But even if it were not, the allegedly natural and allegedly God-given right to self-defense would neither be nor entail either a right to do so with a gun or a right to own a gun.
Yes, Gun Ownership Is a God-Given Right
Rich Lowry.
Showing posts with label amoralism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amoralism. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2019
Saturday, July 13, 2019
When politicians turn moral philosopher
Someone once spoke of the concept of human rights as an essentially contested concept: whether there are any, what they are rights to or against, which rights truly exist and how we are to know that, whose or what's actions or behavior - if anyone's or anything's - are supposed to comport with, honor, guarantee, or fulfill them, and what all such talk could even mean.
Quite true, and that is because it is an empty concept, other than in its legal use, a mere mystification helpful in securing obedience or deference.
And it is abundantly clear that this is, has been all along, and must be a political contest, far too important to be left to the philosophers.
And so, of course, it never has been.
Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights
For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.
Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.”
. . . .
The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights.
It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict.
It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.
So what is Pompeo’s game when he asks, “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?” and continues, “How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity?”
The author of the article, Roger Cohen, affirms his faith as a true modern liberal believer,
Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being.
They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none.
That is not at all, and is flatly contrary to, what the Declaration of Independence, a key American founding document, says, though it is not at all contrary to every traditional, Enlightenment, or contemporary view of the question.
They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it.
They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.
The United States, through the State Department and other means, has been a consistent advocate for these rights.
The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.
In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
I am not suggesting that Pompeo wants to go back there, but the “natural” rights of 1776 are not the human rights the United States helped codify in 1948.
In 1995, Hillary Clinton declared, “Women’s rights are human rights” and, 16 years later, “Gay rights are human rights.”
Quite true, and that is because it is an empty concept, other than in its legal use, a mere mystification helpful in securing obedience or deference.
And it is abundantly clear that this is, has been all along, and must be a political contest, far too important to be left to the philosophers.
And so, of course, it never has been.
Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights
For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.
Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.”
. . . .
The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights.
It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict.
It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.
So what is Pompeo’s game when he asks, “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?” and continues, “How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity?”
The author of the article, Roger Cohen, affirms his faith as a true modern liberal believer,
Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being.
They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none.
That is not at all, and is flatly contrary to, what the Declaration of Independence, a key American founding document, says, though it is not at all contrary to every traditional, Enlightenment, or contemporary view of the question.
They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it.
They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.
The United States, through the State Department and other means, has been a consistent advocate for these rights.
The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.
In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
I am not suggesting that Pompeo wants to go back there, but the “natural” rights of 1776 are not the human rights the United States helped codify in 1948.
In 1995, Hillary Clinton declared, “Women’s rights are human rights” and, 16 years later, “Gay rights are human rights.”
. . . .
As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage.
Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.
Cohen admits he really has no idea where this is going, but he is very alarmed and, given his politics, he probably should be.
It is doubtful this commission will endorse the idea the Founders or the founding documents contain or endorse half the rights currently urged by liberals, or even all the rights contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Nor is it likely to urge that we should endorse or support them, all the same, in any theoretical or practical way.
Here is more.
“International institutions designed and built to protect human rights have drifted from their original mission,” Mr. Pompeo said.
“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect.”
The announcement, along with a blunt commentary by Mr. Pompeo that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, raised worries among human rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers that Mr. Pompeo is moving to curtail State Department advocacy for some rights, particularly ones related to women’s health and reproduction and gay and transgender issues.
Some House Democrats are pushing a measure that would block State Department funding from being used for the commission, which falls under the agency’s policy planning office.
“This commission risks undermining many international human rights norms that the United States helped establish, including L.G.B.T.Q.I. rights and other critical human rights protections around the world,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Mr. Pompeo is an evangelical Christian who is open about how his religious beliefs help shape actions and policies.
In March, Mr. Pompeo said the United States would withhold funding from foreign nongovernmental organizations that give money to foreign groups that perform abortions.
. . . .
Last month, officials in Washington told some American embassies not to fly gay pride flags after diplomats had asked to do so.
By contrast, in 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, proclaimed in a speech that “gay rights are human rights.”
On Monday, Mr. Pompeo said: “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?
"How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored?”
Here is more.
“International institutions designed and built to protect human rights have drifted from their original mission,” Mr. Pompeo said.
“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect.”
The announcement, along with a blunt commentary by Mr. Pompeo that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, raised worries among human rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers that Mr. Pompeo is moving to curtail State Department advocacy for some rights, particularly ones related to women’s health and reproduction and gay and transgender issues.
Some House Democrats are pushing a measure that would block State Department funding from being used for the commission, which falls under the agency’s policy planning office.
“This commission risks undermining many international human rights norms that the United States helped establish, including L.G.B.T.Q.I. rights and other critical human rights protections around the world,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Mr. Pompeo is an evangelical Christian who is open about how his religious beliefs help shape actions and policies.
In March, Mr. Pompeo said the United States would withhold funding from foreign nongovernmental organizations that give money to foreign groups that perform abortions.
. . . .
Last month, officials in Washington told some American embassies not to fly gay pride flags after diplomats had asked to do so.
By contrast, in 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, proclaimed in a speech that “gay rights are human rights.”
On Monday, Mr. Pompeo said: “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?
"How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored?”
Sunday, June 9, 2019
The Difference Principle
Rawls.
The difference principle is the second part of the second principle of John Rawls’s theory of justice.
The first principle requires that citizens enjoy equal basic liberties.
The first part of the second principle requires fair equality of opportunity.
These rules have priority over the difference principle; the difference principle cannot justify policies or institutions that abrogate them.
The difference principle governs the distribution of income and wealth, positions of responsibility and power, and the social bases of self-respect.
It holds that inequalities in the distribution of these goods are permissible only if they benefit the least well-off positions of society.
These are Rawls' offerings as principles of justice.
The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past four decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993).
Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5–6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)
Where the rules may conflict in practice, Rawls says that Principle (1) has lexical priority over Principle (2), and Principle (2a) has lexical priority over (2b).
It is his claim that justice requires observation of these principles.
Ignore, for the moment, the senselessness of moral claims of all sorts, including claims about what justice requires.
Is it really plausible that justice requires that any number of better off people be deprived of any amount of income or wealth to prevent deprivation of some or even all of the worse off, no matter how few they may be, of even the tiniest amounts of the same?
Apparently it was to Rawls, but it isn't and hasn't been to most others aware of the question.
No utilitarian would buy that.
And is it in the least credible that a representative flock of even no more than normally egoistic rational individuals would, in the fiction of the original position, choose a regime committed to this behind Rawl's veil of ignorance?
No, IMHO.
The difference principle is the second part of the second principle of John Rawls’s theory of justice.
The first principle requires that citizens enjoy equal basic liberties.
The first part of the second principle requires fair equality of opportunity.
These rules have priority over the difference principle; the difference principle cannot justify policies or institutions that abrogate them.
The difference principle governs the distribution of income and wealth, positions of responsibility and power, and the social bases of self-respect.
It holds that inequalities in the distribution of these goods are permissible only if they benefit the least well-off positions of society.
These are Rawls' offerings as principles of justice.
The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past four decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993).
Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:
1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5–6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)
Where the rules may conflict in practice, Rawls says that Principle (1) has lexical priority over Principle (2), and Principle (2a) has lexical priority over (2b).
It is his claim that justice requires observation of these principles.
Ignore, for the moment, the senselessness of moral claims of all sorts, including claims about what justice requires.
Is it really plausible that justice requires that any number of better off people be deprived of any amount of income or wealth to prevent deprivation of some or even all of the worse off, no matter how few they may be, of even the tiniest amounts of the same?
Apparently it was to Rawls, but it isn't and hasn't been to most others aware of the question.
No utilitarian would buy that.
And is it in the least credible that a representative flock of even no more than normally egoistic rational individuals would, in the fiction of the original position, choose a regime committed to this behind Rawl's veil of ignorance?
No, IMHO.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
"If we do that, how are we any better than those we are fighting?"
The title question is asked by people too stupid to ask it, much less answer it, about World War Two, say.
Too stupid to understand that if we don't differ on means we still differ on ends, and our ends being so much different they remove all reasonable doubt that we are different, exactly in a way that matters hugely.
And that would be true even if the Machiavellian Principle were false that for any means, no matter how bad, there is a possible purpose so good as to justify it.
Even if the Pauline Principle were true that we must never do evil that good may come.
Though of course neither is true.
No moral principle is true.
Nor indeed, is any false.
Nor indeed, is any false.
And though one still might find it better to follow - or that others follow - the one than the other, there is nothing to say preference might not vary from case to case.
Monday, September 4, 2017
The Trolley Problem in pop culture
OITNB season 5 episode 8.
Piper explains The Trolley Problem.
A runaway trolley will hit and kill 5 people down the track if you don't flip it to a siding where it would hit and kill 1 person.
Do you flip it or not?
It is generally taken for granted both that the question is a moral one and that it has a correct answer.
And consideration of the matter usually turns at once to the fact that if you do nothing the five will die, but not as the result of any act of yours; if you flip the trolley to the siding the one will die as a result of your act.
Is that a morally significant difference?
Do you think there is no obligation to save others, but there is one not to kill them?
Well, consider a case in which no one is standing on the siding.
If you do nothing the five will be killed, as before.
But this time if you flip the trolley to the siding no one will die.
Do you really think you do no wrong if you don't flip the trolley to the siding?
Piper or some other prisoner claims to expound the utilitarian answer.
If it's only consequences that are decisive, she says, then clearly you have to flip the car to the siding.
On the other hand, if it's always wrong to kill the innocent, but perhaps not always to omit to save them, . . .
Of course, none of this points to any real problem if moral skepticism is true.
Though there remains the question what to do.
Personally, I think I would flip the trolley in the absence of an established legal doctrine or commonly held moral view making that the wrong answer and punishing it at least with opprobrium.
Unless, of course, that one on the siding who ends up dead if I flip the train is near and dear to a hit man, cartel boss, or other really dangerous person.
Anyway, I think so just now.
As for the bearing of the dilemma on the episode, it's this.
The prisoners are afraid they will get no amnesty for participating in the prison riot if they don't hand over the well-liked prisoner who murdered a despicable and deranged guard.
She's the one, they're the many.
Get it?
Like their worry is that it sure seems to be morally wrong for a witness to tell the authorities which prisoner murdered a prison guard.
Er, what?
Piper explains The Trolley Problem.
A runaway trolley will hit and kill 5 people down the track if you don't flip it to a siding where it would hit and kill 1 person.
Do you flip it or not?
It is generally taken for granted both that the question is a moral one and that it has a correct answer.
And consideration of the matter usually turns at once to the fact that if you do nothing the five will die, but not as the result of any act of yours; if you flip the trolley to the siding the one will die as a result of your act.
Is that a morally significant difference?
Do you think there is no obligation to save others, but there is one not to kill them?
Well, consider a case in which no one is standing on the siding.
If you do nothing the five will be killed, as before.
But this time if you flip the trolley to the siding no one will die.
Do you really think you do no wrong if you don't flip the trolley to the siding?
Piper or some other prisoner claims to expound the utilitarian answer.
If it's only consequences that are decisive, she says, then clearly you have to flip the car to the siding.
On the other hand, if it's always wrong to kill the innocent, but perhaps not always to omit to save them, . . .
Of course, none of this points to any real problem if moral skepticism is true.
Though there remains the question what to do.
Personally, I think I would flip the trolley in the absence of an established legal doctrine or commonly held moral view making that the wrong answer and punishing it at least with opprobrium.
Unless, of course, that one on the siding who ends up dead if I flip the train is near and dear to a hit man, cartel boss, or other really dangerous person.
Anyway, I think so just now.
As for the bearing of the dilemma on the episode, it's this.
The prisoners are afraid they will get no amnesty for participating in the prison riot if they don't hand over the well-liked prisoner who murdered a despicable and deranged guard.
She's the one, they're the many.
Get it?
Like their worry is that it sure seems to be morally wrong for a witness to tell the authorities which prisoner murdered a prison guard.
Er, what?
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Pretty dark, really
Just what was Conrad up to in his Heart of Darkness, 1899.
Yes, yes.
He opposed the massive hypocrisy of imperialism.
But not necessarily imperialism, nor even colonialism, judging just by this book.
Though obviously he saw and loathed all the horror of the Congo.
Via this book, he and white people in general have nevertheless been angrily denounced for racism.
As to the latter, racism - specifically, the idea of the racial inferiority of blacks to whites - has historically been used as an excuse for the most unspeakable crimes and the most inhuman rapacity.
That doesn't make it false, though it may well be that.
And it is certainly possible Conrad believed in the racial inferiority of blacks without for a moment buying it as an excuse.
In any case, he was a profound pessimist, atheist, amoralist, and even nihilist.
So what was he up to?
And a very fine writer.
Saturday, February 4, 2017
In lieu of objective goodness
Goodness is subjective and relative, and right and wrong are a hoax.
So God's choice cannot follow objective value but only his own subjective desire.
So why does God desire what he desires?
Whence God's utility curve, so to speak?
How can it be necessarily the utility curve that a necessary and perfect being necessarily has?
If that makes no sense, God cannot be a person, and he cannot choose a world, and he cannot prefer one thing to another.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Progress in the sciences. Or philosophy.
It's a matter of connecting the dots.
If the dots aren't there, how can you connect them?
A thank you to Mackie.
Friday, December 4, 2015
How to be worthy of praise
By whom or whose standards, one might ask.
Aye, there's the rub.
Well, a rub.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Brent Bozell is full of beans
The left joyfully picked up on Bozell's bigoted eyewash.
Cooke is too soft on religion, though, on the whole.
And a sucker for natural law, even without a lawgiver.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
The death of "ought"? Not at all.
Our contemporary secularists can stand a world without God only because they don't see it as a world without morality, meaning, valid ideals, and a true common good.
Eyes firmly shut, they refuse to see these are just more delusions, more lies.
More "wheels in the head," so to speak.
But they will never see that even if they say it.
True activists are always true believers.
Reading Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists.
7/3, I've read enough to regret buying it.
Phooey.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
James Holmes "legally sane"
In a nutshell, that means he knows, and knew at the time, "right from wrong."
Imagine that.
Could the law possibly be more archaic, delusional, or absurd?
The moral faith could not be more deeply embedded in the legal systems and traditions of the Occident.
US gunman deemed 'legally sane'
When asked whether Mr Holmes had "the capacity to know right from wrong", whether he had the capacity to form the intent to act and whether he met the legal definition of sanity at the time of the shooting, Dr Reid answered "yes" to all.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
The social value of religion, revisited
Christianity is Dying
The prisons have always been full of believers and the hangmen have always been plentifully supplied with religious material on which to exercise their craft.
That has been enough to satisfy some religious skeptics among the learned that Locke, Voltaire, and Gibbon were mistaken in supposing religion has a useful, taming and socializing effect on the human beast.
All the same, the claim has been and still is made that religion is good and even necessary for society because it is a bulwark of morality, itself crucial to the social order.
The popularity of the sexual revolution has thrown a different light on the morals taught by the churches, making religion appear a machine of cruelly intolerant repression, as Hemant Mehta points out.
But, on the other hand, in the modern world children are a burden and an economic liability, with the result that in the presence of lawful contraception and abortion (and, soon, infanticide?) and the absence of socially upheld idealizations of and aspirations for parenthood in a context of morally and legally durable heterosexual nuclear families defined as the only acceptable setting for either sex or parenthood, fertility rates in advanced societies have fallen chronically below replacement level.
Thus it is shown that religious morals are indeed crucial to the survival of social life, though not because they keep us from killing and robbing each other in the war of all against all but because they keep us making families in which to have and raise children.
In brief, the denigration of homosexuality and indeed all sex outside marriage along with the shotgun wedding and many other moral and legal policies totally inimical to the sexual revolution and the personal, sexual freedom it privileges have historically been and continue to be, in the end, crucial to the self-perpetuation of most societies.
The primal horde is the exception, and the matriarchal societies not far removed from it, only because contraception is absent, safe abortion unavailable, infanticide forbidden, economic life simple, and there is so little to culture that it can be reliably passed on even when children are raised, so to speak, in the street, by anybody and nobody.
Hence the increasing reliance of the modern, antinatalist global North on the all-too-natalist global South to keep up population levels.
The prisons have always been full of believers and the hangmen have always been plentifully supplied with religious material on which to exercise their craft.
That has been enough to satisfy some religious skeptics among the learned that Locke, Voltaire, and Gibbon were mistaken in supposing religion has a useful, taming and socializing effect on the human beast.
All the same, the claim has been and still is made that religion is good and even necessary for society because it is a bulwark of morality, itself crucial to the social order.
The popularity of the sexual revolution has thrown a different light on the morals taught by the churches, making religion appear a machine of cruelly intolerant repression, as Hemant Mehta points out.
But, on the other hand, in the modern world children are a burden and an economic liability, with the result that in the presence of lawful contraception and abortion (and, soon, infanticide?) and the absence of socially upheld idealizations of and aspirations for parenthood in a context of morally and legally durable heterosexual nuclear families defined as the only acceptable setting for either sex or parenthood, fertility rates in advanced societies have fallen chronically below replacement level.
Thus it is shown that religious morals are indeed crucial to the survival of social life, though not because they keep us from killing and robbing each other in the war of all against all but because they keep us making families in which to have and raise children.
In brief, the denigration of homosexuality and indeed all sex outside marriage along with the shotgun wedding and many other moral and legal policies totally inimical to the sexual revolution and the personal, sexual freedom it privileges have historically been and continue to be, in the end, crucial to the self-perpetuation of most societies.
The primal horde is the exception, and the matriarchal societies not far removed from it, only because contraception is absent, safe abortion unavailable, infanticide forbidden, economic life simple, and there is so little to culture that it can be reliably passed on even when children are raised, so to speak, in the street, by anybody and nobody.
Hence the increasing reliance of the modern, antinatalist global North on the all-too-natalist global South to keep up population levels.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Those other religious hypocrites
Closeted atheist clergy and our new age of radical transparency
A naturalistic explanation of religion?
Kids believe what their parents tell them.
Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, God.
Parents tell them a lot of rot, themselves believing or pretending to believe what their parents told them, or what power insists on.
Not very different from a correct naturalistic explanation of morals, though you might not realize it from the various quite different explanations for these social phenomena offered by persons of scientific expertise.
Explain gullibility.
Explain lying.
Explain coercion.
A naturalistic explanation of religion?
Kids believe what their parents tell them.
Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, God.
Parents tell them a lot of rot, themselves believing or pretending to believe what their parents told them, or what power insists on.
Not very different from a correct naturalistic explanation of morals, though you might not realize it from the various quite different explanations for these social phenomena offered by persons of scientific expertise.
Explain gullibility.
Explain lying.
Explain coercion.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
There's more at stake
Churches will be required to do same-sex weddings, as will clergy.
One way or another, that's where it's going.
Questions For Indiana’s Critics
When they told you "Of course that will never happen" they were lying.
On the other hand, the conservatives are lying now when they claim it's not about the liberty to discriminate.
That is the issue when Christians refuse to participate in any way with gay marriages.
And that is also the issue when Christian motel owners refuse to rent rooms to un-married heterosexual couples or to persons of the same sex they suspect of being homosexual couples.
Liberals rightly point out that many people in the past and perhaps some even now wish to discriminate in similar ways against couples of mixed race, citing religious reasons.
Of course, they also denounce such people as abusing religion to hide bigotry, eerily echoing Obama's liberal propaganda that Islamic terrorists are hijacking, abusing, or lying that their activities have a religious sanction.
But the basic point is right.
What's at stake here is the freedom to discriminate, supported by an alleged right to do so for religious reasons and opposed by an alleged right not to be discriminated against.
Guess which moral allegation cuts ice, today?
One way or another, that's where it's going.
Questions For Indiana’s Critics
When they told you "Of course that will never happen" they were lying.
On the other hand, the conservatives are lying now when they claim it's not about the liberty to discriminate.
That is the issue when Christians refuse to participate in any way with gay marriages.
And that is also the issue when Christian motel owners refuse to rent rooms to un-married heterosexual couples or to persons of the same sex they suspect of being homosexual couples.
Liberals rightly point out that many people in the past and perhaps some even now wish to discriminate in similar ways against couples of mixed race, citing religious reasons.
Of course, they also denounce such people as abusing religion to hide bigotry, eerily echoing Obama's liberal propaganda that Islamic terrorists are hijacking, abusing, or lying that their activities have a religious sanction.
But the basic point is right.
What's at stake here is the freedom to discriminate, supported by an alleged right to do so for religious reasons and opposed by an alleged right not to be discriminated against.
Guess which moral allegation cuts ice, today?
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Looks like not
I have spent some time browsing material at his site and it looks like Richard Joyce's view is not the same as mine, the view I have given glimpses of in the various posts on this blog labeled "amoralism" or "nihilism," and sometimes referred to as "moral skepticism."
Very interesting, though.
Joyce
My view, or central parts of it.
Very interesting, though.
Joyce
My view, or central parts of it.
About objectivity in morals
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie, 1977.
Mackie thinks that moral judgments purport to ascribe objective traits, and in this I think he is right.
And just as, for example, actions may be clumsy, ill-timed, opportune, inept, quick, or painless, they purportedly may have the traits purportedly ascribed, for example, by “right” or “wrong” quite apart from any affective or conative relation in which they might stand to us, to anyone, or to everyone.
But while he is also right in supposing that moral judgments purport to express overriding, or at least enormously weighty, reasons for or against whatever they concern, he is mistaken, I think, in accepting the philosophers’ extravagance that the purported moral traits must themselves be or purportedly are intrinsically action-guiding and prescriptive.
Indeed, he thinks this is what is distinctive about supposed moral traits, and then argues from these features that such traits must not really exist.
[A]though most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.
It is this that makes the name “moral skepticism” appropriate.
(Penguin pelican pb edition, 1978, page 35)
His chief argument against the existence of moral traits, thus characterized, is that thus characterized they would be very strange, indeed, and to know which things had or did not have such traits we would need a special and exotic faculty of knowledge built, as it were, for the purpose.
For instance, writing specifically of Plato’s Form of the Good, he says this (page 40).
Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of objective values would have to be.
The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursues it.
An objective good would be sought by anyone acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it.
Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it.
For the coup-de-grace he explains the supposed property of wrongness would have to supervene upon the possession of natural properties like deliberate cruelty and then huffs and puffs that supervenience is itself too queer to endure.
But, as I said, I think he is quite mistaken in going so far.
And by the way, Mackie appeals to these alleged characteristics of purported moral traits to argue that meta-ethical naturalism, the view that moral terms in moral use denote “natural” properties like, for instance, being conducive to the best balance of pleasure over pain, no matter whose, cannot be right since no natural property itself has the requisite properties of to-be-doneness, etc.
But it is better to simply argue with respect to any natural trait alleged to be the topic of moral judgments that that’s just not what anybody, except by idiosyncratic stipulation, actually means, which is clearly true.
Mackie thinks that moral judgments purport to ascribe objective traits, and in this I think he is right.
And just as, for example, actions may be clumsy, ill-timed, opportune, inept, quick, or painless, they purportedly may have the traits purportedly ascribed, for example, by “right” or “wrong” quite apart from any affective or conative relation in which they might stand to us, to anyone, or to everyone.
But while he is also right in supposing that moral judgments purport to express overriding, or at least enormously weighty, reasons for or against whatever they concern, he is mistaken, I think, in accepting the philosophers’ extravagance that the purported moral traits must themselves be or purportedly are intrinsically action-guiding and prescriptive.
Indeed, he thinks this is what is distinctive about supposed moral traits, and then argues from these features that such traits must not really exist.
[A]though most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.
It is this that makes the name “moral skepticism” appropriate.
(Penguin pelican pb edition, 1978, page 35)
His chief argument against the existence of moral traits, thus characterized, is that thus characterized they would be very strange, indeed, and to know which things had or did not have such traits we would need a special and exotic faculty of knowledge built, as it were, for the purpose.
For instance, writing specifically of Plato’s Form of the Good, he says this (page 40).
Plato’s Forms give a dramatic picture of objective values would have to be.
The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive; something’s being good both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursues it.
An objective good would be sought by anyone acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it.
Similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it.
For the coup-de-grace he explains the supposed property of wrongness would have to supervene upon the possession of natural properties like deliberate cruelty and then huffs and puffs that supervenience is itself too queer to endure.
But, as I said, I think he is quite mistaken in going so far.
And by the way, Mackie appeals to these alleged characteristics of purported moral traits to argue that meta-ethical naturalism, the view that moral terms in moral use denote “natural” properties like, for instance, being conducive to the best balance of pleasure over pain, no matter whose, cannot be right since no natural property itself has the requisite properties of to-be-doneness, etc.
But it is better to simply argue with respect to any natural trait alleged to be the topic of moral judgments that that’s just not what anybody, except by idiosyncratic stipulation, actually means, which is clearly true.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Some points about Mackie's moral skepticism and my own
Mackie holds the following in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
His own moral skepticism is the claim that there are no objective values.
An account of values should treat all alike, moral, non-moral, aesthetic, and any others
The thesis at issue is ontological; theses about meaning follow to suit.
Moral skepticism is a 2nd order view.
First order moral skepticism is either the view that “all morality is tripe” or that conventional morality is deeply immoral.
Moral claims like “rape is wrong” entail assertions about properties like “rape has the property of wrongness (the property something has just in case it is wrong).”
(A nominalist would not accept that, but never mind.)
Assuming Russellism about descriptions, that no such property exists, and modus tollens, moral claims turn out to be false.
Mackie offers a detailed characterization of what, as he thinks, moral properties would have to be like in order for moral truths to have the practical significance they are generally thought to have.
He argues that no such properties exist or could exist (he evidently thinks the first does not entail the second).
It seems to be his view that if properties of that description did exist they would be what moral terms in moral use denote.
I hold the following in various posts on this blog.
My moral skepticism is the claim that moral terms in moral use fail to denote, though they purportedly denote.
My account does not treat all value judgments alike, handling moral claims one way (“taboo theory”) and judgments of non-moral value another (subjective naturalism).
My theses are semantic; ontological issues such as his are interestingly related but not primary
Moral skepticism (whether his or mine) is a 2nd order view.
First order moral skepticism is the belief that moral assertions, common ones if not all, are all false.
The belief that moral claims like “rape is wrong” entail explicit property ascriptions like “rape has the property that something has just in case it is wrong” is part of the moral delusion (though not for nominalists, I suppose).
Both quoted expressions contain a moral term – “wrong” – in moral use and so are meaningless and hence neither true nor false.
Mackie’s position seems incoherent.
Consider that if there is no such property as wrongness then either “wrong” denotes something else or it fails to denote.
Mackie would agree the former is out of the question, and the latter entails that moral claims are meaningless, not false.
Most people who concern themselves with such things seem to think that properties are necessary.
The characterization he offers is fairly broad and drawn from common beliefs about the practical import of moral truths.
Mackie gives no argument why there could not be many such properties, even well-known and readily discernible to us, while moral terms in moral use nevertheless fail to denote.
His own moral skepticism is the claim that there are no objective values.
An account of values should treat all alike, moral, non-moral, aesthetic, and any others
The thesis at issue is ontological; theses about meaning follow to suit.
Moral skepticism is a 2nd order view.
First order moral skepticism is either the view that “all morality is tripe” or that conventional morality is deeply immoral.
Moral claims like “rape is wrong” entail assertions about properties like “rape has the property of wrongness (the property something has just in case it is wrong).”
(A nominalist would not accept that, but never mind.)
Assuming Russellism about descriptions, that no such property exists, and modus tollens, moral claims turn out to be false.
Mackie offers a detailed characterization of what, as he thinks, moral properties would have to be like in order for moral truths to have the practical significance they are generally thought to have.
He argues that no such properties exist or could exist (he evidently thinks the first does not entail the second).
It seems to be his view that if properties of that description did exist they would be what moral terms in moral use denote.
I hold the following in various posts on this blog.
My moral skepticism is the claim that moral terms in moral use fail to denote, though they purportedly denote.
My account does not treat all value judgments alike, handling moral claims one way (“taboo theory”) and judgments of non-moral value another (subjective naturalism).
My theses are semantic; ontological issues such as his are interestingly related but not primary
Moral skepticism (whether his or mine) is a 2nd order view.
First order moral skepticism is the belief that moral assertions, common ones if not all, are all false.
The belief that moral claims like “rape is wrong” entail explicit property ascriptions like “rape has the property that something has just in case it is wrong” is part of the moral delusion (though not for nominalists, I suppose).
Both quoted expressions contain a moral term – “wrong” – in moral use and so are meaningless and hence neither true nor false.
Mackie’s position seems incoherent.
Consider that if there is no such property as wrongness then either “wrong” denotes something else or it fails to denote.
Mackie would agree the former is out of the question, and the latter entails that moral claims are meaningless, not false.
Most people who concern themselves with such things seem to think that properties are necessary.
The characterization he offers is fairly broad and drawn from common beliefs about the practical import of moral truths.
Mackie gives no argument why there could not be many such properties, even well-known and readily discernible to us, while moral terms in moral use nevertheless fail to denote.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Bogeyman
Could be the best episode so far of a series that seems better than the book it’s based on.
Backstrom is less anti-PC, less clownish, less a joke or the butt of jokes, and more House-like than he has been.
No comedy this time, but the outcome in which Backstrom is shown to have erred by overestimating the evil at hand is only an aspect of the show’s numerous weekly and sometimes seemingly ambivalent concessions to an American audience that requires God, an afterlife, and the triumph of good at the end of every hour, even when the title character is an atheist with a considerably darker view of things than that.
(Remember the cowardly and dramatically absurd ending of the first season of True Detective?)
In that regard the show is almost as flabby as Inherit the Wind, a brilliant and relentless attack on American Protestant fundamentalism with a disappointing ending in which the religious liberalism of Bert Cates (a fictionalized John Scopes) triumphs in the person of Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) over the atheist nihilism of E. K. Hornbeck (H. L. Mencken).
Our culture may be getting less Christian and more secular every day, but it may turn out that while we will surrender God, the Devil, human immortality, and the soul we will never give up our view of human life as an epic of moral conflict in which the righteous ultimately win all or most of the episodic battles, or anyway those we are forced to watch.
Powerful testimony to the enduring, if partial, dominance of a mythic view of the world as old, at least, as Zoroaster.
When we give that up, if ever, we will finally have given up the myth of meaning.
Backstrom is less anti-PC, less clownish, less a joke or the butt of jokes, and more House-like than he has been.
No comedy this time, but the outcome in which Backstrom is shown to have erred by overestimating the evil at hand is only an aspect of the show’s numerous weekly and sometimes seemingly ambivalent concessions to an American audience that requires God, an afterlife, and the triumph of good at the end of every hour, even when the title character is an atheist with a considerably darker view of things than that.
(Remember the cowardly and dramatically absurd ending of the first season of True Detective?)
In that regard the show is almost as flabby as Inherit the Wind, a brilliant and relentless attack on American Protestant fundamentalism with a disappointing ending in which the religious liberalism of Bert Cates (a fictionalized John Scopes) triumphs in the person of Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) over the atheist nihilism of E. K. Hornbeck (H. L. Mencken).
Our culture may be getting less Christian and more secular every day, but it may turn out that while we will surrender God, the Devil, human immortality, and the soul we will never give up our view of human life as an epic of moral conflict in which the righteous ultimately win all or most of the episodic battles, or anyway those we are forced to watch.
Powerful testimony to the enduring, if partial, dominance of a mythic view of the world as old, at least, as Zoroaster.
When we give that up, if ever, we will finally have given up the myth of meaning.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
TV has a new bad boy.
To TV’s pair of outspoken atheists has been added a cranky young homicide dick and slob, Backstrom.
He joins Doctor Gregory House and Patrick Jane, the former a brilliant diagnostician and mean pig anyone would rather shoot than work for and the latter a sociopathic ex-confidence man and murderer.
You get the idea.
All three are more outspoken about their personal beliefs – atheism, nihilism – than anyone is apt to find real occasion to be in a normal work environment, even to the point of being rather aggressive, each in his own degree.
I have no idea why TV-land persists in creating such characters, but the same writers who make them more than a bit louche feel the need to sometimes have some mouthpiece for The Common Man, The Ordinary Good American, give him a piece of his credulous, meaning-loving, God-needing, something-greater-than-ourselves-clinging, and very mushy mind.
Which always leaves the bad boy crestfallen and defeated with no smart-mouth backtalk, nothing to say.
Dr. Deb in episode 3.
Update, 02212015.
How did I forget Elementary's Sherlock Holmes?
I watch it all the time, and still.
Perhaps because as the series has progressed the scripts have simply left out reference to such things, much as The Mentalist in later episodes pretty much ignored Jane's atheism, his criminal past, his murder, his present crimes, and his sociopathy.
He joins Doctor Gregory House and Patrick Jane, the former a brilliant diagnostician and mean pig anyone would rather shoot than work for and the latter a sociopathic ex-confidence man and murderer.
You get the idea.
All three are more outspoken about their personal beliefs – atheism, nihilism – than anyone is apt to find real occasion to be in a normal work environment, even to the point of being rather aggressive, each in his own degree.
I have no idea why TV-land persists in creating such characters, but the same writers who make them more than a bit louche feel the need to sometimes have some mouthpiece for The Common Man, The Ordinary Good American, give him a piece of his credulous, meaning-loving, God-needing, something-greater-than-ourselves-clinging, and very mushy mind.
Which always leaves the bad boy crestfallen and defeated with no smart-mouth backtalk, nothing to say.
Dr. Deb in episode 3.
Update, 02212015.
How did I forget Elementary's Sherlock Holmes?
I watch it all the time, and still.
Perhaps because as the series has progressed the scripts have simply left out reference to such things, much as The Mentalist in later episodes pretty much ignored Jane's atheism, his criminal past, his murder, his present crimes, and his sociopathy.
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