November 2013 – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Theism is not a Religion

Yesterday I argued that atheism is not a religion. Well, theism is not a religion either, but for different reasons. Atheism is not a religion because it amounts to the rejection of the central commitment of anything that could legitimately be called a religion. (So if atheism were a religion, it would amount to a rejection of itself.) This core commitment is the affirmation of the existence of a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.

Theism is not a religion for at least two reasons.

First, there is no religion in general, only particular religions, and theism is not a particular religion. Theism is merely a proposition common to many different (monotheistic and polytheistic) religions. It is the proposition that God or gods exist. As such, it is simply the negation of the characteristic atheist proposition. No extant religion consists of the theist's bare metaphysical asseveration, and no possible religion could consist of it alone.

Second, both doctrine and practice are essential to a religion, but a theist needn't engage in any specifically theistic practice to be a theist. He need only uphold the theoretical proposition that there is such a being or such beings as God or gods.

If theism is not a religion, then, as Tully Borland suggested to me, it is difficult to see how a reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance could be construed as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. The clause reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ."

"One nation under God" from the Pledge is at most an affirmation of theism. But theism is not a religion. So the occurrence of the word 'God' in the pledge does nothing to establsh any religion as the state religion. Understandably, atheists don't like that word in the Pledge, but the Establishment Clause gives them no ground for removing it.

Similarly with "In God We Trust" on our currency. This is more than a bare affirmation (or presupposition) of the existence of God; it brings in the further notion of trusting God, a notion that is admittedly religious. But which religion is established by "In God We Trust"? Judaism? Christianity? Islam? All three Abrahamic religions have monotheism in common. Obviously, if Congress were to establish a state religion it would have to be some one particular religion. But no particular religion has proprietary rights in "In God We Trust." So why should we think that the phrase violates the Establishment Clause.

And the same goes for the Ten Commandments as I maintained years ago when I first took to the 'sphere. The Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions. So if a judge posts them in his chambers, which religion is he establishing by so doing?

Once again we see what extremists contemporary iberals are. The plain sense of the Establishment Clause is that there shall be no state religion. One has to torture the Clause to extract from it justification to remove all references to God and every last vestige of religion from the public sphere, a sphere that ever expands under liberal fascism while the private sphere contracts.

A pox be upon the shysters of the ACLU and the leftist totalitarians who support them. I have written many posts against the sophistical shysters of the ACLU ('shyster' is from Gr. scheissen, to shit). See for example: Liberal Fascism: The Floral Variation.

Promise or Lie? Falsehood or Half-Truth?

Some pundits and journalists keep referring to Obama's signature "If you like it, you can keep it, period" as a promise.* This is an incoherent use of 'promise.'

Suppose a loan originator hands you a mortgage contract and says, "I promise you that this loan is not callable." (A callable loan is one in which the lender reserves the right to demand payment in full, plus interest, at any time.) If you are not stupid you will point out that this is not a question of the making and keeping of promises, but only one of the actual and explicit content of the contract. You will demand to see where in the contract it is stated that the loan is not callable. If the loan officer cannot locate the passage, or you find words to the effect that the loan is callable, then you know that the loan officer is lying about the content of the mortgage contract. At this point you might say to the officer, ironically, "I see you broke your promise, or perhaps it was a false promise from the start."

The point ought to be obvious and equally obvious its relevance to Obama's signature lie. One cannot promise what a document will contain given that there is an easily ascertainable fact as to what it does contain. Obamacare was a bill before it became law, but either way it has a definite content. It is not for Obama to promise what is in the ACA but to report truthfully as to what the definite content is.

Coherent: "I promise to sign the bill." "I promise to have a bill written that will provide that anyone who wants to keep his plan or doctor can do so."

Incoherent: "I promise that I was once an adjunct professor of law." "I promise that the ACA provides that anyone who wants to keep his plan can do so, period." "I promise that if you read the bill, you will see that it does so provide."

If you insist that our POMO POTUS made a promise with his signature avowal, will you say that he broke his promise or that he made an insincere promise from the start? Either way you don't understand the concept of promising.

Another mistake that some journalists make is to describe the Obama lie as a half truth. Not so. A statement that is false cannot be half-true. Compare

1. All of you who like your plan can keep your plan, period.

2. Most of you who like your plan can keep your plan, period.

(1) is false and (2) is true. (1) is not rendered half-true or partially true due to the presence of the universal quantifier or the fact that (1) entails (2).

'All politcians lie' entails 'Some politicians lie.' The latter is true; the former false, not half-true. Note finally that 'wholly true' is pleonastic.

_________________

* For example, "President Barack Obama’s “if you like it, you can keep it” promise has House Democrats facing a dilemma as they look ahead to a vote on Republican legislation to preserve existing health plans."

ObamaCare Puts the Screws to Faculty Adjuncts

Adjuncts are the peons of the academic world, the lowest men and women on the collegiate totem pole, the bottom-most rungs of the ladder of higher education — pick your metaphor. But a consequence of ObamaCare, intended or not, is that many are now worse off than they were before. There is some irony in this considering that Obama himself was once an adjunct professor of law.

Because they are paid so little, adjuncts must teach many courses to make a living. But the ACA requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance if they work an average of 30 hours per week including work both within and outside the classroom. Finding the financial burden too heavy to bear, many colleges have simply restricted the number of courses adjuncts can teach. The result is that the lowly adjunct must shuttle between different institutions, wasting time and gasoline, to keep his number of courses the same. The top-down initiative that was intended to help the poorly paid part-timers ends up making them worse off. Central planning in action.

For more, see this Chronicle of Higher Education piece.

Related: In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion

Atheism is not a religion. But the following is not a good reason for thinking so:

Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby. That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion.

Right, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. But atheism is not a mere lack of belief in something. If atheism is just the lack of god-belief, then tables and chairs are atheists. For they lack god-belief. Am I being uncharitable? Suppose someone defines atheism more carefully as lack of god-belief in beings capable of having beliefs. That is still unacceptable. Consider a child who lacks both god-belief and god-disbelief. If lacking god-belief makes him an atheist, then lacking god-disbelief makes him a theist. So he is both, which is absurd.

Obviously, atheism is is not a mere lack of belief, but a definite belief, namely, the belief that the world is godless. Atheism is a claim about the way things are: there is no such thing as the God of Judaism, or the God of Christianity, or the God of Islam, or the gods of the Greek pantheon, or . . . etc. The atheist has a definite belief about the ontological inventory: it does not include God or gods or any reasonable facsimile thereof such as the Plotinian One, etc. Note also that if you deny that any god exists, then you are denying that the universe is created by God: you are saying something quite positive about the ontological status of the universe, namely, that it does not depend for its existence on a being transcendent of it. And if it does not so depend, then that implies that it exists on its own as a brute fact or that it necessarily exists or that it causes itself to exist. Without getting into all the details here, the point is that if you deny that God exists, this is not just a denial of the existence of a certain being, but implies a positive claim about the ontological status of the universe. What's more, if there is no creator God, then the apparent order of the universe, its apparent designedness, is merely apparent. This is a positive thesis about the nature of the physical universe.

Atheism, then, is not a mere lack of god-belief. For it implies definite positive beliefs about reality as a whole and about the nature and mode of existence of the physical universe.

Why then is atheism not a religion? No good purpose is served by using 'religion' to refer to any set of action-guiding beliefs held with fervor and commitment. For if one talks in that hopelessly loose way, then extreme environmentalism and Communism are religions.

Although it is not easy to craft a really satisfactory definition of religion, I would say that all and only religions affirm the existence of a transcendent reality,
whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or
identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose
of human existence. For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah is the
transcendent reality. For Taoism, the Tao. For Hinduism, Brahman. For
(Mahayana) Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana. Since atheists precisely deny any such transcendent reality contact with which is our highest good and ultimate purpose, atheism is not a religion.

"But aren't militant atheists very much like certain zealous religionists? Doesn't militant atheism function in their lives much as religion functions in the life of the religiously zealous?" No doubt, but if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the
other or is a species of the other.

And another thing. If atheism is not a religion, then, while there can be atheist associations, there cannot be, in any serious sense of the word, an atheist church.

Obama Under Fire after Wielding Imaginary Guns

A great new post by Rick Marole over at Bill Loney's place.

Jewish Epistemology

If chess is Jewish athletics, what is Jewish epistemology? "Your mother has privileged access," quipped Peter over Sunday breakfast.

Bozo De Blasio, New York City, and ‘Lack of Diversity’

From a piece both pithy and penetrating by David P. Goldman (HT: Bill Keezer):

There has been considerable hand-wringing during the past few years about “lack of diversity” in the eight public high schools [of NYC] that require written exams. Asians are 14% of the public school population, but 50% of the elite high school population (the same proportion applies to Hunter College’s free public high school). By and large the Asian entrants are the children of working-class immigrants who pay extra tuition to prepare them for the entrance exams.

The NAACP has filed a complaint against the school system demanding racial quotas. The same concern for those “left behind” motivated the open admissions program in the City University system in 1969, which nearly ruined the system until CUNY found a way to shunt the underperformers into the community college system. (See chart at bottom of page.)

The above clearly illustrates what is so deeply wrong with the liberal-left way of thinking. It is true that Asians are disproportionately represented in the best NYC high schools. But this is not anything that needs remedying. It simply reflects the fact that Asians, as a group, have different values than blacks, better study habits, and are of higher intelligence. Notice, I said as a group. That's reality. But leftists are here as elsewhere in the business of reality denial. Leftists confuse the world with the way they would like the world to be. But things are as they are regardless of human hopes and dreams and desires.

Some inequalities have come about through wrongs that ought to have been righted, and have been righted. But the inequality of Asians and blacks as regards values and study habits and intelligence has not come about though any wrongdoing. Slavery was outlawed almost 150 years ago when the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified on 6 December 1865. Jim Crow was outlawed almost 50 years ago. There is no de jure racism in the U. S. and very little de facto racism. The 'overrepresentation' of Asians is the predictable outcome of the differences between Asian and black culture, values, and innate intelligence.

By the way, one ought to be very careful with the word 'overrepresent' and its opposite. It is ambiguous as between normative and nonnormative readings. It is just a value-neutral fact that there are proportionately more Asians than blacks in the elite high schools of NYC. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not be, or that it would be better if there were proportional representation.

Consider the sports analogy. Asians are 'underrepresented' on basketball teams. That is a fact. But it doesn't follow that this state of affairs is one that ought not
be, or that it would be better if there were proportional
representation. Enforced proportional representation would adversely affect the quality of basketball games.

Since we are now back to the delightful and heart-warming topic of race/ ethnicity, let's talk about Jews. They are 'overrepresented' in the chess world so much so that there is much truth to the old joke that chess is Jewish athletics. Should the government do something about this 'problem'? (This is what is called a rhetorical question.)

I once told my Jewish and Israeli friend Peter that I had never met a stupid Jew. He shot back, "Then you've never lived in Israel." The very alacrity of his comeback, however, proved (or at least provided further evidence for) my point.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am not now, and never have been, either an Asian or a Jew or an Israeli.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Recent Dylan Bootleg Releases

Song to Woody. This version from the 1970 New Morning sessions, but not included on that album. Originally heard on Dylan's first album.

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. This version too from the 1970 New Morning sessions. First heard on the 1966 Highway 61 Revisited album. Ramblin' Jack Elliot delivers a haunting version.

When I Paint My Masterpiece. Another Self Portrait, Bootleg Series. vol. 10. The Band's version.

Intro to Another Self Portrait, Bootleg Series. vol. 10.

More than an Animal

An animal that knows it's one is more than one.

Ten Lessons of ObamaCare

By Robert Tracinski. You really must read this. I am tempted to pull some quotations, but, as the saying goes, it's all good.

For a Lie to be a Lie, Must There be an Intention to Deceive?

Tully Borland writes,

You host my favorite blog on the internet. I can’t believe I didn’t find out about it until just a few months ago. May you blog forever.

Here’s a counterexample to your latest definition which still includes an “intention to deceive”, i.e. here is a case of a lie where there is no intention to deceive:

Larry is on trial for felonious assault (he punched his grandma in the face repeatedly because she turned the channel when Chris Matthews came on). His whole family was there. There was blood found on him when the cops arrived that was his grandma’s, and there was no blood found on anyone else. His grandma and his own mother testify in court against him, weeping because Larry has been such a disappointment. There is no evidence presented for the side that he did not do it. His lawyer has presented absolutely no evidence in his favor. EVERYONE in the courtroom knows that he did it. Moreover (and more importantly), he KNOWS that they know that he did it (the jurors repeatedly shake their heads in disgust every time he looks at them).

But Larry is corrupt to the core, lacking any remorse. In the sentencing phase, as a last act in defiance of his family, the court, and his hometown, he coldly looks the jurors square in the eyes and says, “I did not do it.”

Liar!

Very interesting case. It puts me in mind of O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. When Clinton told his famous lie, (almost) everybody knew he was lying, and Bubba knew that (almost) everybody knew he was lying. So when he made his false statement ("I did not have sex with that woman") he knew that hardly anyone would be deceived by what he said. I think Borland would say about this actual case what he said about his hypothetical one, namely, that the agent lied shamelessly but without any intention to deceive. If so, then any definition of lying that includes as a necessary condition the intention to deceive is mistaken.

There are at least thee ways of responding to this putative counterexample.

A. Run the argument in reverse. Borland's argument is that Larry lied but had no intention to deceive his audience; therefore, an intention to deceive is not a necessary condition of a statement's being a lie. But the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety: An intention to deceive is a necessary condition of a statement's being a lie; Larry had no intention to deceive; ergo, Larry did not lie.

Or as we say in the trade, "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

On this approach, Tully's example is not a counterexample to my definition but merely an illustration of a phenomenon like lying but distinct from it.

B. A second approach is to question Tully's assumption that there is no intention to deceive where there is no possibility of deception. Is the belief that it is possible for me to deceive you a necessary condition of my intending to deceive you? Or can I intend to deceive you while knowing that it is not possible to deceive you?

It seems to me that, necessarily, if an an agent A intends to do X, then A believes that it is possible for A to do X. The following, though not narrowly-logically contradictory, strikes me as broadly-logically contradictory: I fully intend to complete the 2014 Lost Dutchman marathon in under three hours but I know that this is impossible for me.

Therefore, necessarily, if a person intends to deceive his audience about his or that , then he believes that it is possible for him to deceive his audience about this or that.

The (B) response to Borland's putative counterexample, therefore, does not look promising.

C. On a third approach we abandon the attempt to capture in a definition the essence of lying. We treat lying as a family-resemblance concept in roughly Wittgenstein's sense. Accordingly, there is no one essence specifiable by the laying down of necessary and sufficient conditions that all and only lies have in common.

Or perhaps I should put the point like this. There are correct uses of 'lie' and cognates in English and incorrect uses. But there is no one univocal sense shared by all the correct uses. So if a person uses 'lie' interchangeably with 'false statement,' then he uses 'lie' incorrectly. But a use of 'lie' that does not involve the intention to deceive is correct as well as a use that does involve the intention to deceive. And there is a correct use that requires that a lie be a false statement and a correct use that allows a lie to be a true statement.

But I should think that the paradigm cases of lying all involve the intention to deceive and the notion that a lie is a false statement and not merely a statement believed to be false by its producer.

I think the best response to Tully's counterexample is (C). What he has shown is that there is a correct use of 'lie' in situations in which there is no intention to deceive, and no deception either. But this use of 'lie' is non-paradigmatic and peripheral to the main way 'lie' is used in English which (dare I say it?) is my way.

Promises and Lies

This from David Fredosso:

Now embarrassed by his oft-repeated and false promise that “if you like your health plan you can keep it,” Obama has retreated to a new line of defense: Your old health plan had to be canceled because it was “junk.”

I object. It was not a promise that Obama repeatedly made; it was a false statement about a matter of fact easily checked. The matter of fact is what the PPACA says; it is easily checked by simply reading the law or having a staff member read the law and report on its contents to the president. So what Obama repeatedly did was make a false statement. That by itself does not get the length of a lie. But there are very good reasons to believe that he made his false statement time and again with the intention to deceive. For had he not engaged in deception, the bill would not have passed. It strains credulity to maintain that Obama did not know about a key provision of his signature piece of legislation, a provision without which the entire scheme is unworkable. Of course he knew. And being the consummate Chicago-machine political hustler that he is, he knew what he had to do to win, the glorious end justifying the contemptible means.

But what really interests me are the underlying conceptual and philosophical questions, and not our morally challenged president and his serial lies, prevarications, and other offenses against truth and truthfulness. What is a promise? What is a lie? How does a promise that one fails to keep differ from a lie? Many pundits confuse the former with the latter. Bill O'Reilly the other night juxtaposed the Obama lie with the Bush the Elder's 1988 "Read my lips" unfulfilled promise, as if the one is assimilable to the other. So let's think about it. My main question is this:

If I promise to do X, and fail to fulfill my promise, have I lied?

To answer this question we need to analyze the concept of promising.

Promising is future-oriented: if I promise at time t to do X, then, if I fulfill my promise and do X, X occurs at a time t* later than t. If I promise to drive you to Tucson, and I do in fact drive you to Tucson, then, necessarily, my driving you there occurs at a time later than the time of my promising. In other words, there is no promising with respect to the past, or even with respect to the present. Suppose I am just now sneezing without covering my mouth. I can promise to not to do that again, but I can't promise to not do what I am in the process of doing.

Now suppose that I promise on Monday to drive you to Tucson on Tuesday, but my vehicle is 'totaled' Monday night and no other vehicle is available for my use. Then I fail to fulfill my promise. But it doesn't follow that I lied when I promised to drive you to Tucson. For one cannot lie about what has not yet occurred. Here is an explicit argument:

a. Promises are about future contingent events
b. Future contingent events either do not exist or if they do exist they are not knowable now.
c. Lies are false statements made with the intention to deceive about events that are both existent and knowable now.
Therefore
d. No promise is a lie.

(b) requires a bit of commentary. If presentism is true, then only the present exists, in which case future events do not exist. If presentism is false and future events (tenselessly) exist, as they do on a B-theory of time, then they, or at least the modally contingent ones, are unknowable by us now.

I have been talking about sincere promises. Suppose I make a promise I have no intention of fulfilling. Or to be precise, I utter a form of words that are verbally of the sort one uses to make a promise, but these words are not animated by any intention to do as I appear to be promising. This is not a lie either. Deception is involved, but not a lie. For to lie I must make a statement about some actual state of affairs. But 'I promise to drive you to Tucson tomorrow' is not a statement about any state of affairs. Promising and stating are quite different. Promising is a performative: I make it the case that I promise to drive you to Tucson simply by uttering those words. There is nothing external to the words to represent or misrepresent either intentionally or non-intentionally.

George Bush the Elder, back in 1988, famously said, "Read my lips! No new taxes!" Did he lie? Of course not. On a charitable view, he made a promise he was unable to keep due to circumstances beyond his control. But even if he had no intention of keeping his promise, he still did not lie.

Bill Clinton wagged his finger at us and said, "I did not have sex with that woman!" Did he lie? Of course. He did in fact have oral sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.

There are at least two ways of failing to fulfill a promise. One can be prevented from fulfilling it by circumstances beyond one's control, or one can renege on the promise. Suppose that on Tuesday morning I just don't feel like carting you to Tucson, and refuse to do so even after promising to do so. Then I renege on my promise. If a person reneges on a promise, we say he broke his promise. A broken promise is not the same as an insincere promise. I can sincerely promise, on Monday, to meet Jake for lunch on Friday, but then break the promise.

Did Obama renege on his PPACA promise? No, for the simple reason that he made no promise. He made a false statement about the content of the PPACA bill that then became law.

Fredosso above uses the phrase "false promise." That strikes me as ambiguous as between 'insincere promise' and 'broken promise.' We should probably avoid the phrase 'false promise.' Truth-value does not come into the appraisal of performatives. Suppose I say to Ed, 'I promise to repay you on Friday.' If Ed says, 'Is that true what you just said,' then Ed shows that he does not understand the nature of promising. For another example, 'I hereby pronounce you man and wife,' said by a Justice of the Peace, is neither true nor false. Of course, if he says it, then it is true that he said it; but the saying itself is not true or false; therr is no reality external to the saying that the saying is about.

Here is a quickie argument:

Lies are all of them false
Promises are neither true nor false
Ergo
No promise, not even a 'false' promise, is a lie.

Further question: Is 'insincere' in 'insincere promise' an alienans adjective? Suppose I break my promise to you and you protest: You promised! I say, 'But I didn't mean it.' Is an insincere promise a promise? I am inclined to say that an insincere promise is not a promise while a broken promise is a promise.

Concluding Polemical Postscript. Obama lied, and health care died!

More on Lying

Chad McIntosh e-mails:

Here are some thoughts on your recent post on lying. You offer the following definition:

A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.

I wonder if more should be said about what counts as a statement. You leave open the possibility that there are other ways of tokening statement-types than uttering them when you say a statement type isn’t a lie until someone “utters or otherwise tokens the type.” Do you have in mind other ways to token statements that aren’t utterances?

BV: Well, there are written statements in addition to spoken statements. A written statement is not an utterance but it tokens a statement type. Obama has been caught numerous times lying via speech acts about the content of the PPACA. But suppose he publishes a written statement that includes the sentence, "After the PPACA passes, you will be able to keep your health plan and your doctor if you so desire." That sentence is a token of a statement type. It too would be a lie. Every lie is a statement, i.e., a stating, but not every statement is a spoken statement.

If so, we need to see if they, too, count as lies on your proposal (i.e., are there forms of deception that token statements without uttering them?). If a businessman leaves his home porch light on as he leaves for vacation, is he tokening the statement “someone is home”? Or does a football player token the statement “I’m going right” when he jukes right but goes left? If so, we have false statements being made with the intention to deceive. But it would be counterintuitive to say the business man and the football player here are lying.

BV: The question Chad is raising now is whether a statement type can be tokened by a non-sentential entity. Can one make a statement without speaking or writing or displaying (as on a sign) a declarative sentence? I would say no. A statement type is a linguistic entity the tokens of which must themselves be linguistic entities. The statement type *Obama is a liar* is tokened by my stating that he is a liar, i.e., by my assertive utterance of the sentence 'Obama is a liar.' But it can also be tokened by my writing the sentence, 'Obama is a liar.'

Note that not every utterance of a sentence is an assertive utterance. I might utter the sentence 'Obama is a liar' in oratio obliqua, or in a language class to illustrate a sentence in the indicative mood. And the same holds for writing a sentence. If you ask me for an example of an English sentence, I might write on the black board, 'Obama is a liar.' But I haven't thereby made a statement.

Or here’s a possible counterexample that avoids the non-utterance category. Suppose the CIA discovers that Al-Qaida has tapped the phone line on which the president’s whereabouts are discussed in an effort to plan an attack on his life. Knowing this, a CIA agent says over the line, knowing the terrorists are listening, that the president will be at the Washington Memorial at 4pm, when in fact he will be safe at camp David at that time. Has the CIA agent lied to the terrorists? It doesn’t seem to me that he has; not just because the deception here is not wrong, but because it just doesn’t seem like a lie period.

BV: This is an interesting example that Chad intends as a counterexample to my above definition. I utter a sentence that I know to be false with the intention of deceiving any terrorists who might be listening, without knowing whether any terrorists are listening. According to Chad, I have made a false statement with the intention to deceive, but I have not lied. Chad's point, I take it, is that a lie necessarily involves an interpersonal transaction in which the maker of the false statement knows that the adressee is in receipt of it. If that is Chad's point, then I can accommodate it by modifying my definition:

A lie is a false statement made by a person P and addressed to another person Q or a group of other persons Q1, Q2, . . . Qn, Qn+1, . . . such that (i) Q or some of the Qs are in receipt of P's statement and are known by P to be in receipt of it, and (ii) P's statement is made with the intention to deceive Q or some of the Qs.

But I should say that I do think all lies are morally blameworthy. I see here a distinction similar to that between murder and killing. All murder is morally blameworthy and also killing, but not all killing is murder. Similarly, all lies are morally blameworthy and deceptive, but not all deceptions are lies. So I’m inclined to see your definition as capturing only a necessary condition of lies. I have some ideas about what sufficient conditions are needed to get a better definition, but I’ve said enough for now. What do you think?

BV: Murder, by definition, is wrongful killing, whereas killings (of human beings) are some of them morally permissible, some of them morally impermissible, and some of them — I would argue — moral obligatory. It seems that Chad wants to pack moral wrongness into the concept of lying, so that the following is an analytic proposition: *Lying is wrongful intentional deception.* That would give him a reason to deny that the terrorist example is an example of lying. For while there is deception, and it is intentional, it is not wrongful intentional deception.

Suppose the SS are at my door looking for Jews. I state falsely that there are no Jews in my house. On Chad's analysis I have not lied because my action is morally praiseworthy, or at least not morally wrong. On my view, I have lied, but my lie is morally justifiable. But then moral wrongness cannot be packed into the concept of lying. I agree that lying, in most cases, is wrong. But I don't see the connection between lying and wrongness as analytic.

Suppose once again that the SS are at my door looking for Jews. I state what I believe to be false, namely, that there are no Jews present. But it turns out that, unbeknownst to me, what I state is true. So I make a true statement with the intention to deceive. Monokroussos in an earlier thread took this to show that a lie need not be a false statement. What's necessary is only that the statement be believed to be false by its utterer. I wonder what Chad would say about this case.

Libertarian (‘Losertarian’) Party Strikes Again

Ken Cuccinelli could have won in Virginia had the Libertarian candidate not siphoned off votes. Libertarianism is a healthy, if extreme, counterbalance to the the hard leftism that controls the Democrat Party, and the soft leftism of the RINOs. But the Libertarian Party is not only unnecessary, but destructive. Libertarians should follow the lead of Ron and Rand Paul, join the Republican Party, and push it in a libertarian direction, at least with respect to economic and political issues.

Libertarian ideas are many of them good; the Libertarian Party, however, is a disaster.

I have had my say on this topic in previous posts wherein you will find my reasons:

Libertarians are the Ralph Naders of the Conservative Side

Vote Libertarian, Waste a Vote.

Besides, a vote for the 'Libertarian' candidate, Robert Sarvis, was "insane," according to Ron Paul:

Specifically referring to the mileage taxes that Sarvis indicated he may support and which may require GPS systems to be installed in everyone's cars, Paul said "anybody who would conceivably vote for someone who would endorse a mileage tax" is "insane" because a mileage tax would be an "invasion of privacy" and would just give the government more money it could waste. In an interview on MSNBC, Sarvis indicated that he could support "vehicle-miles-driven taxes."

But What if I Want a ‘Crappy’ Health Plan and by Which Standard is it ‘Crappy’?

For liberal scumbaggery and dumbassery, it is hard to beat Ed Schultz. This is the guy who called the sweet and loveable and ladylike Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut." Now he is saying that the health plans that Obamacare will outlaw are 'crappy.'

If so, there must be some one standard relative to which they are adjudged 'crappy.' But what is that standard, and who sets it? Is maternity care built into the standard? But maternity is not in my future, or in my past for that matter. And if you are a woman past a certain age, or a nun of any age, maternity is not in your future either.

Primary care physicians advise their patients to have colonoscopies starting at the age of 50. Suppose you are a healthy 27-year-old runner who thrives on a fiber-rich diet. You and Sir Thomas Crapper are on most excellent terms. Your policy does not cover colonoscopies, let us assume. Does that make it 'crappy'? Not at all. It makes it reasonable. Why buy what you don't need?

So what would be a crappy plan for one person might not be for another. It depends on age, sex, and other factors.

Who is to decide? Obviously, the person in question or the person's parent or guardian. Not the government.

So here is the nub of the issue. The government has no right to force you to buy health care or health insurance (not the same, by the way), or anything else. Whether you buy and what you buy is your business. Or do you think that the citizen-state relation is or is closely analogous to the child-parent relation?

The various mandates (individual, employer, HHS) are egregious assaults upon individual liberty and upon the mediating structures of civil society such as private enterprises, clubs, fraternal associations, and churches. (In a later post I plan to talk about contraceptives and abortifacients and the assault on religious liberty.)

So do you value liberty? Or do you want an Obama-style "fundamental transformation" of our country in the direction of a collectivist nanny-state? We are well on the way to it already. How far do you want to go?

Let us understand what is fundamentally at issue here. Let's not get hung up on details such as those pertaining to the inasupicious 'rollout' of ObamaCare. We need clarity as to the "conflict of visions" ( T. Sowell) of Right and Left.

But we can't have clarity as long as Obama and his defenders lie and bullshit and prevaricate. The latter include Feinstein, Pelosi, and Wasserman-Schultz.

So, Mr President, please tell us forthrightly what your vision for America is. Don't lie to us, or try to trick or fool us or try achieve your ends by stealth.

Then and only then can we have the 'conversation' — to use a nice squishy bien-pensant liberal word — we need to have about the direction of the country.

But please, no more lies, and no more lies about your lies.