Willie Horton and Reverend Wright-Type Ads

These are ads that show despicable people who are black in an association, of one kind or another, with a candidate for office. The premise of the day is that these ads are racist. This premise rests upon the further premise that:

Showing such black people on TV, and linking them to a candidate, is racist.

But what is the basis for that premise? There are only two possibilities:

Either:

1. Blacks are a lowly race and linking them to the candidate wrongfully taints him by association to a lowly race.

Or:

2. The ad creator knows that many viewers of the ad incorrectly believe that blacks are a lowly race and will therefore decide not to vote for the candidate associated with blacks in the ad.

Now, #1 is a racist premise. So, anyone who objects to the Horton/Wright-type ads on its grounds is a racist. It shouldn't come as a surprise if many liberals fall under this category. So many of them practice the bigotry of low expectations (excusing Obama's attending a socially diseased church, for example, or refusing to accept that black people can make it on their own in this world, for another example.)

So, the non-racist alternative seems to be #2. But it rests upon a problematic premise. It assumes that it is the intent of the ad creator to influence racist viewers and not to influence viewers who prefer not to vote for candidates associated with despicable people. In fact, as the ads show despicable people linked to a candidate, it is simpler to assume that the ad creator wants to target viewers who don't want to vote for candidates who are linked to despicable people. To prove that the ad creator has the racist viewer in mind carries quite a burden when it's a matter of common sense that very many viewers will not like to vote for candidates who associate with despicable people. This is because not liking to vote for such candidates is itself a common-sense attitude. So, to assume that the target of Horton/Wright-type ads is people with common sense makes more sense than to assume that the target is racists.

In fact, it's a bit loopy to take #2 as the premise for viewing the Horton/Wright-type ads as racist. For this implies that if an ad creator is to escape the sin of racism, he may show only despicable white people, but no despicable black people, in any ad intended to denigrate a candidate by associating him with those people. This implies that any candidate who adores certain despicable people may not be criticized for it in any ad which shows the color of those people's skin if it is black skin. That's simply loopy. Think about it. Horton and Wright may not be shown. Because they're black. If they were white it would be okay. That's nutty.

So, if you think the Horton/Wright ads are racist, then either (#1) you are a racist or (#2) you are committed to a rather loopy premise.

UPDATE: A technical aside: #2 portrays the ad creator as a cynical race-baiter and therefore not a racist in the narrow sense of "racist"; #2 does not entail that the ad creator himself believes that blacks are a lowly race. However, there is an extended sense of the term in which the race-baiter is a racist. In that he is willing to stoke the fires of racism, he is a racist in this extended sense.

Billy Budd V: Susan Mendus's "Innocent Before God"

I take Vere's decision straightforwardly. Vere and his jury did the right thing. Billy committed a capital offense. Instead of sparing Billy's life, they protected the ship and England (from mutiny and the French Revolution, respectively.) Billy's sacrifice, like that of other decent young men sacrificed in war, is just. The book is a microcosmic allegory of the great disaster of war.

Still, there is something to be said for Susan Mendus's idea that the captain's particular personal characteristics made a difference. For Mendus, Vere's choice was right because it fit his character and the agreement he had with his employer to act as captain with such a character. I can imagine a captain of great charisma and persuasive power, able to spare Billy's life while dousing the flames of mutiny. This would be the right path for him to take, while Vere's was right for him. Here the relativistic "right for" locution which Mendus uses makes sense. Right depends, in some sense, on the particular characteristics of the agent and his situation. (A further illustration: what it is right for a person who happens upon a car crash with a badly injured victim to do may depend upon the person's characteristics: Is he a doctor? Is he strong enough to carry the victim? Or better able to flag down a passing motorist? Etc.)

Nevertheless, Mendus's analysis of this particularism about Vere ambiguates over theses that are either trivial or false. No non-trivially true thesis is evident in her article. Even the interesting point about a more charismatic captain than Vere was left unmade by Mendus.

The trivial sense of her thesis is that what is right for the captain of the ship to do depends upon the understanding he has with his employers about what he is to do as captain, given his particular, personal characteristics. Of course, contracts matter, even tacit ones. Whether the captain has promised to use his ingenuity to solve problems or to follow the letter of the law, the promise matters and we all knew that. So, this is trivial. Only if you make the point about a charismatic captain does it become a little more interesting.

The false sense of Mendus's thesis is that the right depends entirely on the agent's desires, talents, and contracts. It does not. This is where the "right for" locution leads one into trouble. There are heavy constraints on right action which are not usually defeasible by the agent's particulars. The situation Vere faces is heavily constrained by the duty not to kill an innocent man, the duty not to allow mutiny, and the duty not to allow the French Revolution to spread to England. Without recognizing this Mendus dwells upon a fanciful melding of the right with the good, under the supposedly liberal flag of value pluralism. She thinks it appropriately liberal and soundly in the tradition of Mill and Rawls to allow that the particular values of the agent determine what it is right for him to do. In fact, Mendus's account suffers from a deficit of value pluralism. John Kekes, the best conservative philosopher we have now, is a value pluralist; his is a model which takes heavy constraints on right seriously. Mendus, on the other hand, dwells on personal preference (good), confusing it with right and not taking seriously the variety of heavy constraints on right. Her account founders on a misconstrual of which values to be pluralistic about and on a confusion of good with right. The failure to be serious about embracing a wide variety of values seems to me an essential defect of liberalism. Duties that don't involve transferring power or wealth to the poor or require that we respect as good and right each person's particular inclinations do not play a significant role in liberal moral and political deliberations. Mendus's article is no exception.

In short, the false sense of Mendus's thesis is that it reduces right to an individualistic good. If Vere were a sadist, then on Mendus's view torturing Billy before executing him might be right; her analysis has no means by which to avoid this conclusion. Alternatively, the trivial sense of the thesis is that the agent's characteristics and contracts matter in moral deliberation. There is no non-trivial true alternative sense of Mendus's thesis.

So, Mendus's thesis has only a little to be said in its favor. It stumbles unknowingly over something interesting and true (the case of the charismatic captain.) But it fails in its derivation of right from a liberal conception of good and it ignores important constraints on the right.

Billy Budd IV: The Bully as Hypnotist

The innocent and good are not always prepared for the psychological subterfuge of the bully or psychopath. The proper preparation is an immobility of the emotions, a kind of stillness at a resting point or sweet spot of sorts, from which it is impossible to be driven to rage or inappropriate guilt. Billy Budd is not so prepared. He is stricken by John Claggart's attempt to frame him as a mutineer. Meeting his accuser face-to-face, he is unable to respond appropriately. A typical psychopath or bully, Claggart depends upon his hypnotic powers to subdue his prey.

[Billy] stood like one impaled and gagged.... [Claggart's] first mesmeric glance was one of serpent fascination; the last was as the hungry lurch of the torpedo-fish.

"Speak, man!" said Captain Vere to the transfixed one, struck by his aspect even more than by Claggart's, "Speak! defend yourself." Which appeal caused but a strange dumb gesturing and gurgling in Billy; amazement at such an accusation so suddenly sprung on inexperienced nonage; this, and, it may be, horror of the accuser, serving to bring out his lurking defect and in this instance for the time intensifying it into a convulsed tongue-tie; while the intent head and entire form straining forward in an agony of ineffectual eagerness to obey the injunction to speak and defend himself, gave an expression to the face like that of a condemned Vestal priestess in the moment of being buried alive, and in the first struggle against suffocation.

...Billy's aspect recalled to [Vere] that of a bright young schoolmate of his whom he had once seen struck by much the same startling impotence in the act of eagerly rising in the class to be foremost in response to a testing question put to it by the master. Going close up to the young sailor, and laying a soothing hand on his shoulder, he said, "There is no hurry, my boy. Take your time, take your time." Contrary to the effect intended, these words so fatherly in tone, doubtless touching Billy's heart to the quick, prompted yet more violent efforts at utterance--efforts soon ending for the time in confirming the paralysis, and bringing to his face an expression which was as a crucifixion to behold. The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck.

The blow brings about exactly what Claggart desired: Billy's complete undoing.

The good and innocent need to be prepared to respond to bullies with calmness and decisiveness. The bully depends upon the crippling effect of rage, the shame associated with that effect, and the guilt one feels for feeling rage. No attempt to resist these emotions will work because they are eliminated only through a certain calm strength that cannot be created when attempts to resist them are underway. A better tactic is simply to observe these emotions detachedly and without antipathy to them. They pass and one discovers reserves of strength.

Bullies desire their victims to experience impotent rage and guilty self-loathing. What they dread is that the victims have reserves of calmness and impassivity necessary to defeat them.

This advice may bear some partial similarity to various pacifistic philosophies that counsel non-aggression or non-violence. But it is perfectly compatible with more forward-leaning points of view, according to which bullies and psychopaths are to be aggressively hunted down and subdued and, when it's necessary, crushed with preemptive violence. Indeed, I think pacifists mistakenly infer from the preferability of calmness and impassiveness to false conclusions about the preferability of passivity and non-violence.

Marc Bennett, RIP

I had a friend well worth having two decades ago, during my college days at Swarthmore. Marc Bennett passed away last year, leaving behind a wife, Anna, and young son, Asher.

My memory of Marc has stayed fresh these twenty years. He was at once funny and serious, friendly and, let's just say, prickly. Put it this way, he was a gentleman who didn't shy away from letting me know where there were deficiencies in my character obvious to him though not to me. Heedless as I was, I'm grateful that the memory stuck with me and that I was able to have quite a few laughs with him.

To Asher I say, You may someday be lucky enough to have memories of your father pointing the way for you to be a better man. I'd say don't ignore them as much as I did when I was twenty.

Billy Budd III: John Claggart

John Claggart, a psychopath, will frame Billy Budd for mutiny simply because he hates him. Melville applies the label "mystery" to the intelligent psychopath's "antipathy spontaneous and profound," offering only the pseudo-explanation that Claggart has a "natural depravity." Lacking ordinary concern for others' welfare, the psychopath employs reason and a respectable demeanor in order to accomplish evil ends that the rest of us, who do not lack such concern, find uncanny. As Hume might have said, the psychopath prefers the destruction of others to a slight scratch on his finger.

Two further observations suggest themselves. One is that Claggart and Billy likely come from good stock: fine genes. Melville says so. They naturally have the potential for excellence. Claggart's potential has gone to naught, while Billy is a happy and excellent young man.

The form of Billy Budd was heroic; and if his face was without the intellectual look of the pallid Claggart's, not the less was it lit, like his, from within, though from a different source.

Billy is admired, Claggart despised. Claggart resents Billy's happiness; he is utterly consumed by hatred and resentment. He even hates himself for resenting Billy, as his private facial expression becomes distorted with anger when it is publicly proclaimed that he is "down on Billy." Claggart resents his ruined life and present station, he resents Billy, and he resents his resentments. He is not just a psychopath; he has been driven to distraction by resentment.

As I've suggested, unless the novel is just the story of an unusual case of crime and punishment on a boat, Claggart represents war. War is, after all, in part senseless death and mad violence. Much of what occurs in the trenches and in "boarding her in the smoke" is similar to the rage and violence in Claggart's soul. He represents the enemy's ability to deliver this brutality and evil in war. Billy must die when he slays this enemy. If we spare his life, then we end up defenseless against more of the same enemy.

Not only does Billy Budd portray a country's need to sacrifice its fine young men in its own defense; it also shows that the war to which they are sacrificed is a monster who will add a senselessness and indecency to their deaths. What makes sense and is good may be recouped from the senseless and the evil by men of Vere and Budd's caliber. Yet even then, some of them will be psychologically wounded by having to do so, as in Vere's case. We see why; the sensible sacrifice has a senselessness in it. In war, what is good partakes deeply in what is senseless and indecent.

Billy Budd II

In Omoo, Melville writes:

I do not wish to be understood as applauding the flogging system practiced in men-of-war. As long, however, as navies are needed, there is no substitute for it. War being the greatest of evils all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character; and this is about all that can be said in defense of flogging.

Billy sees the results of a brutal flogging and is cowed by it, resolving never to do anything to bring such punishment down upon him. If flogging is justified, then so is the death of a sailor or soldier in battle. Because navies are needed. Because war is unavoidable.

Melville's little tale of criminal justice aboard the Bellipotent is a thumbnail sketch of the justice of sending Billy to war. Billy is a man least deserving of death at war. Yet it is just that he be sent to that fate.

The Dansker says, "Baby Budd, [Claggart] is down on you." Billy: "What for? Why, he calls me 'the sweet and pleasant young fellow,' they tell me." But this is precisely why Claggart intends to send Billy to his death. Rather than being those who we should send to war last, the good are the very ones we need at the front lines. They are the ones who can look death in the face without blinking, as Billy does.

Claggart does not represent just leaders who justly send men to war, of course. He is unsuccessful in his mission to send Billy to his death. The punishment of death comes to Billy for the act of eliminating this enemy out of an instinctive and natural rage and indignance for him, the sort of instinct the young and good, those who we must send to war, should have.

War's evil: Billy and Vere, good men, are accessories to it who necessarily partake of the same character.

O Mio Babbino Caro

Maria Callas, singing this song so beautifully.

This performance draws tears. But why?

There is a certain nobility of spirit in the girl, a purity of intention to make something good, an admirable self-direction, and a fortitude of will. Tragically, these very virtues will ruin her because she lacks an additional one: wisdom. We are particularly stricken when we see such nobility bring undeserved ruin to itself.

I fret and suffer torments
Oh God, I would rather die
Daddy, have pity, have pity.

In addition, we can vaguely detect that the girl has been someone's victim here. We don't have sympathy for a simply unbalanced character that cooks up some infatuation and then destroys itself. We feel, rather, for the one who has this vulnerability of naivety, a weak spot which is exploited, either by the one she loves or someone else. The girl is a noble victim, too innocent to know how to protect herself from developing an intention to ruin herself.

The music expresses this state of affairs very well, as Callas brings the whole package together. This is why it is especially beautiful and melancholy.

Sissel and Carmen Monarcha also stand out.

Also: Hayley Westenra here and here.

The Maverick

Thanks for the Mavericklanche, Bill!

Folks, if you want to see what a real philosophy blog looks like just keep scrolling. I like the posts on metaethics, my favorite field of philosophy. Unlike Philosoblog, The Maverick has loads of epistemology and metaphysics for you. Plus, he often has great photos of the southwestern landscape. And yes, I did mean "'lanche." That's how popular his philosophy blog is, and deservedly so.

Billy Budd (I)

Get this edition.

Captain Vere must send boys to their deaths. War is a fact, not a debatable proposition. We will send our good boys, and their instinctive and noble fighting spirit will get them killed, just as Billy's did him. And just as in Billy's case, the justice of their fate will be owing to the requirement of a society to defend itself and not to any inherent criminality of their acts.

We can if we like demonstrate to ourselves the need for our country to send good men to their deaths in order to protect the country. Vere argues carefully to his jury (a drumhead court-marshal) that Billy must hang. The problem is that sending Billy or any other decent young man to his death is an indecent act. It make one ill. It renders Vere a broken man.

Billy is an even better man than most, perhaps even Vere. He causes peace and harmony where he dwells. He accepts the sentence Vere hands down and blesses Vere. This expresses the position in which one finds oneself with regard to some soldiers: embarrassed by their superior character and infinite sacrifice.

In war one says, as Billy did on the occasion of his being impressed into the navy, "Goodbye to you, old rights of man." War overrides its participants' rights to be treated with decency and as worthy of respect. War is therefore a fact of the human predicament which is irreconcilable to the rationalistic position that the moral rules demanded by decency and dignity hold absolutely. They don't. We can, however, aim at accepting this reality and this justice as easily as Billy did. In his utterance, he did not mean that war violates our boys' right to life and liberty. And in fact it doesn't. It overrides them.

Of course, there are layers upon layers in Billy Budd. This is only one layer.

Brandt and Who's Responsible for War

Brandt's article (see the post just below this one) leaves out of discussion the point about which side in a war is responsible for the war: which side is the wrongful aggressor. The moral obligations of the innocent side depend on the fact that it is the victim and not the perpetrator. But Brandt ignores this. When you ignore this, it doesn't matter what follows.

In the middle section of the article, Brandt's tactic is to show that his utilitarian position entails various common-sense moral judgments. Of course, these are the utility-promoting ones, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that the many utility-promoting judgments embraced by common-sense ethics are entailed (or "explained," as if they needed explanation) by utilitarianism. So, the tactic has no success is supporting Brandt's utilitarianism.

The kinds of common-sense judgments entailed by utilitarianism are three. There are (1.) humanitarian restrictions on doing harm to the enemy when no military gain will result from it, (2.) humanitarian restrictions that might exact a military cost, and (3.) humanitarian restrictions that will entail military losses. Utilitarianism and common-sense agree perfectly that violence done to the enemy for no foreseeable gain is wrong; but utilitarianism is not needed to explain that. Brandt runs into trouble with the other two kinds of judgments.

When refraining from the use of military violence might require foregoing a military gain, it might still be obligatory to refrain, and reasons of utility will be at play here. One ought not destroy 500,000 million enemy souls just in order to increase the chance of keeping a insignificant stronghold occupied by one of one's platoons. There utilitarianism and common-sense agree. But Brandt never proves that non-utilitarian moral principles shouldn't come into deliberations such as this, as well. Perhaps Brandt looks down his nose at the hodge-podge of common-sense moral principles and wishes to substitute for them something simpler. But why anyone would want to do that, though it seems to be the primary goal of many normative moral theorists, is a mystery to me. A pet theory has no weight at all against a common-sense moral judgment. Common-sense moral judgments are the only data normative moral theory has, and there is never any reason for the theorist to wax theory-driven.

Let's take a closer look. Brandt says that when the outcome of the war is certain, the side that everyone knows will win has an obligation to refrain from taking tolls on the enemy "so heavy as to be out of proportion to the estimated cost of further struggle to both sides." If causing Japan to surrender by invading it would have cost the lives of only five American soldiers and a few hundred Japanese, then the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been wrong. That's common sense, and here again common sense and utilitarianism are in harmony. However, suppose that subduing Japan would have cost, say, 10,000 American soldiers' lives. Then, should the U.S. have refrained from the bombings? No. The point is that Japan was at fault for starting the war. When you unjustly start a war, you should accept that your victim has a right to protect 10,000 of its souls from your violence, even if this costs you 150,000 of your own souls. Brandt provides no evidence that utility alone should be the guide in these cases. He says only that it is in both sides' interest to refrain from this sort of disproportional harm. Well, it isn't in the interest of the side that stands to lose the 10,000. Behind the veil of ignorance we can reasonably maintain that any wrongly and unprovokedly attacked country has the right to finish the enemy off without needlessly losing 10,000 of its citizens. There is no reason that an impartial being standing behind the veil should agree not to reserve this right when he steps from behind the veil.

Behind the veil, the right not to suffer wrongful and unprovoked attack has weight. The right not to sacrifice one's citizens for the sake of maximizing net utility counts. Veil theorists, such as Brandt and Rawls, want to imagine what an impartial and rational being with no morals would choose behind the veil. They imagine different things and nobody should care what they imagine, because nobody should care which morals a person without morals would choose.

Brandt, Utilitarianism, and the Rules of War

In "Utilitarianism and the Rules of War" (1972) Richard B. Brandt, like any rationalist, misconstrues a constraint on rule acceptance as a source of rules. Of course, any acceptable moral rule must meet the constraint that they be acceptable to impartial and rational people; no acceptable moral rule would be unacceptable to them. But there is a large range of mutually inconsistent moral rules that would be acceptable to them. The constraint simply won't determine which rules are right.

Brandt believes that only his preferred rules would be acceptable to them: utilitarian rules. His reason is that it is in the interests of anyone self-interested, impartial and rational to prefer these when he doesn't yet know who he will be: when he is behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. If we have an altruistic fellow behind the veil, then he should choose utilitarian rules, too, as they are in others' interests. Utilitarian rules maximize the chance of maintaining his own and others' welfare. So, they are the right moral rules.

There are two problems with this position. One is that Rawls draws different conclusions when he steps behind the veil. He chooses rules that would minimize the maximum loss of welfare he might suffer. This minimax position is inconsistent with Brandt's utilitarianism. So, apparently the impartial and rational space behind the veil does not lead to the determinate conclusions even amongst those philosophers who claim that it does. When the experts' divinations disagree, one concludes that divination doesn't work.

Also, an impartial and rational agent can also prefer not to treat a few people badly as a means of maximizing the net welfare. Or he may not wish to allow the aggressor in the war mercy sufficient to maximize utility because such mercy comes at the expense of the aggressor's innocent victims. Or he may make distinctions between the treatment of enemy non-combatants and the treatment of enemy soldiers on the grounds of decency, knowing full well that these distinctions may reduce his chances of survival when he emerges from behind the veil and enters the war. There is a variety of moral principles which can come into impartial and rational decision making. This is because there is a variety of anti-utilitarian moral principles that impartial agents might embrace. This is the simple fact that refutes the Rawlsian (Kantian) theory of moral deliberation.

Brandt himself admits that there will be a restriction on the rules. The only acceptable rules are those that are consistent with any country having the right to exert force sufficient to overpower the enemy. For it is a fact that no country will not exert such force. But if there is this restriction issuing from human nature, why are there not more restrictions issuing from human nature, such as those I've listed above? Brandt allowed for one, and I listed three. There are more. This is sufficient to refute Brandt's case for utilitarianism. All attempts to divine moral principles out of the thin air of the space behind the veil fail. They have done so since the first emerged with Kant. Only human beings can determine moral rules, not abstract agents.

The Founders' Constitution

It's like a bible. Only, the Bible you can read in a year and is sacred.

Verificationism in Epistemology

This occasional series on verificationism (one on mind, one on social philosophy) turns to epistemology. The idea is to apply verificationism to epistemology. As it happens, I see one interesting application: to skepticism, as the position that no one has any justification to claim empirical knowledge.

The skeptic need only point to our record of mistaken beliefs and our realistic dreams, as Descartes did, to motivate his argument that nothing we seem to know is in fact knowledge. (How do you know there is a computer before you? You've been mistaken in the past and you've dreamed of things that aren't there. Perhaps it is also so in this case. Etc.) Skepticism recommends that we doubt that our evidence warrants our beliefs in commonly accepted descriptions of the world, in the results of science, or even in the existence of the physical world. Call these three beliefs "common beliefs".

Here's the problem with skepticism. Skeptics have not and cannot offer evidential criteria by which we could verify that the common beliefs are not justified. Skeptics first need to answer a question: What would you take as evidence that the common beliefs are without justification? More to the point, What sort of facts would count as evidence that the ordinary evidential standards (call them "OES") which we use to justify common beliefs do not in fact yield any justification? This is a general question to which the skeptic must have an answer before proceeding to claim that he has any such facts. In other words, we want to know what sort of evidence would prove skepticism before we move on to the task of deciding whether there is any evidence of that sort. Now, the skeptic cannot reply that the evidence he has in mind is simply the same as that warranted by the OES, because this would imply that he could obtain a warrant from a source that gives no warrants. So, what kind of evidence does the skeptic have in mind? None.

In short, the skeptic has no idea what he means by "evidence that the application of OES dos not yield justification." You can formulate the case in the form of an open-question argument, if you like. For example, "By the OES, Joe has sufficient warrant for his belief; but is he justified in his belief?" The question seems open. It has an "open" ring to it, like the question, "My mom has acted normally all these years; but is she perhaps a zombie?" But it is not open. No one has any concept of evidential standards required for justification in addition to the OES, just as no one has concept of zombies.

Of course, the skeptic could reply that he accepts only the OES and merely proposes that we never satisfy them in any case. Okay, so we move to a case-by-case examination of common beliefs, rather than skepticism at the level of principle. In each dispute, the skeptic will have to point to discoveries of facts that refute the particular belief in question, such as "I discovered that it was only a shadow, not a monster," "I woke up an realized that I'd been dreaming and it was not actually summertime," or "my fever subsided and found out that I'd hallucinated the bear." All of these discoveries are comprised of common beliefs, such as "there is a shadow," "it is winter now," and "there is no bear in this room." As you can see, no one has any concept of what would count as a finished refutation of the set of common beliefs. Therefore, no one has any concept of what it would take to justify skepticism.

Skepticism has its appeal to the philosopher in adolescence because it's fun to seem to pop all the old bubbles. But after that it becomes merely tiresome. The reason is that it pretends to have substance when in fact it doesn't.

Virtue, Rightness and Human Nature

Virtue, of course, is goodness of character, and rightness is the property certain acts have of being morally permissible, rather than wrong. Some philosophers maintain that virtue is the more fundamental concept, rightness being derivative of it. Not so, I reply. Virtue is reducible to the disposition to do what is right. We wouldn't think that an act is right because it is what a virtuous person would do. We would, however, think a character trait virtuous because it results in its possessor's doing what is right. Is that too quick? Then let us consider.

One might persist in maintaining that virtue is the more fundamental concept, but then the puzzle arises, what makes the virtuous character traits virtues if it is not rightness? The virtue-primacy theorist must appeal to human nature, but the account is incomplete unless more is said. "Why, human nature, of course" is an insufficient explanation. One must appeal in addition to purposes that inhere in human nature: our reasons for being. The candidates, suggested to me variously by adherents of Aristotle, Aquinas, Darwin, and Ayn Rand: (a.) thriving, survival, or something like that, or (b.) glorifying God. (These are not mutually exclusive. Last night, for example, I enjoyed disputations with a Rand-cum-Aristotle virtue-primacy theorist.) The acceptance of a certain purpose of human beings is what drives the virtue-primacy theorist to suggest that rightness is the epiphenomenon of virtue, rather than vice versa. Yet, we have no purposes other than those set by our desires. Our purposes are goals the achievement of which will most satisfy the largest and most practically coherent set of desires. The God-based view entails that we have no purpose if God does not exist; but that isn't so. The thriving-based view has to cope with the fact that thriving doesn't map neatly onto what is right. Hobbes failed to reduce right to self-interest because there are cases in which doing wrong is in one's interest: cases in which one won't get caught. Similarly a person or society can in some cases promote its level of thriving or increase its chance of survival by doing wrong. No, the examination of human nature can help us understand our purpose only because human nature is a set of dispositions to desire certain ends and examining that set is helpful in discovering which resultant preference, after the fashion of an elaborate vector sum, our most coherent set of desires is likely to generate.

I suppose the virtue-primacy theorist has one or the other cherished view about desire-independent human purposes; my interlocutor of last night is partial to the Randian. This commitment drives him to try to maintain it while presenting sensible positions about the logical relation of virtue and rightness. It's a stretch, requiring that he reverse the logical order or rightness and virtue, so that his preferred purpose drives the entire set of positions. My tactic, on the other hand, is not to import any favorite purposes but, like Hume, to assume that desire-independent purposes do not to exist until their rather inscrutable existence is proven, and thereafter to accept whatever purposes remain. There's no proof yet of the desire-independent ones. As Hume said, if we set desire on the sidelines, "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." He hasn't been refuted.

If you think that the rejection of virtue-primacy ill-fits the obvious fact that the examination of human nature and virtue are important components of moral inquiry, fear not. Of course they are. As I've said, they enable us to see more clearly what is most desirable to us and how to cultivate dispositions to achieve it.

Racism in America

There is a malignant tumor in this country: racism. It is a diseased amalgam of guilt and resentment. These forms of self-loathing masquerade as claims of injustice. It's a tumor that will not allow itself to be removed. The only power we have over it is simply to let it go. Then it dies.

No one is responsible for the fact that some people are born into disadvantageous circumstances in this country. There are poor subcultures in this country which make it difficult for people born and raised in them to have a good life. Neither are the people in poor subcultures responsible for their subculture's moral failures, nor are the people lucky enough to live outside those subcultures responsible for those failures. There is no debt of the culturally lucky to transfer any of their goods to the unlucky. (There is a duty to help those who fall into poor health through no fault of there own, but that conservatively narrow requirement of distributive justice is the only requirement.) A dysfunctional culture, by the very nature of culture, can be remedied only by its members' taking steps to improve it. No transfer of any goods into the poor culture can substitute for that inner improvement.

God I love this country. The wide sea of American beings in this land, the ways of life so varied in breadth, so deep in talents, character and creative achievements. I've been a professional jazz musician for 28 years, which has given me to swim deeply in the sea. I've lived in eight cities, visited forty-four states, been educated in predominantly black elementary schools in St. Louis, worked blue-collar hard-labor jobs, as well as white-color jobs. My heart beats for it. It's beautiful. When you add to the list of goods the political tradition that helps make all this possible, you fall in love with it. So much to cherish, so much to conserve.

It has this tumor, however, which won't leave until millions upon millions of us stop getting upset or bothered by race in this country. It seems that only those of us in Generation X and younger can fathom that, and even many of those that young just don't get it. Simply leaving our racist past behind is not fair? You can't just turn the corner on our racist history? Yes you can, because that history can be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is by simply turning the corner on it. Yes we can. Justice does not demand redress of any grievances. Nobody is responsible for bad luck. End of story. It's a story we've wanted to end for generations, and this is the only ending that can be written for it: stop getting upset and move forward with the cultivation of respect, self-reliance, courage and other virtues so important to the good cultures of America.

It's not easy; the tumor is recalcitrant. And, of course, one must maintain a society in which there are ample opportunities for members of poor subcultures to escape them. If you are a member of a poor subculture, you also might stay in it and contribute to improving it. Both of these salutary avenues require dropping guilt and resentment. There is no other way forward and justice requires nothing more.

It's not easy. The guilt and resentment are demons. They cling deeply. By their very nature they disallow one's extricating oneself from their clutches. Guilt requires that one tarry with it and do its bidding - on pain of guilt. Resentment requires certain redress of its grievances, not its mere disavowal. These demons are psychosomatic phenomena, which is to say passions. Escape therefore requires calming oneself until they subside. Excited states of inordinate glee or hope can mark attempts to feel free of guilt and resentment by some distraction (intoxicants and various diverting preoccupations, for example) or by accepting a promise from someone in power that you can be free of the demons if you give him more power to do the things, once and for all, which those demons make us imagine can and should be done (but which in fact cannot and should not.) Excited hope for relief from racism is therefore an indication that you're being hoodwinked by demons; watch for it.

The loudest racist hatred-mongers amongst us are sociopaths: mechanisms of the tumor that feed it's festering guilt and resentment. They need to be shunned, rather than supported and revered. We certainly should not accept a man as president who has just spent his adult life supporting them without having uttering a word of dissent and who continues to support them.

There are millions upon millions of Americans who are already free from racism. God bless them. We marvel at them. The rest of us need to catch up. Racism in America's case is a vice that won't let go. Vices are for the vicious themselves to leave behind and allow to die.

Barak Obama is a Member of a Racist Church

Barak Obama still supports the church. He immerses his daughters in its social disease. It is a black separatist, racist church. He still belongs to it. It's new minister defends the vile bigot Wright.

If McCain still belonged to a white racist church that required its members adhere to a "White Value System" and cheered by the thousand at racist vitriol, then his public life would be over. No one would believe that he didn't know it was a racist church.

Obama is getting a pass because he is black. His audience feels too guilty to hold him to basic standards of decency.

If you can't hold Obama to the same standard you'd hold McCain, then he has you right where he wants you. You feel guilty about taking notice of the fact that the gentle-sounding black man's rhetoric doesn't square with his membership in a racist church. Obama's audacious racism has angered you, but you feel guilty and loathe yourself for being angry at a black man who speaks so gently of social harmony. So you surpress the anger with the guilt and accept Obama. This post angers you because it disturbs the deal with the devil that you have made in order to protect yourself from your own cowardice, guilt and self-loathing. Believing lies and saying you're sorry is easier in the short term for you than doing what you know in your own heart to be right. Obama has a psychosomatic influence on you via guilt, anger and self-loathing, evident in the excitement and agitation the topic causes in you. He belongs to a racist church. He's got you.

Sowell: There was no way that he didn’t know about Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American and racist diatribes from the pulpit. Someone once said that a con man’s job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one: Kathleen Parker.

UPDATE: Andy McCarthy.

More Demagoguery from Obama

Here's his speech. It does not answer the question as to whether he was aware that he was a member of a racist and hatred-mongering church. A few days ago, in an interview with Major Garrett, he said that he was not aware of any such content in his church and would have left if he'd heard it more than once there, so he cannot come clean now without admitting that he has been lying about it until now. He admits only that he heard some "controversial" things from Wright. Perhaps his audience won't discern the difference?

Are you making the distinction? Does the long discussion of slavery at the beginning of the speech tend to make you feel guilty for doing so?

Obama simply has not admitted that supporting a hatred-mongering church was wrong or that he knew that he was doing it. If you still think he is lying, then the rhetorical structure of this speech implies that you should feel guilty about rejecting the candidate of racial unity who is healing the nation after its legacy of racism. After all, as Obama reminds us, some are trying to bring up race in this campaign, moving us back to the old days, and you do not want to be one of them. Perhaps you feel that his church is "too black." After all, Obama says asking him to reject Wright would be like asking him to reject "the black community."

Being scandalized by Obama's twenty-year membership in a hatred-mongering church might just be a case of moving us back to the old days when we need to go forward. And here is the candidate of racial unity who admits that his pastor went over the line, so how far do you want to push this? And Obama said a couple of days ago that he never heard Wright say the wicked things. Do you have any proof that he did?

The candidate who supported a racially hate-mongering church for twenty years is portraying himself as the candidate of racial healing. If you see through this, you better be careful not to be made to feel guilty about it by Barak Obama's rhetoric. After all, hasn't he reminded you sufficiently that black people do, after all, have a reason to be so angry with you?

Obama says his rejecting Wright would be like rejecting either his grandmother, who was a little bigoted, or "the black community." A true leader would have either spoken out against a hatred-mongering church or left it. Obama, however, draws a moral equivalence between a privately bigoted old grandmother and all blacks, on the one hand, and a minister who preaches hatred to thousands, on the other. The moral equation is staggeringly obtuse.

Obama simply has not admitted that what he did was wrong or that he knew that he was doing it. Wouldn't you feel guilty about requiring him to leave his grandmother or leave the black community? Do you feel guilty, then, to require that he leave his hatred-mongering church?

Of course, the speech is peppered with points about blacks that make millions of white people guilty, and millions of black people resentful, to hear them. This has the effect of making it difficult for his audience to analyze what he is saying sufficiently to see that he has not admitted that what he did was wrong or that he knew that he was doing it.

The speech was pure demagoguery.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one. VDH: ...Obama will enlighten you, as your teacher, why you are either confused or too ill-intended to ask him to disassociate himself from Wright. [SNIP] Obama is right about one thing: We are losing yet another opportunity to talk honestly about race, to hold all Americans to the same standards of public ethics and morality, and to emphasize that no one gets a pass peddling vulgar racism, or enabling it by failing to disassociate himself from its source — not Rev. Wright, not even the eloquent, but now vapid, Barack Obama.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon is "pointing out the obvious": that anyone who finds moral equivalence between Wright's racist screeds and his white grandmother's admitting to him in private that she feared black men on the street has got a serious problem.

UPDATE: John Derbyshire: You can go through Obama's speech pulling out questionable points like that from nearly every paragraph. The speech is slippery, evasive, dishonest, and sometimes insulting.

Read the whole thing.

TO SUM UP:

Obama denies that he heard Wright spew his monstrous venom during the twenty-year relationship. His speech today covers over the fact that he denies it. He simply isn't believable.

Obama exposed his children to a church which inculcates hatred of the middle class, of whites, and of America. In my opinion, that's child abuse.

Obama never spoke up about Wright's hatred-mongering, as a leader who disagrees with Wright would have done. Until he got caught last week, that is.

Obama laces his apology for his failure of judgment and leadership with multiple reminders that blacks have reason to be angry. This is the psycholgizing of a demagogue.

If one must judge a man by his deeds and not just his words, then we must conclude that Obama is a black separatist and racist, as well as a leftist. If thinking of that innocent face and noble-sounding voice makes you feel guilty about drawing this conclusion, then he's got you.

Cult of Personality

This is based upon a foundation of hypnotic states induced in its devotees. The hypnotic leader, be he an abusive husband, religious leader, or politician, induces these states by inciting resentment and guilt in his subjects and manifesting charisma that induces an excitement in them by causing them to believe that he can free them from these painful emotions. Their guilt, resentment and excitement are sufficient to cause the subjects to to deny various obvious facts, as they must do if they are to persist in believing that they should follow the hypnotic leader.

There are three ways to disrupt the hypnotic state. The first is epistemic: reasoning, thinking, and re-evaluating the evidence. Obviously, by the vary nature of the hypnotic state, it isn't likely to work. Also, it doesn't make one resilient to the next attempt to prey upon one's resentments and guilt.

The second way to disrupt the hypnotic state is psychosomatic: by sitting quietly and refocus the hypnotic state upon one's own conscience, body and mind, training it away from thoughts of the leader, allowing the excitement to abate and the guilt and resentment dissipate. This way is more prophylactic, making future encounters with hypnotic leaders unlikely to have the pernicious effect.

The third way is to tire of the hypnotic leader's charisma and allow one's hypnotic focus to be captured by another hypnotic leader or by preoccupations with behaviors that offer temporary respite from the resentment and guilt (intoxicants, television, and other diversions, even one's career or hobbies.) Of course, this third way offers no freedom from pernicious hypnotic states. It merely disrupts one in order to substitute in another.

Obama is Racist Degenerate

Barak Obama is an asshole. If you haven't heard the sermons Obama has been adoring for 20 years, go give them a listen. Obama gets paraded about as Mr. Nice Guy. He's not. You don't attend that church for 20 years, get married by its racist degenerate, have your kids baptized by its racist degenerate, and give its racist degenerate $20K in 2006, without being a racist degenerate yourself.

“It sounds like he was trying to be provocative,” Obama told the paper.

That's as weak as it gets. Obama is as subtly bombastic a charlatan as they come.

UPDATE: Obama is now turning out to be a liar. He heard the hatred in his congregation and from his pastor. He had no revulsion to it. Now, in order to get elected, he claims to find it worthy of faint condemnation. He doesn't find it worthy of condemnation and he never did. He's a liar and a longtime member of a racist and hatred-filled church.

I expect better of black people.

UPDATE: VDH: It doesn’t seem to matter that there is more than enough evidence in Obama’s own memoirs and past interviews and puff pieces—as well as the common-sense deduction that one does not frequent a church for 20 years and remain oblivious to the ratings of its preacher—that Obama knew what went on.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Obama’s assertion he will stay on at the church due to Wright’s departure is problematic, since Wright’s successor Otis Moss III, in a recent CNN interview, simply defended Wright and gave no evidence that he would distance the church from his message.

UPDATE: O'Beirne: Too bad Michelle Obama's litany of her husband's faults included morning breath and smelly socks but not nodding off during sermons. It seems to me the senator has a believe-me-not-your-lying-eyes problem. Rev. Wright's enthusiastic congregation gives standing ovations to his vitriol. Had Barack Obama been present he alone would have been sitting in slack-jawed disbelief?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: We are seeing a pattern of double-talk.

UPDATE: William Kristol: [I]t’s becoming clear that Obama has been less than candid in addressing his relationship to his pastor....[SNIP]...the pretense that over all these years Obama had no idea that Wright was saying such things is hard to sustain.

UPDATE: Peter Wehner: Senator Obama, whose campaign only last year said that he was “proud of his pastor and his church,” is now saying that he wasn’t aware of the angry, reckless, anti-American, and racially divisive comments by Reverend Wright. But that claim stretches credulity. [SNIP]This is the worst crisis the Obama campaign has faced. It has done deep and perhaps long-term damage by calling into question the judgment and credibility of the junior senator from Illinois. And it badly undermines Obama’s claim that he is a figure who can bind up America’s racial wounds.

UPDATE: Juan Williams: ...the notion that Barack Obama wants to advance that he didn't -- or wasn't aware of it, I find that unbelievable....

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty: For most, the idea that Jeremiah Wright hid these views and statements from Barack Obama over the course of a 23-year relationship as mentor and pupil strains credulity.

UPDATE: Thomas Sowell:In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break! [SNIP] Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

UPDATE: Shelby Steele: And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. [SNIP] The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother.

UPDATE: National Review: The problem for Obama is that the length and depth of his relationship with the Rev. Wright and his unconvincing attempts to distance himself from his mentor tell Americans far more about his values and judgment than his compelling campaign speeches about racial harmony do.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg: Obama preaches unity. Well, real unity requires real truth-telling and the ability to tell right from wrong, and Wright from right.

UPDATE: Richard Cohen: [H]e has been less than forthright or responsible about Wright.

Libertarianism and Liberal Fascism

Goldberg has posted this. I emailed him this.

Goldberg became more libertarian in writing the book. I became more libertarian in reading it.

Health and Distributive Justice

I've been arguing that one must have ill-health (including insufficient food and shelter) in order to have a claim to distributive injustice. (The other kind of justice is procedural, having to do with fairness in transactions, theft, contractual fulfillment, and so forth. If you're keeping score, "social justice" is the leftist term for "distributive justice.")

However, ill-health is not sufficient for distributive injustice. There is a value placed on people not suffering ill-health. There are other values, too, however: the self-reliance and personal responsibility of the one with ill-health, the property rights of those who have the wealth necessary to to remediate one's ill-health, the chance of any remediation's creating social structures and systems that will be detrimental to society in the future, the corrosion of healthy people's self-reliance, etc. If offering help to someone with ill-health we reward the foolishness which got him into the predicament, cause healthy people to take less responsibility for their health in the future, create a bureaucracy that makes our government worse, or deprive the healthy and wealthy of large amounts of money, then we ought not to offer the help. If offering the help does only one or some of those bad things, then we need to examine further whether we ought to offer the help; deliberation over the trade-offs will tell. But it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that someone has ill-health that he deserves help.

The baseline of health is therefore not a right in any general sense. There are many people in our society who have a right to assistance in remediating their ill-health; there are many who have ill-health and who do not have a right to remediation. Policy makers need only consider the various values at stake (such as those named above) and decide how to target assistance at those who have a right to help and avoid giving assistance to those who have no such right, either because under no circumstances would they deserve the help or because, though they have a prima facie right to help, it is outweighed by other considerations.

It seems unlikely that a national health plan is just, therefore. It seems very likely that government should do whatever prudence dictates to make health insurance cheaper. It should consider liberating the health insurance market from regulation and the medical industry from its litigation load. But the widely believed notion that health care is a right is groundless.

The scope of distributive justice for a conservative is very narrow. The welfare net it prefers is very lean. Where it targets the deserving, the net may be serious and robust, indeed, however, because it is, after all, a genuine matter of justice.

Monkey Clitoris

Dang, y'all come here looking for "flipper babies" and "natural law and divine command theory" a lot. This week I'm getting an unusual amount of search hits for the latter from all over the world. Must be an online philosophy course's paper topic this week. Bottom line, there is no such thing as a natural purpose outside of God's command. Just saying.

Anyways, nothing beats monkey clitoris. Best. Search. Hit. Joke. Ever.

Birds of Iraq

is back over at da man's place!

Real Hope

It is the hour of change and hope. We need both.

Now, when it comes to hope, there is something I don't mean. I'm not talking about Americans who unfortunately suffer in dire circumstances of poverty or ill-health that have occurred through no fault of their own. We all agree that we have an obligation to help those who suffer misfortune. They are a special case of the requirements of justice, but they are not at the center of controversies about justice and the role of government that we face at this time in our history.

No, what is at issue when it comes to hope is the rest of us, we who are not unfortunate but have our health and therefore, as the saying goes, have everything. We have what we need to pursue and win happiness. We are blessed with personal gifts, be they small or large, be they obvious to all or in need of personal discovery by ourselves. We are blessed with personal relationships with our families, our friends and others in our lives who have their own personal abilities and gifts to offer and bring into our lives, and with whom we can cooperate in creating good lives for ourselves and achieving real happiness by pursuing projects that we freely choose, embark upon, and bring to fruition of our own accord. These gifts are within all of us. Most of us believe it is God who created us with these gifts, but we can all agree that we were created with them.

This is a blessed situation in which we find ourselves. There is no need for any of us so blessed to envy one another, to be covetous of those of us who have achieved the most prosperity and fulfillment. Envy and covetousness are vices because they are based upon the ignorance of the immense value of one's own gifts. God never intended us to be envious and indignant of those of stellar accomplishment while we ourselves have beautiful families, personal talents and middle-class lifestyles consisting of more than one car, convenient electronic gadgets of every imaginable function all around us, and air in our houses heated and cooled to a degree of perfection that our grandparents would find astonishing. God certainly never intended us to whine and moan about the fact that we need to use personal initiative and to practice self-reliance in order to keep our lives the way we want them. No one said it was supposed to be easy. Americans have never been afraid of hard work. The system is not rigged. Happiness by its very nature requires self-reliance because it is one's own pursuit.

There simply is no problem of justice amongst us who have our lives and our health. Only envy and covetousness makes it seem otherwise. This is a lesson as old as the story of Cain and Abel.

If you're an atheist like me, go back if you like and take the God and Bible references out of what I've just said and rewrite accordingly. Express it in terms of good character or common sense if you like. It makes no difference how you express it. It's true.

In a situation as fortunate as ours, what we should hope for is that we can be allowed by our government to fulfill the promise of our gifts. These gifts are destinies of grand and modest orders and all orders in between. They are potentials that we have in virtue of being human. Because we are human, it is self-evident that we have rights to the pursuit of these destinies, rights protected here in the United States of America by foundational documents, The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, which state that the government's principal duty is to protect each one of us as we go forward in our pursuit of personal happiness.

Since this is what beings such as we should hope for, it is particularly unseemly of us to complain that the rich in this country aren't taxed enough by the federal government, when in fact the rich pay almost all the federal income taxes. Google that. When you see how little the middle class and the poor pay, in comparison to the wealthy, you'll see how absurd it is for any politician to play class warfare in this country, to play us like a pawn against the rich in order to sucker you out of your vote by appealing to our envy and covetousness and ignorance of the facts. We should inform ourselves of the facts about who's paying the taxes, realize that we are blessed, and get over our petty envies and covetousness. They don't become a people as blessed as we.

But we do face an issue regarding the nature of government at this moment in our history. The issue is not how to soak the rich even more and use the money to buy happiness for the rest of us. Absurd as it is to say it, that mindless misunderstanding of the issue - and of American political philosophy - is the fundamental platform plank of many of our politicians. Sadly, this absurdity has become assumed and commonplace in the political debates we have in this country. It's so familiar that we don't even notice that it is there, let alone how shameful it is. The hatred, envy and bombast that show up in those debates as a result have contributed mightily to poisoning our political culture in this country. We cannot move forward as long as we keep arguing about how much more the wealthy should be made to give to others who are already blessed.

We all know that there are numerous politicians who, upon hearing me say what I've just said, will tell us that my kind of talk is an attempt to hoodwink us and that we ought to be outraged at it. These are politicians who will stoke our fires of envy all the more and attempt to sucker us into rejecting what we know to be true and accepting an absurdity instead. The absurdity, again, is this: that the political philosophy we should cherish in this country is that the government's job is to take money from the rich and use it to purchase happiness for the rest of us. You should make up your own mind whether those politicians have given you a reason to vote for them and accept this absurdity, or whether they've done nothing more than to appeal to your envy and resentment. Go ahead and think about it for a while. It's a simple matter. If you decide to side with the politicians who play one class of the blessed off of another, if you're a healthy American blessed with a precious life and you still want the government to take even more money from your boss and give it to you just because your boss is rich, then there is no need for you to read further.

If you're still with me, then let us consider, What is the issue we face if it isn't how to select the next tactic in class warfare and set the next tax increases? While government is meant to protect us, and also help the unfortunate amongst us, the problem is that government can threaten us, as well. Government is supposed to preserve our blessed lives and solve problems that threaten them. But unfortunately, government has a tendency to become the problem instead of solving the problem.

When government begins to provide for us we begin to lose our willingness and ability to provide for ourselves. It also ruins our economy with its waste. There's your trouble, as mechanics say.

When government gets big, we start demanding that it provide medical care for us instead of making sure the economy and the legal and regulatory environment are such that hospitals and insurance companies can put the money we give them into taking care of our health, rather than into bureaucracies and nuisance lawsuits. Absurdly, we demand that a fat, bloated, and dysfunctional health insurance system be given more power and responsibility over our health, or even more absurdly, that the government that caused the bloating and dysfunction be promoted to manager of the very system it broke.

When government gets big, we start expecting not to have to rely on the nuclear family to raise our children to stand on their own two feet and discover their own gifts. We expect instead that the government will provide money to take the place of these families and babysitting to take the place of real parenting.

When government gets big, we start being reluctant to manage our own retirement planning. We instead demand that a government bureaucrat, who has already spent most of our retirement contributions and who refuses to invest any of the money in anything but a savings account with almost no interest, will magically be able to provide for us when we grow old.

When government grows as bloated as ours, it begins to ruin our economy instead of staying out of our way, feeding its addiction to spending and bloating by printing more money, driving down the value of the dollar, and taxing American businesses so heavily that they are driven overseas just to drive the value of the dollar down even more as we succumb to our horrendous trade deficit.

When government grows as bloated as ours, it grows its debt to the point that those to whom the bill will come, our children, will be saddled with an unjust and unshoulderable burden. This is theft from children. We're out spending our kid's inheritance. Worse, we're letting politicians pour it down the drain.

The government wastes money as easily as it uses it wisely. We are much better at using our own money efficiently. A bigger government means more waste, more of our wealth down the drain, a worse economy with fewer opportunities for us to find our happiness.

The issue we face is how to shrink our government, not how to grow it fat with the money we imagine the rich owe us. The rich don't owe us, and the government can't make us happy. We can find our own happiness by pursuing happiness on our own, by discovering the individual talents and gifts each of us has. The injustice we are grappling with now is the injustice we do to ourselves by tolerating a government that is too big, too fat, and by its very nature unable to provide happiness to us.

Real hope lies in the discovery of a way to turn the behemoth of government around, shrink it, and get it out of our lives. Real hope lies in a vision of an America in which government protects us, helps the unfortunate, and otherwise stays put of our way. Real hope lies in seeing that LBJ's Great Society turned out to be not great and in resolving to stop it before it gets any worse. Real hope is an individual matter of a person's own vision of the potential that lies inside him and his own determination to pursue his own happiness by developing that self-chosen potential by relying on himself, his friends and family, others in his civil society, and on the protection of government. Yes, we can. But hope is also a political matter of creating a government that is consistent with keeping that hope alive. Current American government is sadly not that kind of government. We need change. Each individual has a duty to himself to get involved in the politics of producing a smaller government that does just what it should and not all the shameful and absurd things that our government does now.

This is the real hope for change. Yes, we can.

Some Points on Conservative Distributive Justice

More detail later, but just to sum up at the moment:

If you have your health (and liberty), then you don't have a basis to claim that you are a victim of distributive injustice.

However, an individual's remediable ill-health is not evidence (conclusive or even prima facie) of distributive injustice.

("Health" here is broadly construed, such that ill-health includes the poor bodily states of a person who cannot procure enough food or shelter. Ill-health is the state of pain or bodily malfunction induced by adverse physical circumstance.)

So, ill-health is a necessary but not sufficient condition of distributive injustice. Liberal concepts of distributive justice should say that it is not a necessary condition; they are wont to say that it is a sufficient condition. Libertarian conceptions should say that it is neither necessary not sufficient because in principle there is no such thing as distributive injustice.

In any event, the conservative view is that there is a duty from distributive injustice to render aid only if someone lacks in health. If someone lacks in health, then this fact by itself counts only as reason to take a look at his situation to see whether there is an injustice that we should rectify.

This view of the shape of distributive justices countenances great gaps in wealth. It surmises that a society is just, even if it has vast distances between the levels of wealth of the haves and the have-nots, as long as the have nots have their health. The reason is that distributive injustice generates a duty to render aid, but there cannot be a duty to render aid to someone who has, as the saying goes, "everything."

Recapping: Happiness and Distributive Justice

Chatting with Richard Chappell in the comments to the previous post, I stumbled upon the hackneyed expression "just the frosting on the cake." Hackneyed expressions often have a lot in them.

Consider three cupcakes representing people. (This is so silly. But it works.) The cake part is the fundamental happiness I've been talking about in these posts: health and liberty. The frosting represents supplementary happiness: education, career, raising kids, hobbies, travel, luxuries, etc. One cupcake, A, has no frosting. A isn't in abject poverty, but he is a member of our society who has enough to be happy. B has a medium-size layer of frosting, and C a thick layer of it. C lives in luxury and has various fulfilling activities open to him that A does not. B has some of these, but not others. They are all three happy, though B is happier than A and C happier still (assuming that B and C don't have psychological maladies preventing their enjoying their situations.) There is no imperative to transfer any frosting from C or B to A. If A lost a chunk of his cake through no fault of his own and was a decent and just person, then C and B might perhaps have a duty from distributive justice to help. (That's for the next post.) But there is no duty from distributive justice for the haves to give frosting to the have-nots. C and B can get together and decide to give frosting to A, and that might be reasonable and good. But there is no duty there. A has his health, so he has everything. What B and C have in addition is just the frosting on the cake. Justice doesn't enter in there, because justice is a very serious matter. We can't be serious about a duty to give A frosting, because we can't reasonably lament (Richard's term) that A lacks it. This is because A should not lament it himself.

Now, Richard comments, ...it is surely desirable to bring about "a better society", as you put it. (Whether this is "owed as a matter of distributive justice", or a more broadly consequentialist imperative, does not seem to me an important difference.)

On the contrary, the difference is very important. I don't believe there is a consequentialist imperative, but I do agree that liberalism (leftism, what have you) is committed to there being one. The conservative view is that bringing about a better society (call this value U) is one among a set of values which we ought to promote (where "better" means "having more happiness spread amongst more people in it.") We ought to maintain distributive justice and procedural justice. We ought not to harm other societies for no good reason. There may be other values in the set, though at the moment, that seems exhaustive. U may be defeated (overridden, trumped) by any of these three other values in the set. In fact, the two justices are particularly tough cookies, and may be defeated by U only in extreme circumstances. For the conservative, these things must be kept clearly distinct so that deliberations about them can get them right. The liberal view Richard adheres to avowedly blurs the distinction. It may indeed increase happiness to take frosting from one who has a lot of it and give it to one who has only a little of it. But there is no overriding imperative to do so, and certainly not an imperative from distributive justice to do so.

That's a recap of the view. The reasons to accept it are in the previous two posts and the comments.

Happiness and Distributive Justice

P: If you have your health, you have everything.

P is true. Well, as long as we take it as going without saying that you have your freedom, as well. Chuang-tzu eccentrically opined that not even health is necessary to contentment, and perhaps freedom is not necessary as well. I think even he would admit that it takes a person of extraordinary character to grasp the truth of this extreme view. So, leave that possibility aside. We're interested in political philosophy here, principles that pertain to the lot of us, not just to the eccentrics. For our purposes, if you have your health (and freedom), you have everything.

P is perennial wisdom. It runs deep. To deny it is to put an insurmountable barrier between oneself and happiness; it is psychologically unhealthy.

This old wisdom has a role in distributive justice, the topic in political philosophy. Libertarians, given their principles, should scoff at the notion of such a topic, as from their point of view any redistribution of goods obtained by free and informed transactions and labors is illegitimate. Liberals, given their views, should scoff back at the callousness they perceive in anyone unwilling to acknowledge the justice of redistributions aimed at transferring wealth from rich to poor. Conservatives who accept that some such redistribution is required by justice or at least allowed by it can expect to be scorned by libertarians for confusing justice with theft and scorned by liberals for countenancing only a niggardly transfer. I have had this scorn heaped on me by both libertarians and liberals. I delight in this irony.

What the conservative has in mind is that it is unseemly for anyone who has his health to feel it an injustice that he doesn't have more (when he hasn't done anything to earn more.) It is more than unseemly. It is morally and psychologically dysfunctional. It is an atavism, to use the Nietzschean term. It entails that someone who has every externality required for happiness and has not had anything he earned taken from him deserves to be given more goods. It entails that such a person has a grievance. It is sick to have everything one needs and believe one is owed by everyone who has more. This is a frame of mind incompatible with happiness. It also militates against self-reliance, one of the most important internalities required for happiness and for building a good life.

The liberal view of distributive justice of a society is that it is roughly inversely proportional to the degree of disparity in wealth between the society's haves and the have-nots. There is no sound argument for this position. In addition, it is unhealthy. It's not just that the radical redistribution advocated by the liberal is, as a matter of empirical fact, corrosive of tendencies to self-reliance or that it violates the property rights of the wealthy. Radical redistribution is based upon an unhealthy conceptual confusion about happiness; it is based upon a failure to recognize that P is true.

There are some additional issues regarding what exactly is owed by the haves to the have-nots, according to the conservative position I'm developing here. What of the scorn heaped by the libertarian and the liberal on this tepid view of redistribution? We'll take these issues up in the next post.

Happiness

There is a way of liberating oneself from the din of petty and mundane difficulties such that one is palpably and profoundly gratified by the fact that this world exists and the fact that one is alive in it. I experience this gratitude often and every day, and it is always present as a backdrop to the course of mental events that offer both din and tune, rhyme and rancor. The backdrop depletes and deadens the din and the rancor by depriving them of their habitual sustenance: attention, concern and valuation. The backdrop is perspective. This is the perennial wisdom. (You can find it most emphatically propounded in Chuang-tzu, though also most eccentrically.) Certain meditation techniques can accomplish it.

It's amazing to me that one can be this happy. I can't see how I am not the luckiest person who has ever lived, even though I know it cannot be so.

But Chuang-tzu eccentrically neglected the virtues and good form: ways of life suited to beings such as we and therefore inextricable from happiness. He failed to see that the backdrop must be a backdrop to something worthwhile if the scene is to amount to happiness. One's actions must be good and one's virtues flourishing if one is to be happy. Certain meditation techniques can create the backdrop of supreme gratitude. Both the areteic and the gratitudinal components are necessary for happiness.

There is a theological aside here. To whom is the atheist grateful? To no one, of course. Use "glad," instead of grateful, if you like. By "grateful" for this world and one's life, I mean glad and joyously humbled by them. Neither is a God to whom one is grateful entailed nor is He ruled out. It's a theology-neutral analysis of happiness.

The Justice of Progressive Taxation

Consider a small group of people surviving in an isolated region by their labors. If the functioning of this little society necessitated that the group procure commodities (for example, materials for the construction of an aqueduct), then it would seem that each member of the group would be obligated to contribute an equal amount. It wouldn't be fair to require one of the members to contribute most of the wealth required by the group. Nor would it be fair to allow one to contribute less than a proportional fraction of the amount required by the group.

We can use this case to argue by analogy that taxation in a modern society such as America ought to be a matter of absolutely equal shares: a case that progressive taxation is wrong. Right away, we run into exceptions for children and the handicapped, of course. These are trivial cases where justice obliges us to waive the requirement of contribution. (Libertarians will say it isn't justice but charity that obliges us, but I don't wish to argue that point again.) The wealth or poverty of any individual wouldn't seem to be relevant to the amount he ought to contribute in tax, given that the success or failure in amassing wealth of any person in the small society imagined above wouldn't be relevant to the amount of aqueduct stones or mortar that he ought to contribute. There may be at the margin exceptions analogous to handicap amongst the poverty stricken: cases of bad luck similar to the impoverishment brought on by handicap, such as, for example, a man whose wealth is blown away by a tornado. Those are, again, trivial. The point is that thus far there is no prima facie requirement that the wealthy pay a greater absolute amount in tax than people in either the middle class or lower classes. Even taxation in proportion to wealth would be, prima facie, an injustice to those more wealthy than average. No, the prima facie case is for taxation in equal absolute amount.

Yet, an additional consideration weighs in. The amount procured by taxation in equal absolute amount would be insufficient for the functioning of modern and developed societies such as ours. Therefore, the matter comes down to this: Either the wealthy prefer to partake in such a society or they don't; it's at their discretion. And if they opt to do so, then as a matter of practical entailment they prefer to pay sufficiently for the functioning of the society and therefore more than the non-wealthy. In addition, the development of the society that makes it possible for people to become wealthy also supports this entailment. If one opts to get wealthy in a society of this sort, then it is because of the development and modernity that one eventually succeeds. So, again as a matter of practical entailment, one prefers to pay by opting to become rich in such a society. So, yes, the case for taxation in absolutely equal amount is defeated when we move from primitive little groups to modern and developed societies. This is the case for progressive taxation.

However, this case is severely limited in power. It holds only to the extent that the functioning of the society is the measure of sufficiency of contribution. The modern welfare state remains excluded by the original prima facie case because it moves well beyond societal functioning. Moreover, there is no good argument that the wealthy ought to provide for the food, housing, healthcare, etc. of the non-wealthy. Rawls's case is the best and it fails.

Therefore, currently the wealthy are required to pay more than their fair share in the U.S., since they are required to purchase a welfare state for the non-wealthy. The position held by many that they ought to pay still more is a non-starter.

This is the case from economic justice in favor of abolishing the welfare state. There are weightier considerations against the welfare state, such as the case from the danger of big, centralized government and the case from the morally corrosive effects of such government. We can consider those cases some other time.

The McCain - Conservative Spat in the GOP: Facts

1. The spat is a sign of vibrant health, not dysfunction. It's a sign of a party with a big tent and a large set of precious values the correct ways of adherence to which are not easy to discern. This is a heritage of values amongst which we are meant to dispute, and the dispute can wax rancorous proportionately to the preciousness of the values at stake and the difficulty of negotiating their trade-offs. In contrast, the leftist party is devoid of vibrant philosophy and therefore there is only a drone about two or three egalitarian and pacifist shibboleths where a deliberation should be.
2. McCain is a conservative of mediocre judgment. That's the bottom line in the present dispute over his worthiness as a candidate. Neither staunch McCain supporters nor his vociferous detractors will agree with me. But I'm right. Any conservative with good judgment should, upon reflection and in a cool hour, be able to tell that this is so. The evidence that he is a conservative is conclusive. The evidence that he has made many bad calls is also conclusive.
   
3. The GOP did not put up an excellent conservative candidate. Therefore, the conservatives in the party did not get robbed.
   
4. Any intent of conservatives not to vote in November when the candidate is McCain is patently irrational. It's understandable, and I succumbed to it a few days ago myself. But it is irrational. To use it as a political bludgeon, as a threat meant to pull McCain toward conservative positions on pain of losing conservative votes, is to practice Mutual Assured Destruction. It is to threaten to do something irrational. If they persist in the threats even after having "calmed down" and reflected for a while, then ironically it is they who are the RINO's. More importantly, they are ideologues in the negative sense of that term, lacking in political or practical intelligence beyond the abstract conservative ideas. They are as poor conservatives as McCain.
   
5. Any non-conservative supporters of McCain who want conservative Republicans to shut up and drop their objections at this time are also RINO's. See point #1.
   

Don't want to be a RINO? Then support McCain and raise any conservative objections to his record that you have. Raise them vociferously and acerbically if you like. Or if you have no objections to McCain's record, then review the objections of conservatives who do and reply to them or admit that they are right.

I Won't Pay

When Clinton installs a mechanism by which to garnish my wages in order to force me to purchase health insurance, I would like to know who would be willing to garnish them. Would you? You know, at your computer in the Department of Healthcare Services. With your mouse.

Or if I am paid in cash and keep this cash in my house, who would be willing to kick in my door in order to extract the appropriate sum?

Any Clinton supporter who believes that doing these deeds would be morally reprehensible should consider whether voting for Clinton is not, by the same token, equally morally reprehensible.

To the rest of Clinton supporters I say this: I won't pay.

Calmed Down a Bit, Thank You

I've overcome my little spate of melancholy. To withhold one's vote from McCain next November is indeed to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, given the elderliness of many Supreme Court Justices. I let a little despair about the health of the GOP cloud my vision of that point.

Holding One's Nose and Voting

Of course, there's a time for it. Namely, most of the time. Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Avoiding foolish idealism. That sort of thing. It's all well and good.

However, there comes a point in the progression of a political system's dysfunction where both candidates are so bad that the fact that one is not quite as bad as the other becomes insignificant. It rather becomes time to stop supporting the system because the system is sick. Here I'm talking about the Democrat-Republican party system. With enough voters abstaining from voting for either of the major candidates, a signal is given that there is room for a new political party. The signal would be clearer if like-minded abstainers would write in the same name.

I'm a conservative. I can't vote for McCain or the Democrats. Don't want to write in George Washington. Too august a figure. Nor Thomas Jefferson, my hometown hero.

I will write in John Adams this November, in the event of a contest between McCain and the Democrats. If you are of like mind, I suggest you write in Adams, too, and suggest to your like-minded friends that they consider doing so, as well.

I dream of a puzzled TV news anchor reporting that so-and-so is our new president but that there seems to have been one million write-ins reported for John Adams. Energetic individuals who might start a conservative party would take note of the opening.

UPDATE: I was wrong. As Hugh Hewitt has been arguing, it is significantly preferable that McCain pick the next half-dozen Supreme Court justices than that Obama or Clinton do so. My mistake.

Goldberg and the Conservative View of Deliberation

A few years ago, Jonah Goldberg had an insight into the conservative view of moral and political deliberation. He included it in his recent book, to the delight of one of his readers:

I have to say though, that I think one of my favorite sentences in the whole book is when you say, "But what the conservative understands is that progress comes from working out inconsistencies within our tradition, not by throwing it away." That is the conservatism I love and I wish more people understood this basic principle.

Coherentism is a little-known view in normative ethics, best articulated on this blog and also in Alan H. Goldman's books on ethics. I don't believe Goldman, my dissertation advisor, ever saw his way clear to conservatism, but it is an intrinsically conservative position, as Goldberg apparently recognizes. I think that coherentism (I've also called it common-senseism) is the best moral theory. It is also the best theory of conservative deliberation over matters moral and political, an issue which is motivated by the questions, What distinguishes a reactionary from a conservative? and How can one be conservative and change one's moral or political opinion when reason requires it? Coherentism carries a lot of weight and does so quite successfully. So, I admired Goldberg's having reaching a similar conclusion, although he hasn't developed it in any detail or depth. That's the philosopher's job.

Here are posts which develop this moral philosophy of conservatism:

Here's one.
Here's a second.
Here's a third.
Here's a fourth.
Here's a fifth.
Here's a sixth.

Walzer’s Use of Moral Dilemmas in "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands"

Walzer attempts to prove that moral dilemmas cannot be dissolved by either intuitionist or utilitarian models of moral judgment. The intuitionist would like to show that in a dilemma one can just tell the right thing to do; it is simply and clearly overriding in weight when compared to alternative courses of action. But this view is inconsistent with the fact that one must be able to explain and justify one’s determination of what is right. The utilitarian must take the moral rules, which dilemmas require that we violate, as either mere rules of thumb or hard-and-fast dispositions which we must cling to as more reliable than our faculties of judgment. But rules of thumb are mere heuristics with no intrinsic moral weight and are therefore quite unlike the regrettably foregone horns of the dilemmas we decide. And if the rules are strong dispositions, then utilitarianism, if true, is a truth that may not be divulged, lest it destroy the disposition needed to follow it - a prospect which is absurd.

So, Walzer argues that there really are moral dilemmas. These are more than tough cases to judge. Call them “hard dilemmas:” cases in which neither of the alternative courses of action is permissible, and you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Politicians who face them and make momentous decisions therefore necessarily commit crimes and should be punished for them. Only if by the course they have chosen they have succeeded in “eliminating social classes” or “deny[ing] power and glory to the greatest liars” may they be excused and escape punishment.

Or so Walzer argues. His subject is political action such as conduction war. He means to argue that the politicians who must face the war’s terrible dilemmas and decide who is to die should be punished for whichever decision they take, except in certain cases, as listed above.

It’s interesting that Walzer has arranged it so that all politicians should be punished except those who succeed in achieving Walzer’s preferred egalitarian goals. In any event, the argument for moral dilemmas is lacking. It is obvious that people who have decided moral dilemmas have been able to give reasons for their decisions, reasons which do not bear any mark of a commitment to utilitarianism. They show that one horn of the dilemma was the right one because of the case’s similarities to other, less controversial or even non-controversial cases. Common sense moral reasoning works. For Walzer to overlook what it has to offer and imply that only two arcane academic theories are on the table is fatal to his argument. So, intuitionism and utilitarianism cannot dissolve moral dilemmas. This doesn’t mean that common-sense moral reasoning cannot.

Of course, there are cases in which neither alternative course of action can be shown to be on balance morally better than the other. But Walzer offers no argument that even these are hard dilemmas. In fact, the concept of a hard dilemma is incoherent. For the notion that both alternative courses are both right and wrong is incoherent. Instead, there are soft dilemmas, in which it is strictly permissible to take either one course or the other, and not also impermissible. For example, in the case in which the lifeguard can save only one of two drowning swimmers, we have no reason to think that either course of action is wrong, as well as right; instead, either is simply right. Walzer, as the champion of hard dilemmas, bears the burden of showing that they are not incoherent. Merely challenging other theories to show that they are reducible to soft dilemmas is no argument at all but rather a confusion.

Yet, I owe Walzer my own explanation of the tragedy of some moral dilemmas, so as to provide an error theory for his confusion. Some moral dilemmas – call these “grave moral dilemmas” - require an indecent act, but not, contrary to Walzer’s view, a crime. Indecent acts, so commonplace in war, are the kind of acts that, while not morally wrong, are not enjoyable to undertake by a man of virtuous character. These acts require doing great harm and a virtuous character therefore undertakes them with melancholy. This is why moral dilemmas can seem to Walzer to require a crime; they merely require an act that, unlike other right acts, cannot be rightly enjoyed by the agent. The agent doesn’t have the guilt of a crime on his shoulders. He does have a duty to do what is repugnant to his virtuous character. The difference between grave moral dilemmas and run-of-the-mill trade-offs and compromises countenanced in moral reasoning is that the grave dilemmas are cases in which great evil must be done. This explains the special momentousness of these dilemmas. They entail that the agent must do what is almost always considered a great crime. The human character, when virtuous, is by nature repulsed by them. Usually for such a character to act rightly is enjoyable. But not in these cases.

Politicians who send soldiers and civilians to their deaths when confronted by grave moral dilemmas are not by that fact criminals. The fact that Walzer used a shoddy argument to portray them as criminals only to excuse the few whose courses of action promoted his favorite political ends strikes me as sophistical.

John Ray's Blog

To my delight, I see John Ray is still blogging. Click over to begin dissecting!