December 2013 – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

I just wasted 30 minutes on the phone with a customer service representative straightening out a screw-up emanating from their end. The automated intro said that a "helpful customer care" rep would be available in one minutes (sic)." Don't tell me how helpful and caring you are. Just do your job and do it right.

This change from 'service' to 'care' is squishy, bien-pensant liberal feel-good bullshit and quite in keeping wth the Age of Feeling, the Age of Obama Yomama. It's humbug I tell you, humbug!

Merry Christmas.

Liberals’ Uneasy Relationship with the Rule of Law

Liberals are for the rule of law when it suits their collectivist, big government agenda, but only then. Peter Berkowitz:

The left-liberal mindset endemic on the college faculties and law schools where Barack Obama’s political sensibilities were forged holds that morals and politics are subject to a universal reason to which the left-liberal sensibility is uniquely attuned. This conceit receives expression in a faith that the left-liberal brain trust can embody complex public policy in general rules and regulations, which can then be administered smoothly by well-educated bureaucrats and adjudicated impartially by empathetic judges.

At the same time, the left-liberal mind rebels against established authorities, hierarchies, and formalities that constrain its ability to pursue the people’s good and social justice — at least as it understands them.

Often enough, this rebellion turns against laws duly enacted by left-liberals themselves. Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal are now demonstrating the destabilizing consequences of governing in accordance with a love-hate relationship toward the law.

An outstanding piece of analysis. Read it all.

From the USA to the USSA

I've been asking myself a question these last years. Why did we expend so much treasure to defeat the Evil Empire, the USSR? To become another, albeit lesser, evil empire, the United Socialist States of America?

I now hand off to The DiploMad who has worked himself into a fine lather over this in The New USSRists.

Overheard in the High Sierra

There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers. But there are no old bold mountaineers.

Overheard at the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft

Life is a business that doesn't cover its costs.

Ode to the Welfare State (1949)

A tip of the hat, and greetings of the season to Bill Keezer for this:

Overheard at the Philosophers’ Chess Club

White: To you, sir, I have but two words to say, 'check and mate!'

Black: Those are three words.

Overheard at the Arboretum

Life's a beech.

Miniscule and Majuscule; catholic and Catholic

I am too catholic to be much of a Catholic.

But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.

The Actuarial Absurdity of Obamacare

For Obamacare to work, the young must sign up. But will they? Why should they? Jeffrey H. Anderson:

In its government-run exchanges, Obamacare raises premiums for the young by suspending actuarial science. It forbids insurers from considering some variables that are actuarially relevant to health care, such as sex and health, while also limiting their ability to take age into account in an actuarially based way. Under ordinary principles of insurance, a healthy young person pays a lot less than a person nearing retirement. Under Obamacare, that’s not so. Yet President Obama’s centerpiece legislation depends upon young people’s willingness to pay these artificially inflated premiums.

Another reason the young are unlikely to show up in sufficient numbers is that Obamacare gives many of them an easy out: They can stay on their parents’ insurance free of charge until they’re 26. As for the rest, with the elimination of preexisting conditions as a barrier to buying health insurance, many will choose to go without coverage until they’re sick or injured.

In other words, Obama-care makes insurance more costly while simultaneously making it less necessary—especially for the young.

You ought to read the entire piece, especially if you are young and healthy.

The more I know about Obamacare, the more crack-brained (you can take that word in two senses) it appears. The burden of redistribution is to be borne by the young, precisely those least capable of carrying it.

Recent Publications of Mine

A couple of long review articles of mine have recently appeared:

Constituent versus Relational Ontology, Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 10, no. 1 (2013), pp. 99-115.

Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, online now (by subscription), print version forthcoming 2014.

My PhilPapers page with an incomplete list of my publications.

The Disaster Named ‘Obama’

More brilliant columns by Victor Davis Hanson:

Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief

The Politicization of Everything

This is an extremely penetrating analysis, worthy of careful study. Excerpt (emphasis added):

Again, note the nature of the “foremost” ideological mandate: if Muslim nations do not feel “good” about their historical contributions to science and engineering, such depression could not be attributed to their present scientific ossification or Islam’s often historical subordination to Western science, especially after the fifteenth century. Instead, the discontent over the absence of scientific parity might be due to other more nefarious causes—and thus in part rectified by the power, wealth, and influence of a properly sensitive U.S. federal government.

Similarly, homeland security is no longer just about ensuring the safety of the United States. In a series of bizarre euphemisms—overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, work-place violence—Islamic terrorism was redefined as a spontaneous tragedy without specified causation. To the degree that the issue of radical Islam was unavoidable in the debate over U.S. domestic and foreign policy, the contortions only grew worse: we should not allow the mass murderer Major Hasan to prejudice the Army’s diversity program; the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely secular; and jihad is a legitimate tenet of Islam properly characterized as a “holy struggle,” and therefore improperly associated with radical Islamic terrorists.

The politicization of almost every aspect of American culture and politics over the last five years could easily be expanded. Traditional employment background checks are now “racist” given that minorities with higher crime records might be unduly affected. The 2009 reordering of the Chrysler creditors leap-frogged junior union creditors over senior bondholders—as enforcement of existing legislation becomes predicated on perceptions of social justice rather than faithfully executing settled laws on the books. Each new tropical storm launches a fresh debate about “climate change,” despite no evidence that recent weather is more prone to hurricanes or the planet has heated up over the last 15 years. Almost every new mass shooting offers occasion for mobilization to enhance existing gun control legislation.

America's Coastal Royalty

An Untenable Analysis of ‘Sherlock Holmes is a Purely Fictional Character’

London Ed claims that

1. Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional character

means

2. Someone made up a story about a person called ‘Sherlock Holmes.'

I don't think this is right. Even if (1) and (2) are intersubstitutable salva veritate in all actual and possible contexts, they are not intersubstitutable salva significatione. They are not intersubstitutable in such a manner as to preserve meaning or sense. (1) and (2) don't have the same meaning.

First of all, it is not in dispute that Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional person, unlike, say, the 19th century American chess prodigy, Paul Morphy, who is the main character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players. (Available from Amazon.com for only a penny! The perfect Christmas gift from and to impecunious chess players.) A fictional object need not be a nonexistent object: Morphy is a fictional object inasmuch as he figures in the novel just mentioned, but he existed. Holmes never existed and never will. Hence the need to distinguish between the purely fictional and the fictional, and the fictional and the nonexistent.

Now let us assume that some fom of 'creationism' or 'artifactualism' is true: purely fictional objects are the mental creations of finite minds, human or not. They are literally made up, thought up, excogitated, invented not discovered. They are literally ficta (from L. fingere). On this approach, internally logically consistent ficta cannot be reduced to real, albeit mere, possibilia. For the merely possible belongs to the real, and cannot be made up; the purely fictional, however, is unreal and made-up.

Let us further assume that artifactualism about purely fictional items, if true, is true of metaphysical necessity. It will then be the case that (1) and (2) will be either both true or both false across all possible worlds. But they don't have the same meaning since one who understands (1) may easily reject (2) by holding some other theory of fictional objects, say, a Meinongian theory according to which Sherlock Holmes and his colleagues are mind-independent nonentities.

London Ed is making the following mistake. He thinks that 'x is mind-made' follows analytically from 'x is purely fictional' in the way that (to introduce a brand-new example) 'x is male' follows analytically from 'x is a bachelor.' 'Tom is a bachelor' and 'Tom is an umarried adult male' have the same meaning; the latter merely unpacks or makes explicit the meaning of the former. But (2) does not unpack the meaning of (1): it goes beyond it. It adds the controversial idea that purely fictional objects have no status whatsoever apart from the mental activities of novelists and other artistically creative persons.

Ed may be misled by the etymology of 'fictional.' Pace Heidegger, etymology is no sure guide to philosophical insight.

If you say that Tom is a bachelor but not an unmarried adult male, then you contradict yourself, not formally, but materially. But if you affirm both (1) and the negation of (2), then you involve yourself in no sort of contradiction. Some maintain that purely fictional objects are mind-created abstract objects. People who hold this do not violate the meaning of (1).