For every means there is an end . . .

.  .  .  that would justify its use.

That seems to be the universal conviction of the principals on The Expanse.

And it is truly a sincere moral view.

A long way from the all but universal left commitment to Just War theory - because of or despite its dependence on the Doctrine of Double Effect - and the idea of war crimes.

Moral bookkeeping without God

The Expanse, season 3.

Asked if a truly good act at the end of life can make up for some or all of the evil done earlier, Ashford, a soi-disant atheist, says he likes to think so.

Make up for without make up to.

Gratitude without providence

Or, "Count your blessings and be glad of them" for atheists.

Epicurus advises that in old age, infirmity, or ill health we take pleasure in the grateful recollection of past times of pleasure and happiness, rather than bemoaning our current miseries or short and awful prospects.

But there is no providence in Epicurus' view, and so this is not a case of being grateful to, but only of being grateful that.

There need not be anyone to thank, you see.

And that is a most interesting observation, from a man who died so painfully.

The dirtiest and the most dangerous source of energy available

is nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy and nuclear power are filthy and dangerous spinoff technologies meant as moral whitewashes for the one and only actual use for nuclear tech, insanely destructive and filthy nuclear weapons.

And they are irrefutable proof of the absurd idiocy and viciousness of the human race.

Just saying.

Stuff and nonsense

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.

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.” 

. . . .

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?”

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.

"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.

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.

The disappearance of education

And its replacement by voc-ed training.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world, though it did not earn me a penny.

My BA in Philosophy (with unofficial minors in Theology and English), my two (two!) MAs and my ABD in the same.

Never did finish a dissertation.

Didn't especially want to teach.

My working life has been in the Socratic and Cyrenaic-Stoic tradition.

Find some not too distressful job a decent, self-respecting man who means no harm can do, that pays enough.

For me, more than a tub, less than a McMansion.

Myth. Science. Whatever. Wheels in the head.

We human beings have an irresistible need to think we've got it all figured out.

And so we always do.

Meaning is bullshit

Not a word about the meaning of life before the 19th Century.

The whole idea is vacuous bullshit.

The question whether life has meaning, or what it might be, is meaningless.

Man's Search for Meaning?

Poppycock.

And, yes, that makes absurdism rather absurd.

Up to a point.

The burden of proof

Personally, I think it is such obvious gibberish even at first blush that the burden of proof is entirely on them to show it is not utter nonsense.

The moral vocabulary in moral use.

What is greater than ourselves

Humans follow reason, but are readily deceived into thinking there are valid and compelling reasons requiring the sacrifice of all we hold near and dear, as understood by empirical egoism.

Hence morality.

Hence religion.

Humans believe too readily.

The Elf on the Shelf.

Trotskyism.

Nazism.

Islam.

The necessity of bullshit

As I have said before, laws are commands backed by force and government is force backed by bullshit.

The bullshit is crucial, and that it is believed is crucial.

And the more democratic the state the more necessary the bullshit, and the more necessary the bullshit is believed.

And the more awful must be the believed wickedness and consequences of the most tempting crimes.

How else maintain a regime that forbids and punishes both infanticide and abortion, for example? 

How else force on recalcitrant, selfish, brutal, and cruel humanity a more humane social order, protecting the very weakest?

Eternal, hopeless damnation, anyone?

On top of the most severe human justice, of course.

Is it even possible for a mythology to both accept sexual liberation and successfully and seriously condemn and limit both infanticide and abortion?

By the way

Since there are no moral propositions, there are also no moral questions.

Since "wrong" has no meaning (does not denote), "Murder is wrong" has none.

And likewise "Is murder wrong?"

And "Is it true that murder is wrong?"

And "Is there a possible world in which murder is wrong?"

But is there a possible world in which there are moral properties, as Mackie asked?

Properties are necessary, and so the same in every world. 

That is not to say they are each and all necessarily exemplified, however. 

So, given a suitable and convincing description, one could ask are there moral properties?

See Mackie. 

And no, I don't think so. 

Well, is there a world in which normative terms in moral use denote?

Of course.

Just as there is a world in which 'xrtyn' denotes.

So?

The ultimate sources

The ultimate sources for the total submergence of humans in wretched and harmful error are the credulity of the well-meaning and the malevolence of the rest.

The credulity makes it too easy.

The malevolence makes it inevitable.

About that eternal return

There are books I am glad I have read but would not read again.

There are movies I am glad I have watched but would not want to see again.

I note these things in answer to the pessimists' challenge that no one would want to relive the same life, in endless repetition, for all eternity.

Does it matter that, ex hypothesi, you would each time have forgotten all the previous times, so that subjectively each time would be the first and only time?

Well, think again about reading that book, or seeing that movie.

Repeatedly, again and again, for all eternity.

I think the idea of eternal return of the same book, or the same movie, as disheartening as eternal reruns of the same life, even conceding that each time will seem like the first and only time.

And yet, still, I am glad I read those books and saw those movies.

And am glad to live this life.

Philosophers are the true flaneurs

"Anaxagoras used to say that he came into the world to admire the sun," explains the Skeptic Gringoire to Frollo, when the latter urges that he get himself hanged in Esmeralda's place - his latest plot to carry her off, though all unwilling, for himself.

Gringoire - Edmund O'Brien in the 1939 film - refuses, saying "I don't see why I should be hanged in another person's stead," and Frollo protests, "What makes you so fond of life?"

"Oh, a thousand things," answers Gringoire, in the manner of a man who has and needs nothing to live for, no "reason to live", no "cause greater than himself".

At the end of a list of examples including the air, the sky, and moonlight, and the reference to Anaxagoras, he says, "And besides, I have the pleasure of spending all my days, from morning till night, with a man of genius, to wit, myself, and that is a mighty agreeable thing."

And as to fate, an episode of Supernatural on Netflix has the Archangel Michael telling Dean he and Sam cannot avoid their destiny, "all roads lead to the same place."

That is one of at least three different ideas of fate, another being that you must do what is fated (or what is fated must befall), and the last merely that you will do it (or what is fated will befall).

The last is a consequence of logical determinism, the doctrine that all contingents, including future contingents, are true or else false.

Many philosophers consider it - but not the other two - a conception of fatalism compatible with human freedom of choice, though not all would say the same for causal determinism.

Reading The Hunchback.

A considerable contrast

between Carl Morck as we see him in the Department Q novels and the same detective as we see him in the Danish TV movies made from some of them.

He is in both presentations a socially inept nihilist very good and dogged at the job.

But the author, Jussi Adler-Olsen, mocks his leading character and makes him a selfish, clownish boor.

Fortunately, none of that comes through in the films.

Reading The Hanging Girl, 2015.

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.