very edge of the web of value - with some liberals in the group still just inside the web, some of them well beyond it. The book repairs a fundamental semantic blind spot in our political cognition. But Goldberg still frequently refers to conservatism as “the right.” He has another term to recover. I recommend a second edition of the book to this end.

UPDATE: Title of post changed from "...Chapter One" to "...the Introduction"

Nagel’s False Dichotomy between Absolutism and Utilitarianism

I suppose this is the last of my posts on “War and Massacre.” Afterwards, Walzer and Brandt. Down the road, Machiavelli and Melville’s Billy Budd will come into this little series on war. If you haven’t read Billy Budd, give it a whirl, and afterwards see Terence Stamp portray the title role in the 1962 movie rendition.

The last point about Nagel is typical of a problem to be found in many ethics articles. Nagel offers a false dilemma between absolutism and utilitarianism. How many undergraduates are asked to take either of these two sides in term papers, by the way? A lot. If they are less unlucky, they will have a virtue ethics alternative, as if it were a competing alternative, and as if it were the only one. W. D. Ross is forgotten. Alan Goldman’s books fall stillborn from the presses.

In any event, Nagel says that either we accept the utilitarian view of moral deliberation over war or we accept that morality requires a less “administrative” and more personal mode of justification. The latter course requires that we be prepared to justify our decision to each affected party, rather than to justify them by some higher level calculus, as utilitarians try to do. It therefore entails that absolute constraints on utility maximization be maintained. As a result, weapons of mass destruction, the strategic bombing of innocents, and other modes of massacre are to be considered absolutely wrong (i.e., wrong in any case.)

I’ve argued in the previous post that this is a non sequitur. We can justify to each individual the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This points to a defect in Nagel’s dilemma, wherein he implies that either one is with the absolutists or with the utilitarians. The third alternative, unchecked by Nagel, is that there are no absolute constraints upon the use of weapons of mass destruction or the strategic bombing of innocents, even though utilitarianism is not the correct view to take of the matter.

Instead, one might opt for a common-sense approach to war and massacre. Common sense bids us to weigh individual rights to go unmolested along with the reasons to promote utility of one’s own society under undeserved attack. Neither has an absolute trump value over the other. Other common-sense factors enter into the matter, such as the membership of the victims of the bombing in the society that has launched the undeserved attacks. (Bad luck, to be an innocent member of a bellicose society and as a result to be a victim of its victims’ retaliation.)

Of course, when some one mentions “common-sense” as a reason for his position, you should reach for your wallet, as it were; expect an unsatisfying argument. But in this case, I am not arguing for an alternative to absolutism or utilitarianism. I’m merely showing that there is a common-sense alternative to them. However, I would be prepared to argue for the common-sense view. But enough has been said on this blog over the last few weeks, let alone five years, to obviate that necessity now. The point is that much common moral argumentation is neither absolutist nor utilitarian. To overlook it is fatal to any formal treatments of morality, such as Nagel's.

Walzer next. And we will return to our series on Kekes's The Art of Life

Strategic Bombing of Innocents
Obviously, we countenance the killing of innocents as a last resort in fending off a bellicose aggressor. So, we are considering the case of bombing a city as a last resort, in order to weaken the will of the aggressor to fight on. Is it justified? Leave aside the question of the degree of efficacy of the strategic bombing of innocents. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. It has been known to steel the will of a beleaguered country, and it has been known to crush its will. Suppose that in the case at hand we may be justified in believing that the enemy will fold or will fold with probability 50% or more.

I imagine that I am entering waters already plumbed deeply by others, but the following consideration seems an important obstacle to the view that it is always wrong to conduct strategic bombing of innocents.

We assume that it is permissible to bomb enemy military targets with collateral deaths of innocents. In such cases the diminution of the enemy military and the innocent deaths have a common cause: the bombing. But the innocent deaths are not the cause of the diminution of the enemy military. In the case of strategic bombing of innocents, the bombing is also the common cause of the same two effects. The difference is that the innocent deaths cause the diminution of the enemy military. (In this case it is a psychological diminution, whereas in the latter case it is a physical one, but that is not relevant.) So, the only difference is in the organization of the causal chain of events. In the one case, the innocent deaths are a means. In the other, they are not.

Therefore, there can be no other plausible argument in favor of the position that the strategic bombing of innocents is wrong besides the following: It is wrong to treat people merely as a means and not as ends in themselves. This is the Kantian view of the matter.

It's a plausible enough case. Note, however, that it seems that we sometimes permissibly use people who serve us as means alone. Take luggage handlers at an airport for example. In my experience, Kantians rule the use of service personnel permissible by explicating “treating as a means alone” as "treating in a way that one would not accept as a universal principle." No one could accept that strategic bombing of innocents be universal law, but we can all accept that there be a service industry such as baggage handling. You're not really treating service personnel as means alone if you wouldn't object to ending up as service personnel yourself. This is supposed to show the crucial moral distinction between using baggage handlers as means and bombing enemy cities as a strategy in war.

In fact, it does no such thing. As I suggested in the last post, consider your country attacking an innocent and peace-loving neighbor for no reason other than desire for power and wealth. Suppose your country kills some of the neighboring country’s citizens and oppresses the others. Suppose the other country cannot stop your country’s military without unacceptable losses to itself except by a strategy of bombing your city, the place where you and your family live.

I would have no objection to being bombed. I accept that as a universal principle, one may conduct strategic bombing of innocents in such cases. I don’t see how I could reasonably object to my family’s being wiped out. Moreover, it seems arbitrary to object to being bombed as a means while nevertheless allowing that one would have no objection to ending up as a collateral casualty when one's country's military is bombed. In short, there is no morally relevant difference.

The case for a moral distinction between collateral innocent deaths and strategic bombing of innocents is therefore unsound.

Flaws in Nagel’s “War and Massacre”

Nagel offers little in the way of argument for absolutist constraints upon violence in war. But, there is a criticism of absolutist condemnations of certain kinds of violence which says that the absolutist is simply reluctant to get his hands dirty (in other words to sacrifice his integrity.) The criticism is an attempt to psychologize and therefore explain absolutism as based upon non-rational desires rather than sound reasons.

Nagel, however, says that this criticism from dirty hands is confused.

First, it is a confusion to suggest that the need to preserve one’s moral purity might be the source of an obligation. [SNIP] Secondly, the notion that one might sacrifice one’s moral integrity justifiably…is an incoherent notion.

In fact, the criticism from dirty hands rests on no such confusions. It contends that the absolutist is afraid of taking a moral stand that requires boldly indecent acts, preferring to hope that meekness and pusillanimity will pass as morally sufficient stances in situations in which a compelling argument for violence is obvious. It is an insufficiency of spleen to the extent that one is unable to grow morally into the person who recognizes when sacrificing one’s decency is morally justifiable. It is a hope that in the final reckoning, as it were, the judge of us all will not have the heart to give the performance of the meek and earnest amongst us a lower score lower than the brazen and brutal, even when the latter got things right. There is sufficient hope to allow the absolutist to forego mustering the spleen necessary to pull the trigger or drop the bomb or to appear immoral to his friends.

In sum, the criticism from dirty hands does not suggest that the need to preserve one’s moral purity is the source of an obligation; it suggests that absolutists believe that clean hands are a sufficient stand-in for righteousness. And the criticism from dirty hands does not assume that one might sacrifice one’s moral integrity justifiably. It assumes that one might engage in indecent acts justifiably. Nagel fails even to begin to turn the criticism away.

The point is that it there is no sound argument for absolutist constraints upon violence in war. Absolutism remains just a theory with no sufficient basis. Therefore, we may turn to psychologism, in order to explain the fact that people hold to this theory. Otherwise, with no psychological explanation handy, one might suspect that the cause is indeed a sufficiently rational basis in the many thousands of pages of absolutist writings since Kant. But psychologism is not philosophy. The philosophical point is that the absolutist intuition that it is absolutely (i.e., indefeasibly) wrong to conduct strategic bombing of innocents or use weapons of mass destruction has no basis.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at what little argument Nagel offers for his absolutism: that one should do something to another only with the intention of treating him as a subject who will receive it. Meanwhile, consider this:

Your country is a totalitarian regime which seeks to extend brutal totalitarian hegemony across its hemisphere. It unprovokedly attacks another country and massacres its people, with no moral justification at all. The other country correctly determines that there is little hope of rescuing itself from your government’s brutal oppression unless it bombs your city, in effort to weaken the resolve of your country to continue its aggression. Do you object?

An Absolutist Argument against Strategic Bombing of Non-Combatants

Thomas Nagel's 1971 article "War and Massacre" presents the absolutist view that there are certain acts in war which one must never do, no matter how bad the consequences of foregoing them may be. Take, for instance, refraining from bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as an example, if the consequence of this would have been an American land invasion of Japan resulting in hundreds of thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths.

Here is how Nagel argues for the position (in my paraphrase):

1. Hostility should be directed at its true object: the people who provoke it.
   
2. This is because of Nagel's principle that one should give others the respect they deserve by doing to them only those things that they can understand to be addressed to them as people.

Strategic bombing of non-combatants would therefore be always wrong because it misdirects one's hostility.

I don't think that this argument has much evidential force. Here are two problems with Nagel's view.

1. It doesn't in fact rule out the strategic bombing of non-combatants. We can indeed address the bombing to them as members of the society that attacks us, a society that can be brought to its knees by loss of non-combatant life. We needn't address our hostility to enemy non-combatants in order to bomb them. We need only address our bombing to them, and in doing so, assume that they can understand it as addressed to them.

Even if this is not so, and we cannot divorce bombing people from directing our hostility at them, then Nagel's principle can easily be used to prohibit the bombing of enemy military forces, as well as non-combatants. In any war one will that the find rank-and-file enemy soldiers include men who have little idea of the facts relevant to the moral standing of the war, men who do as they are told without the wherewithal to understand what the war is all about. Surely these men are not appropriate targets of our hostility, even as they raise their guns at us, if Nagel is to be interpreted in a strict sense.

If Nagel wants us to follow his principle, then very well. In bombing we say, "You do understand, don't you, that we drop bombs on you because you are a member of a society that is attacking ours and because bombing you will stop these attacks." This holds just as well for the enemy non-combatant as for the enemy soldier with whom we do not have a beef.

In short, Nagel's principle is too ambiguous to have much force. In fact, it smuggles in its own conclusion because it has force only if by "doing things they can understand to be addressed to them" we mean "...rightly addressed to them...." So, the principle is question-begging and the position is vacuous. As with any derivative of Kantianism, one can easily derive any morals one likes from it.

2. Suppose Nagel's argument doesn't suffer from those difficulties. Still, even if the non-combatants are not the appropriate object of hostility, it may be permissible to kill them. For the fact that stopping their country's military from pursuing its unprovoked attacks on other societies may suffice to override this consideration. Nagel never gives any argument to the contrary, other than to say that something is "wrong with the frame of mind" that disagrees with him on this point. He never gives any argument for his principle that one ought to do only those things to people that they can understand as directed at them. It could just as breezily be replied that something is wrong with the mind of the person that says that a million Japanese and Americans should be killed rather than bombs be dropped on, but that wouldn't make for a worthwhile philosophical argument, either.

On the other hand, the diagnosis of fear of dirty hands in the absolutist is worth looking at. Nagel raises and dismisses it without seeming to understand its force. We'll take a look at it soon.

Lt. Michael Murphy

It's not easy to enter enemy fire intentionally. Lt. Murphy received the Medal of Honor posthumously for heroic acts that included performing this daunting feat.

I could accept the loss of both of my sons in circumstances relevantly similar those of Lt. Murphy's death, if I knew that this would be the unlucky result their growing up to be men of Lt. Murphy's caliber. So, I can accept that what happened to Lt. Murphy would apply universally. Therefore, I don't take it to be an injustice that my country sent Lt. Murphy on his final errand. I hope many American boys grow up to be like Lt. Murphy, my sons included, and I understand that, by random selection, some of those boys will die young as a result of their courage. I don't rail against any of this.

It strikes me that anyone who agrees with this line of reasoning would think that it goes without saying. On the other hand, there are plenty of Americans, some who are relatives of my sons, who would find this line of reasoning very difficult to accept. So, it doesn't go without saying, even if it should.

Some Terrain to Cover

We'll be investigating some more of the issues of morals in war. For now a bird's eye view of some of the terrain:

• The definition of "terrorism." If the bombing of Hiroshima wasn't terrorism, then nothing is.
• Nagel's article "War and Massacre." It draws a false dichotomy between utilitarianism and absolutism (Kantianism.) I wouldn't accept either. It also doesn't quite get the difficulty that the "dirty hands" argument poses for Nagel's absolutism.
• You can filter out impermissible acts of war using Kant's test of universalizability: could you accept that everyone do X in circumstances like this? If so, X is permissible in your view. Nagel covers some of this ground, though too quickly.

In any case, next we'll pick up the thread left by the previous post.

The Indecency of War

Let's take another look at the position that principle developed in the previous post is true: principle W for "war" because it is the essence of war from which this principle is derived.

There is in war a requirement to do what is indecent. The side that is justified in waging war is not only sometimes justified in but sometimes justified only in doing indecent acts of violence. This is what magnifies the horrors of war into something grotesque. Where morality requires acts of indecent violence it is grotesque.

Since a society has a right to repel the unjust attacks it receives from another, it has a right to do violence which causes casualties amongst enemy innocents whenever this violence is necessary to its defense. The horror of war is that this principle is too obvious to require argument. The morals of war sanction indecency, for it is indecent to incinerate enemy children, yet morality allows it.

But the matter is even worse. There is no morally relevant difference between the strategic killing of enemy innocents and the death of enemy innocents via collateral damage, as in the case of the bombing of a military base unavoidably killing nearby enemy civilians. The justification for the latter - call it collateral killing of innocents - is that it is necessary to defending oneself against the enemy's military. But sometimes this justification subsists remains in the case of the former (the strategic killing of innocents.) And if it be replied that the strategic killing is indecent, it may be pointed out that collateral killing is no less indecent, as the intentional incineration of thousands of innocent non-combatants is indecent in any case.

While the principle that a society sometimes has a right to do acts of violence to enemy innocents doesn't require argument, arguments may be found. I mentioned one in the previous post: the argument from the falsity of pacifism, as it were. The idea is that any war will be such that the deaths of enemy innocents will be inextricably woven into the chain of events known as "defending oneself against that enemy." Therefore, if self-defense is permissible and this is not empty talk, inflicting death upon enemy innocents is permissible. There is another argument, but let's leave that for another post.

War Justifies its Own Horrors

War is a matter of “it’s us or them.” Leaving the option of surrender to conquest out of consideration, each side must decide whether it is to be the one to perish. The horror of war is what flows from each side’s taking the obvious decision to fight: vast numbers of killings, maiming, starvation, and other attendant miseries. Borrowing from Hobbes’s description, we can say that war is “nasty” because it relentlessly poses the question of whether one will choose to perish or choose to fight dirty. By “dirty,” I do not mean inflicting more than the amount of harm necessary to repel the enemy. Rather, I mean doing what is ordinarily done in war: horrific quantities of slaughter of innocents as a necessary means of repelling the opponent.

So, war being dirty and horrible, a brutal principle W makes itself distastefully evident whenever the justice of this horror is contemplated:

W: If side A is justified in waging war against side B, then A is justified in slaughtering vast numbers of B combatants and non-combatants, to the extent that A reasonably considers this to be necessary to conquer B without incurring vastly many more casualties than A will by committing the slaughter.

In other words, if A is justified in waging war against B, then A is also justified in killing many enemy innocents, as long as this is necessary to winning the war. This is why the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were justified horrors. W goes to the essence of war’s horror. War is peculiarly horrible precisely because there is no way of avoiding the perpetration of its horrors via moral reasoning. Moral reasoning bids one commit them. Unlike the Portuguese earthquake of 1755, for instance, war is a horror which morality requires that one intentionally bring about. The horror is not just in the death and suffering. It is also in the fact that morality is this way.

The justification for W is Hobbesian. A nation is not morally obligated to let itself be slaughtered by an enemy just because repelling the enemy’s attacks will cause the deaths of enemy innocents. If one has a right to defend oneself against an enemy during war, the prospect of enemy innocents doesn’t override that right. W follows from this premise. As for the premise, I take it to be non-controversial. There are pacifists who might reject it, but pacifism isn’t plausible enough to be worth arguing over. The premise follows from the fact that pacifism is false.

There are more topics here. Who is responsible for the slaughter of innocents in war according to principle W? Does principle W make any distinction between collateral damage and intentional, strategic slaughter of innocents? Let’s address those next.

Posts Coming

A bit busy at the moment. Posts continuing our Kekes series (Art of Life II) and our series on verificationism coming soon. A foreshadowing:

What would count as evidence that inductive reasoning does not provide justification for belief? What sort of evidence would that be? I mean, Hume's my favorite philosopher, but something is amiss in the problem of induction.

Imagine having to sacrifice something of enormous, but not the highest value to you for something of highest value to you. This would involve first having the wherewithal to make the evaluations of degree and the character to act in accordance with them. It is a test that shows whether you have good character. Without the test, and few of us are ever confronted with it, one never knows one's character. This is why passing such an abhorrent test can be immensely satisfying.

Illegal Immigration and Culture

Yesterday the federal government here in the U.S. began to take steps to let the 15 million illegal aliens living here stay. They way the government intends to accomplish this is by passing more laws on how the illegal aliens are supposed to go about immigrating. The new laws are more easygoing on the illegal aliens than existing laws.

The existing laws are hardly enforced at all. They already govern the way in which non-Americans are to go about immigrating. Millions ignore them with impunity and simply come right over from Mexico and elsewhere. Therefore, passing new laws with no sign of enhancing law enforcement does nothing to address the problem except make the government appear inept. That the new laws are more easygoing on the illegal aliens than the old shows that the government is caving in to illegal immigration by officially announcing that it has no intention of enforcing the existing, tougher laws.

Culture is exceedingly important. America has had a culture until now that has served it very well. Now we are going about changing our culture to make it more like Mexican culture, as we allow immigration rates to stay at a culturally indigestible level. We are also deciding that our culture does not need to have a rule of law to protect it.

All this is as it should be. It is time for American culture to perish. It is fat and sick. When a culture grows fat, wealthy, and slovenly, it is meet that it commit suicide. It's too bad, I suppose, but it is unavoidable and natural. When you have a good culture and life is difficult, you cherish and protect that culture. When you are fat and wealthy, you grow lazy and non-chalant. There is no use raging against this natural way of things. It is time for us to go.

Besides, there will be another great culture sometime in the future, now that Western culture is fading. It hasn't appeared yet, but it will. It will use Western culture (500 bc - 2000 ad) as its classical forerunner. And it will invent anew.

UPDATE: It's a fallacy to complain about a solution to a practical problem without proposing an alternative solution. Here's an alternative: a bill allocating an additional $1 billion each year to the enforcement employment laws prohibiting the employment of illegal aliens.

Richard Replies Readily

He has an interesting post here.

Richard on my Verificationism

Richard takes up my verificationism here. He proposes that it's principle V (scroll down a bit below here) is wrong because it's too strong. He says I require

he requires that the base facts themselves be epistemically accessible, at least in the limited sense that we can envisage possible evidence for and against them. But while this starts in the right place, I think the added restriction goes too far. We should merely require that the base facts be comprehensible, in the sense that someone could understand the difference between scenarios where they do or do not obtain.

However, it seems to me that "understanding" requires epistemic content. If you understand what a z is, then you are able to explain to someone who doesn't understand, and that explanation entails saying how to recognize when there is a z. "I understand what a z is, but I just can't tell when I've got one, that's all." That sentence is suspect, in my view. Consider:

A: "A square without corners or sides? I don't get it. How do you tell when you've got one?"
B: "Well, it can fit into a square hole, but not into a round hole of its size."
A: "But how can you tell that it can or can't fit?"
B: "Dunno. But you do understand me, right?"

Similarly:

C: "A zombie? I don't get it. How do you tell when you've got one?"
D: "Well, he acts like a conscious person, and with all the brain states, only he has no consciousness."
C: "Eh? How would you know that he isn't conscious? Even he can't tell."

I'm still suspicious of things masquerading as "understanding" that are nothing of the kind. I think the mind is very big and complicated and that in its spaces it can play tricks on itself that it itself cannot very well detect. It can seem to itself to understand undetectable ethers, undetectable separate universes, undetectable lacks of consciousness, etc., all the while understanding none of these things.

Richard needs to say what is the difference between "comprehensible" and "suspiciously incomprehensible" other than a feeling of "I've got it!" I don't trust that feeling. I need epistemic, evidential terms.

Two side points:

1. As for Richard's worry that his view of moral facts supervening on base facts is "slippery", I say don't worry, Richard. What needs to be added to actions (say, of your Hitler) is that they are performed in a society of people with dispositions to disapprove of those actions (sentiments of a certain kind). You have to include the subjective base facts about sentiment, as Hume suggested. On a planet of cruel nasties who kill for fun, but where no one has a nature such that he is ever even slightly disposed to have concern for others' welfare, none of the nasty things done is wrong. I'll pursue it this week on Philosoblog.

2. Please keep in mind that in order for a term to be meaningful on V, it only need be the case that one can say what the evidence for the term's correct application would be. One needn't actually be in possession of that evidence. You don't have to have evidence that there is a presently-causally-isolated universe for that term to be meaningful. You only need to have the physics (or whatever) that would at least roughly give an idea of what such evidence would be. Similarly for brains-in-vats (in a comment thread a few posts below.)

UPDATE: I wonder whether Richard's view entails that one can understand an incoherent term (such as "square with only three sides"). After all, "I know what it means, I understand it, but I just don't see how it could be rendered coherent" sounds Richardesque. I suppose he might say that the incoherence precludes comprehension. But that seems arbitrary. Why won't he also allow that evidential vacuity precludes comprehension, as well? Again I say that the mind is large and its imagination powerful. It can imagine a logically impossible thing (especially if it's in a sort of dreamy state: try it, you can do it. Or if the contradiction is buried deep enough, you can accomplish the task in a clear-headed state.) It can mistake this for comprehension. It can imagine the correct application of an evidentiallly vacuous term (e.g., "zombie") and mistake this for comprehension, too. How can Richard distinguish these two, such that in the latter case there is in fact no mistake?

Richard Requests Reasons

Richard requests (in a comment thread below) reasons for my acceptance of verificationism. The audacity! Well, I made a half-hearted gesture in their general direction in a previous post, but let's begin to lay them out a bit more carefully.

By "verificationism," I don't mean the old-fashioned philosophy of the early 20th Century. I only mean V:

V: If S knows what S means by an X, then S has an idea of what S would take as evidence that the X correctly described a given object and what S would take as evidence that the X incorrectly described another given object.

I don't have an elaborate theory of meaning as the old positivists did. I don't reduce evidence to phenomenal states as they did. I simply offer necessary conditions of meaning in V.

Reasons for V:

1. Imagine that someone uses a word (a noun, verb or adjective) and you inquire as to its meaning. Upon being told, you nod and inquire as to how to recognize when the word was correctly applied to an object - you request circumstances of warranted assertability. Your interlocutor then shrugs and admits that there isn't any such way, that there aren't any such circumstances. Do you not become the least bit suspicious? Do you smell a rat, a poseur, or at best a deluded person who doesn't realize that he isn't saying anything? If you answered yes, then you have at least a toe in my camp.
So, reason 1 says that if a person has no idea how to tell whether what he's saying is true, then he doesn't know what he's saying and doesn't mean anything by it. He thinks he does, but then the mind is a subtle and devious thing, isn't it.

2. Knowing the meaning of a word typically enables one to use it warrantedly. Circumstances in which this is not so are unusual and usually correctable by consultation and rehearsal with people who do know how to use it warrantedly. When we find a word that everyone concerned admits cannot be used warrantedly, we have an anomaly. Here we have a choice: expand our conception of meaning to include the slovenly item, or move it into the category of potentially meaningless terms. As an analytical philosopher, I need a reason to wax vague about meaning. There being no reason here other than people's feeling that the term has meaning, I opt for the debunking.

3. When in particular cases, such as "zombie," we have components of a definition that militate epistemically against each other, I cry foul. Consciousness being private, and its evidence being behavioral, zombies are things that one is by definition not entitled to have even the slightest bit of evidence for. (This reminds me of the guy selling a snake oil remedy. When I asked how I would know it worked, he said that it was only a "subtle" cure, meaning one that I couldn't know of. For such a cure I will pay very, very little indeed.)

By the way, Richard's is a philosophy blog with archives from which the philosophy enthusiast can profit.

Kekes's Art of Life I

The Art of Life is about the meaning of life. Kekes even leaves nihilistic suicide on the table as an option for a short passage in the preface. But the thesis he explains is that there is an art to upholding the two components of a good life: satisfaction and moral acceptability. Satisfaction is the having of both the right ideals and the habitual dispositions to achieve them, as well as particular projects to which one is well suited (careers, in the broad sense of that term.) The art lies in selecting a good way amongst reasonable alternative ways of life, and that depends upon one's particular character and situation, creativity and imagination. There are only a few rules and not complete guidance from them. Yet, the art isn't the same as randomness or arbitrariness. There are bad reasons for selecting a way of life, as well as good reasons, and the latter evaluate well the promptings of creativity and imagination, whereas the former do not.

Thus does the book begin well: with what is only slightly controversial at most, and rather seemingly on target, as well as interesting. Good philosophy begins with the trivial and moves toward the interestingly true. Also, good lives are supposed to be morally acceptable. As a younger man I might have questioned that; why couldn't Stalin's life count as good? The answer is that it is possible in theory, though whether an evil sociopath has ever had a good life in fact, I doubt. But it is the exception that proves the rule: you have to be an odd specimen of human nature to achieve such a thing. Moreover, even thought it is possible for a man's psychology to be devoid of moral components, it is unlikely that what remains will function well enough because what remains is of such a nature that it functions well only with the moral component on board. Could there be a monster so malformed that by chance his amoral nature can function and thrive in a sort of happiness? Perhaps, but it is nothing for the rest of us to contemplate, for whom happiness is not a separate endeavor from morality.

We'll see what role morality plays in the good life for Kekes as we move through the book. For today, let's finish with a look at the first chapter. It treats of unconditional commitments. The good life requires these. They include career, family, religion, etc. and may in principle be whatever is appropriate for you, but you must have them. I suppose morality is the one that trumps the others, as if morality requires that you sacrifice all of your other commitments, I suppose that you are obliged to do so. But, that trump aside, Kekes speaks of the others as "unconditional." Putatively unconditional commitments may conflict, at which time one determines which is the actually unconditional one. Here Kekes gives the examples of Montaigne and Thomas More. Montaigne sacrificed clean hands to do what he could for his community as an eminent lawyer. More sacrificed his life (and by that the father of his young child, as well) rather than break his commitment to moral and religious sanctions against divorce. These men exemplify self-direction, a self-control one needs if one is to recognize and adhere to an array of values in their order of importance (a hierarchy the levels of which Kekes calls "unconditional," "defeasible" and, lastly, "loose" commitments.) One must know when to peel off and let go of the important in favor of the more important.

By the way, most of us never experience tests of such our self-direction as severe as those of Montaigne and More. But I will say that the test comes with a blessing: it lets you know that you are self-directed, a fact which may remain uncovered for most of us. Untested metal is lies shrouded in mystery. One doesn't know what one is made of. To discover it by trial results in a profoundly gratifying experience, which, as we have seen, and as Kekes quotes, Wharton's Countess Olenska describes in this way:

I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

This is where you can see that you are a person of moral depth. It is a relief. You could always have supposed as much, but never known it without the test.

Kekes also explains that tradition offers a selection of formats in which we may compose our lives. It is not that traditional lives are the opposite of self-directed ones. On the contrary, tradition is a body of discoveries of ways of life that are fulfilling to people of various sorts of character. The self-directed life uses this body and creates a life best suited to a particular person: the one who lives it. It enables one to find desirable unconditional, defeasible and loose commitments and array one's life suitably with them. As an achievement of a cultural heritage, self-direction is distinct from liberal autonomy, existentialist authenticity, or other new philosophies, all of which are either not achievements or not cultural.

Stand-Up? Sit-Down?

It's stand-up. You've heard of "fisking" and "round-ups." I'd call this stand-up. This was sit-down.

Analytical Philosophy and Analysis

My thesis is self-serving, as I find that the stances I take in philosophy are often analyses that other philosophers dismiss out of hand as incredible on their faces. (On the other hand, which philosopher doesn't face the same predicament? So perhaps I am serving all today!) My thesis is that all interesting results in analytical philosophy, in a strict sense of that term, will seem untrue to most philosophers.

I take it that analytical definitions are the goal of analytical philosophy in the strict sense (the loose sense being philosophy that aims at uncovering the truth of philosophical issues by rigor of argument and clarity of terms.) If interesting, any viable analytical definition is by bound to appear to be incorrect or uninteresting. It is the expansion on, the unpacking of the sense of a term in order to draw out implications for philosophical issues to which it is relevant. If the analysis seemed correct it wouldn't have been interesting. It would have been a common-sense or lexical definition of the term. It just so happens that many terms relevant to philosophy have a large semantic space that is not transparent even after several passes and examinations and that after further scrutiny is found to have multiple compartments, as well as quite a few nooks and crannies. An analytical definition comes up with a summary description of this space and an identity of it with its packaging term: of definiens with definiendum. Due to the volume of space and the distance covered by the identity, any true analysis will seem false to most philosophers. They'll need to follow the sound argument in order to convince themselves. Otherwise the analysis would not be interesting, as, ex hypothesi, it is.

In the little series on verification I will give you a definition of "right". In the twelve years of its existence, no one has ever told me he thought it seemed true to him. This is evidence that it is true. Just kidding! But you see my point. In fact, I hope someone will come up with a refutation of the definition. No one has yet.

Verification, Social Philosophy and Conservatism

The idea of the previous post is the following. Suppose your society has a set of values that are free of internal inconsistency (such as "All men have a right to liberty" and "blacks have no right to liberty") or error about the non-moral facts (such as, for example, "blacks are happier as slaves".) In other words, your society is committed to a set of values that are unassailable on grounds of coherence and fact. These are the values by which you and your compatriots prefer to live.

If the value set to which you are committed is wrong, then it will be appropriate for someone to require your society to change its values and adopt new ones, values which are not the ones by which its members prefer to live. In that case, the true values will have no appeal to members of your society, as the prospect of pursuing lives that violate one's preferred moral values is repugnant. In addition, no one has any idea what would count as evidence that they should nevertheless accept the new values. On the verificationist view of the matter, this is a notion of persuasion with no content. And the notion that a society should have to live by new values that it coherently and with full information finds repugnant is a notion that smells of tyranny and hasn't the slightest hint of moral enlightenment.

The verificationist result in social philosophy therefore is not only inherently interesting but also has interestingly conservative implications. It seems an important part of the core of conservatism that a society has a right to live as it prefers and can have no reason to pursue any so-called "progressive" paths that are not motivated by the values to which the society is already committed. As I said in the previous post, progressivism is a non-starter whenever it has no appeal to the premises already accepted by the society it criticizes. In other words, it is not worth debating progressives who do not have arguments couched in the antecedently-held values of the society under question. Their moral convictions have no content. More likely they are expressions of resentment or instruments for gaining power, as they have proven to be numerous times in the 20th Century.

Verificationism in Social Philosophy

This post continues our series in verificationism. If you're just jumping in and it's not clear to you, scroll down and start at the beginning.

Any society S has a set of values. Now consider whether S should reject that set and adopt a new set. Suppose that some members of S recommend a "progressive" attitude and the judgment that S should make progress to a new set. There is a way to fill in the details so that we can know without examining the progressives' arguments that they are unsound.

Suppose the following facts about S's values. First, they are a coherent set. This means that S's members can live lives and behave in ways that fulfill the values of the set without violating any. This assumes that where two values give contrary prescriptions in a specific case, there is an ordering of precedence that decides which of the two overrides. This is matter of common-sense practical rationality, in which one decides, for example, that the importance of avoiding nuisances is overridden by matters of life and death. By the same token, the values of liberty and security are coherent even though in certain cases they yield contrary prescriptions. And some values, such as liberty and security, are always more important than others, so the coherent set of values includes a hierarchy, as well as a pattern of decisions, like case law, that shows the ways in which values of comparable weight are applied in cases in which they diverge in prescription. In any event, we don't need a lecture about coherence in practical reasoning. Suppose S's value set can't be faulted for its degree of coherence.

Second, suppose that S's values are consistent with all non-moral facts. They don't place blame based upon errors about agency and responsibility for action. They don't assign statuses of S's members based upon false views about the differences in capacity to perform or to suffer amongst various kinds of members of S. They don't assign punishments for crimes based upon errors about whether punishment deters crime. They don't recommend ways of life based upon errors about which ways will make which people happy. Etc. S's values are free of error in their assumptions about the non-moral facts.

Therefore, S's set of values is the set that S prefers. By "prefers" I mean that S is devoted to its values and there is no inconsistency in them or non-moral fact that could be raised that would give S internal grounds to revise the set. By "internal grounds" I mean grounds to eject one value from the set on the basis of others more important or central to the structure of the set.

Given these two facts, S can have no reason to revise its values. This is the Humean view that there can be no external reason for S to revise the set. A corollary to this claim is that progressivism, if it is the claim that S should adopt a new set of values even though the old set is coherent and free of error about the non-moral facts, is always false.

The reason is verificationistic. There is nothing that would count as evidence that S's value set, as described above, was wrong (either immoral or otherwise practically irrational.) No one has any idea what would count as evidence that the progressivist's recommendation was the right one. "S prefers its values yet ought to reject them" is a claim for which no one has an idea what would count as evidence for it.

This counts not only for the progressivist but also for the theistic reactionary. The progressive usually recommends that the wealthy members of S give more goods than they already do to the poor members of S. Aside from attempts to demonstrate that this position rests upon a more coherent construal of S's own values than that embraced by S itself, there is never any evidence to be adduced for this progressive stance. Usually the progressive requires that members of S "just see" that their poor are treated unjustly or that they just understand that Kantian rationality or the Golden Rule requires this conclusion. The theistic reactionary claims that God requires the S change its values. There is never any evidence for this claim, and even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. "God prefers that S change its set of values" does not make it more likely that S should comply. We can usefully refer to God's recommendation when we think that He knows that our present values are in error about the non-moral facts of human nature or are incoherent. But if He wanted S to change its values even acknowledging that there were no such reason, then his preference would have no purchase. The theistic reactionary, after all, is the fellow who still subscribes to divine command theory, which was debunked long ago.

There is a lot more to say about this, such as that this view does not entail any vicious moral relativism. But the point here is that the verificationist approach to the matter gives this interesting result that progressivism and reactionary theism are non-starters.

Discernment, Resentment, and Anger

I have found the truth in a teaching that I once dismissed. This is the counsel that one should not despise people who would do wrong by you. I think it is unfortunately passed around as "Do not judge others," a formulation of it that on the face of it is obviously bad advice. There is an ambiguity at play. On one interpretation it is bad, even laughable advice, on another interpretation it is right.

It's worthless advice if it means that one should not distinguish between right and wrong, should not recognize evil and should not resist one's enemy's attacks. It is laughable if it means that one only "descends to his level" when one decides that an evildoer is evil and that one should resist, counter-attack, and punish them.

But it is good advice if it means that one should not harbor hatred, anger and resentment when discerning and opposing evil. On this interpretation, it means that one should maintain an equanimity - a steady, calm, cool, and self-directed spirit - when discriminating between right from wrong and acting according to this discrimination.

That this is good advice is not obvious. One might think that anger is appropriate when one confronts bad behavior and especially genuine evil. But anger and its kin, hatred and resentment, can disable the character. They are a wrench in the works when we harbor them. It may be appropriate for a bit of indignant anger to flare up in someone who confronts an evildoer; it may provide the adrenaline the warrior's muscles need in the moment. But if he is of the highest sort of character, the anger will pass as quickly as it came.

When you envision a person of the highest order of virtuous character, you can see that he is devoid of anger, hatred and resentment. Otherwise, he would not count as content with this world and his place in it; but he does. It's just a fact that a considerable disposition to these negative emotions is not mechanically compatible with a virtuous character. In abstract theory, yes, and that's why the advice seems wrong. But in fact, no, the two aren't compatible.

Nor does a man of virtue shrink from crushing an evildoer with decisive violence or from publicly exposing wrongdoers with clear and accurate declarations. The resentful man is more likely to be hamstrung by his hatred and unable to act as effectively. His character is crippled. The man of virtue enjoys a certain ease and flow of action. His resentful friend gnashes his teeth, nursing his rage instead of acting or speaking up. Or if he does speak up, he betrays a vicious resentment that puts his pronouncements, as correct as they may be, in a dubious light for his audience. Or he engages in an overkill of violence that betokens despair and not exemplary heroism.

So, if "judging" means condemning out of a deeply seated antipathy, then "Do not judge others."

A Note on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

The point of The Age of Innocence is that one can either find a sort of salvation in accepting fate and duty or succumb to despair and resentment. The House of Mirth speaks of a closely allied theme. It's theme is the goal of creating a "republic of the soul," the orchestration of one's dispositions such that one isn't swept hither and thither by them, driven to extremes by compulsion and for lack of a central control. Whereas the former book's Countess Olenska acheives this harmony and control and Newland Archer does not, in the latter book Lawrence Selden enjoys the repose and Lily Bart fails to acheive it. In the latter case, however, the failure is much more grim in ramification than in the former case. At least Archer escapes with his life.

Lily Bart sees Selden's republic of the soul. It is palpable for her. She begins to create it in herself whenever he is near enough to her for her to observe his manner. But contact with another isn't enough to develop one's own virtue. The point is not that Lily doesn't develop virtue; it is that she could have done so. As does Archer in The Age of Innocence, Lily fails because she sees herself as mastered by fate, rather than as fate's equal.

In both books, Wharton wants the reader to see that virtue is crucial and failure to acheive it is failure to acheive a sort of salvation. The House of Mirth paints this picture more starkly than Archer's "mere gray speck of a man." Lily Bart loses everything.

Selden, for his part, fails, as well. Sometimes virtue requires action that would in most circumstances seem somehow rash or wide of the mean. Selden mistook passivity for equanimity at crucial moments where more forthright action would have made all the difference, both to himself and to Lily.

Verificationism and the Zombie II

There are some points that need clarification, so let's review:

1. Evidence that there is a zombie cannot be found in any possible world. Therefore, such evidence is a logical impossibility. I suppose this is because there is a contradiction buried in the notion of "zombie for whose existence there is evidence." Perhaps it is that consciousness is by definition private (which would likely be because to have experience of a particular instance of consciousness is to be that instance.) "Evidencethat object o is not conscious other than o's physical and functional states" is incoherent.

[An aside: "evidence that there is a zombie" refers to first-order evidence. There is a possible world in which an honest and very intelligent person tells you that there is a zombie. But his testimony is second-order evidence. The point is that he can't have his opinion from bonafide first-order evidence; there is none of that in any possible world.]

Perhaps the fact that the concept of zombie is not incoherent (self-contradictory) misleads one into thinking that zombies are logically possible. There is more to logical impossibility of a thing than contradiction in its concept. A term X will fail to refer in any possible world if it is meaningless. And X can be meaningless because either (a.) X is self-contradictory in definition or (b.) X pretends to refer to something for which it is self-contradictory to claim that there is evidence that X correctly refers to it. When a person claims that there is an X and, upon our asking him to describe circumstances of warranted assertability of this claim, admits that there could never in any circumstances be evidence for his claim, we may conclude that X is a meaningless term.

2.Concepts can be large and diffuse clusters of various component concepts and experiences. So, one might be able to imagine things that are not logically possible. The imagination is powerful and can even sally forth without due regard to logical possibility. A zombie, who acts conscious but is non-conscious, may be fantasized about. He may therefore seem compellingly possible. But this is no argument against the verificationist dismissal of zombies that I've given here. It is merely the claim that my dismissal of them seems wrong.

3. Since evidential states that indicate a zombie existed are not possible and "zombie" is idle chatter like "round square" or "square with no corners," consciousness logically supervenes upon physical and functional states. "Zombie" is not a meaningful term because zombies are not logically possible. Since this is so, it is clear that consciousness is certain physical and funtional states.

Verificationism and the Zombie I

Now, back to our zombie. Poor bastard! He has no idea what chocolate really tastes like. He prefers Belgian and seems to savor it upon his palate, but he in fact has no consciousness of its wonderful flavor. As passionately as he behaves toward his wife, he loves her not. Writhing in pain from a wound, he is blessedly spared the agony you and I feel in such a case. You see, he has all the physical, behavioral and neural states we do, but none of the actual consciousness. He isn't biologically possible in our world, since the biology here requires that these states give rise to corresponding conscious states. But he is possible in a world that we may imagine. For there is no contradictions in the concept of "zombie," and therefore we can clearly and distinctly perceive the difference between consciousness, on the one hand, and physical and functional states, on the other.

Or so it is said. But there is nothing that would count as evidence that someone was a zombie. Suppose you parachute in to the possible world in which zombies are said to exist. Proceed then, in your imagination, to chat up the first cordial person you meet. Ask him a battery of questions and he opines on love, salvation, satire, overcoming depression. Prick him, and he cries out. He finds your chocolate delicious. And so forth. Meanwhile, have you any evidence that your spouse is not a zombie in counterexample to the biological laws I alluded to? None at all.

No, the concept of zombie has built into it the stipulation that zombies are undetectable: no physical or behavioral examination can discover them. Therefore, there is by definition nothing that would count as evidence that your specimen was a zombie.

If verificationism is correct, then "zombie" is not a meaningful term. And if "zombie" is not a meaningful term, then mind and the corresponding physical and functional states are not distinct.

Here you may tollens my ponens, as Aaron Haspel has when I broached this argument in the past. As I recall, he stated, "So much the worse for verificationism."

But you will have to bite the bullet here. If you don't accept principle V (stated in the two previous posts), then you countenance terms as meaningful which are devoid of evidentiary content and whose definitions may even stipulate that the terms can in principle never be any justification for applying them to any object. If you maintain that only an incoherent definition may be cause for dismissing a term as meaningless, you will have to explain why incoherence is a graver sin than the lack of evidentiary content. If a person proposes a noun or adjective X and we rifle through the infinity of possible evidentiary circumstances together with him, under each of which he declares that there is no evidence that X applies to any object, then we may consign his term X to the flames

Of course it is meaningless to speak of people who are not people. But it is equally meaningless to make reference to the distinctness of things for which there could never be evidence that they were separated from one another. To say that "consciousness and the physical and functional states that correspond to it are distinct even though nothing could ever count as evidence that the latter existed without the former" is meaningless talk.

The mental space that a meaning takes up may be quite large. Meanings of terms are sometimes large clusters of concepts. The corresponding evidential criteria for the application of a term may be an equally large cluster. The artificial substitution of one element of the cluster with a new component does not always make for an obvious contradiction. Sometimes the contradiction must be ferreted out. Also, the substitution can create vacuity of meaning in another way: by depriving the term of the possibility of justified application in any conceivable circumstance. And both contradictions and evidentiarily vacuous terms may be imagined to be applicable; such is the power of the imagination. When sleepy, I can imagine a world in which there is a round square or an absolutely undetectable gnome. So, the power of the mind to imagine the zombie is no evidence that mind is non-physical.

This is the first result of verificationism as I have proposed it. "Zombie" is a meaningless term. But if consciousness is distinct from the physical and functional states that correspond to it, then "zombie" is a meaningful term. So, consciousness is not distinct from the physical and functional states that correspond to it.