Month: September 2015

Could I Support a Muslim for President?

It would depend on the Muslim.

Consider first a parallel question: Could I support a Christian for president?  Yes, other things being equal, but not if he or she is a theocrat.  Why not?  Because theocracy is incompatible with the principles, values, and founding documents of the United States of America.

Similarly, I could easily support a Muslim such as Zuhdi Jasser for president (were he to run) because he is not a theocrat or a supporter of Sharia. To be precise: Jasser's being a Muslim would not count for me as a reason not to support him, even though I might have other reasons not to support him, for example, unelectability.  

When Dr. Ben Carson said he could not support a Muslim for president what he meant was that he could not support a Muslim who advocated Sharia.  That was clear to the charitable among us right from the outset.  But he later clarified his remarks so that even the uncharitable could not fail to understand him.

Some dismissed this clarification as 'backtracking.'  To 'backtrack,' however, is to say something different from what one originally said.  Carson did not 'backtrack'; he clarified his original meaning.

Nevertheless, CAIR has absurdly demanded that Carson withdraw from the presidential race.

Is there anything here for reasonable people to discuss?  No.  Then why is this story still in the news?  Because as a nation we are losing our collective mind.

It's like Ferguson.  What's to discuss?  Nothing.  We know the facts of the case.  Michael Brown was not gunned down by a racist cop seeking to commit murder under the cover of law.  Brown brought about his own demise.  On the night of his death he stole from a convenience store, assaulted the proprietor, refused to obey a legitimate command from police officer Darren Wilson, but instead tried to wrest the officer's weapon from him.  He acted immorally, illegally, and very imprudently.  He alone is responsible for his death.

So there is nothing here for reasonable and morally decent people to discuss.  But we are forced to discuss it because of the lies told about Ferguson by the Left.  The truth does not matter to leftists; what matters is the 'empowering' narrative.  A narrative is a story, and a story needn't be true to be a good story, an 'empowering' story, a  story useful for the promotion of the Left's destructive agenda.

Another pseudo-issue  that deserves no discussion except to combat the lies and distortions of the Left:  photo ID at polling places.

Exercise for the reader: find more examples.   

Sloppy Liberal Thinking About Equality

Equality of opportunity is one thing, equality of outcome quite another.  The former is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the latter.  Yet many liberals think that any lack of equality of outcome for a given group argues an antecedent lack of equality of opportunity for that group.  This is a non sequitur of the following form:

P is necessary for Q

Ergo

~Q is sufficient for ~P.

This is an invalid argument form since it is easy to find substitutions for ‘P’ and ‘Q’ that make the premise true and the conclusion false.  For example, being a citizen is necessary to be eligible to vote; ergo, not being eligible to vote is sufficient to show that one is not a citizen.  The conclusion is false, since there might be some other factor that disqualifies one from voting such as being a felon, or being under age.  Similarly, an unequal outcome is not sufficient to show discrimination or unequal opportunity for the simple reason that there might be some other factor that explains the unequal outcome, such as a lack of competitiveness, an inability to defer gratification, or a lack of ability.

Russell, Sense Data, and Qualia

Reader K. G. writes,

I recently came across a passage in Russell's Mysticism and Logic which you may find interesting. In the essay "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter," Russell writes (p. 144), "… the existence of sense-data [qualia] is logically independent of the existence of mind, and is causally dependent upon the body of the percipient, rather than upon his mind.” [. . .] On the contrary, I propose that any tenable definition of qualia must construe them as mental items, i.e. items whose esse is their percipi. [. . .]
 
What are your thoughts on this argument?
 
I think you are confusing qualia with sense data.  I grant you that qualia are mental items, and that they cannot exist apart from minds.  But sense data are not qualia.  First of all, Russell does not use 'quale' (singular) or 'qualia' (plural) in the two essays you mention.  But he does tell us what he means by 'sense data':  ". . . I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects or sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter." (10th ed., 128)
 
Suppose I am staring at a blue coffee cup.  The particular blue that I visually sense, precisely as I sense it, is a sense datum: it is the direct or  immediate object of my visual sensing.  It is distinct from the sensing. The sensing is something I undergo or experience or live through; it is part of my mental life.  As such it is mental in nature.  The sense datum, however, is not mental.  It is not an episode of experiencing or part of an episode of experiencing; it is the direct object of  an experiencing.  For Russell, the blue sense datum is not only not mental; it is physical: it is a proper part of the coffee cup.  I read Russell in these essays as a bundle theorist: physical objects are bundles of sense data both synchronically and diachronically.
 
Note also that while a blue sense datum is blue, a sensing of a blue sense datum is not blue.  (An adverbialist who speaks of sensing-blue-ly gives up the act-object schema that Russell presupposes.) 
 
Sense data, then, are objects of sensings.  For Russell, they are extra-mental and indeed physical.  Qualia, however, are the phenomenal characters of experiencings.  For example, the felt quality, the what-it-is-like, of a twinge of pain, precisely as it is felt.  Or the smell of burnt garlic.  Or the taste of licorice. 
 
There are many tricky questions here.  Suppose I am given a piece of black, semi-soft candy and asked  what it is.  I put it in my mouth to find out.  I discover that it is a piece of licorice.  I seem to have discovered something objective about a physical object, namely, that this bit of candy is licorice.  This would suggest that the object of my gustatory sensing is extra-mental and indeed physical.  Or should we say merely that I had a gustatory experience with a certain phenomenal character and that the characteristic taste of the thing I put in my mouth is wholly mental in nature?
 

Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

Here (emphasis added):

According to "The Black Book of Communism," between 1959 and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 (out of about 10 million) Cubans spent time in the island's gulag. Between 15,000 and 19,000 were shot. One of the first was a young boy in Che Guevara's unit who had stolen a little food. As for quality of life, it has declined compared with its neighbors. In 1958, Cuba had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Today, as the liberal New Republic describes it:

"The buildings in Havana are literally crumbling, many of them held upright by two-by-fours. Even the cleanest bathrooms are fetid, as if the country's infrastructural bowels might collectively evacuate at any minute.

"Poverty in Cuba is severe in terms of access to physical commodities, especially in rural areas. Farmers struggle, and many women depend on prostitution to make a living. Citizens have few material possessions and lead simpler lives with few luxuries and far more limited political freedom."

This left-leaning pope (who failed to stand up for the Cuban dissidents who were arrested when attempting to attend a mass he was conducting) and our left-leaning president have attributed Cuba's total failure to the U.S.

It's critically important to care about the poor — but if those who claim to care for the poor and the oppressed stand with the oppressors, what are we to conclude?

Much is made of Pope Francis' Argentine origins — the fact that the only kind of capitalism he's experienced is of the crony variety. Maybe. But Pope Francis is a man of the world, and the whole world still struggles to shake off a delusion — namely, that leftists who preach redistribution can help the poor.

Has this pope or Obama taken a moment to see what Hugo Chavez's socialist/populist Venezuela has become? Chavez and his successor (like Castro, like Lenin, like Mao) promised huge redistribution from the rich to the poor. There have indeed been new programs for the poor, but the economy has been destroyed. The leader of the opposition was just thrown in jail. Meanwhile, the shops have run out of flour, oil, toilet paper and other basics.

If you want moral credit for caring about the poor, when, oh when, do you ever have to take responsibility for what happens to the poor when leftists take over?

We know what actually lifts people out of poverty: property rights, the rule of law, free markets. Not only do those things deliver the fundamentals that people need to keep body and soul together, but they accomplish this feat without a single arrest, persecution or show trial.

Catholic Doctrine on Capital Punishment

It is generally not understood. Catholic doctrine allows capital punishment.   Here according to Avery Cardinal Dulles is the gist of it:

The doctrine remains what it has been: that the State, in principle, has the right to impose the death penalty on persons convicted of very serious crimes. 

[. . .]

1) The purpose of punishment in secular courts is fourfold: the rehabilitation of the criminal, the protection of society from the criminal, the deterrence of other potential criminals, and retributive justice.

2) Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness, which is reprehensible.

3) Punishment may and should be administered with respect and love for the person punished.

4) The person who does evil may deserve death. According to the biblical accounts, God sometimes administers the penalty himself and sometimes directs others to do so.

5) Individuals and private groups may not take it upon themselves to inflict death as a penalty.

6) The State has the right, in principle, to inflict capital punishment in cases where there is no doubt about the gravity of the offense and the guilt of the accused.

7) The death penalty should not be imposed if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment.

8) The sentence of death may be improper if it has serious negative effects on society, such as miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life.

9) Persons who specially represent the Church, such as clergy and religious, in view of their specific vocation, should abstain from pronouncing or executing the sentence of death.

10) Catholics, in seeking to form their judgment as to whether the death penalty is to be supported as a general policy, or in a given situation, should be attentive to the guidance of the pope and the bishops. Current Catholic teaching should be understood, as I have sought to understand it, in continuity with Scripture and tradition.

The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism

Peter Lupu called me last night to report that it had occurred to him that the famous Euthyphro Dilemma, first bruited in the eponymous early Platonic dialog, reflects a difference between two conceptions of God. One is the God-as-Being-itself conception; the other is the God-as-supreme-being conception.  After he hung up, I recalled that in June, 2009 I had written a substantial entry on the Euthyphro Problem.  I reproduce it here with some edits and additions  in the expectation that it will help Peter think the matter through.  I look forward to his comments.  The ComBox is open.
 
The Euthyphro Problem
 
The locus classicus is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them? 

But leaving piety and its definition aside, let us grapple with the deepest underlying issue as it affects the foundations of morality. As I see it, the Euthyphro problem assumes its full trenchancy and interest in the following generalized form of an aporetic dyad:

1. The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands.

2. The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it.

It is clear that these propositions are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. What's more, they are contradictories: each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb of the dyad is quite reasonably accepted, or so I shall argue. Thus the problem is an aporia:  a set of propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.  Specifically, the problem is an antinomy:  the limbs are logical contradictories and yet each limb make a strong claim on our acceptance.

Ad (1). The obligatory comprises what one ought to do, what one must, morally speaking, do.  Now one might think that (1) is obviously false. If I am obliged to do X or refrain from doing Y, then one might think that the obligatoriness would be independent of any command, and thus independent of any person or group of persons who issues a command. The obligatory might be commanded, but being commanded is not what makes it obligatory on this way of thinking; it is rightly commanded because it is obligatory, rather than obligatory because it is commanded. And if one acts in accordance with a command to do something obligatory the obligatoriness of which does not derive from its being commanded, then, strictly speaking, one has not obeyed the command. To obey a command to do X is to do X because one is so commanded; to act in accordance with a command need not be to obey it.  So if I obey a divine command to do X, I do X precisely and only because God has commanded it, and not because I discern X to be in itself obligatory, or both in itself obligatory and commanded by God.

There is a difference between obeying a command and acting in accordance with one.  One can do the latter without doing the former, but not vice versa.  Or if you insist, 'obey' is ambiguous: it has a strict and a loose sense. I propose using the term in the strict sense. Accordingly, I have not obeyed a command simply because I have acted in accordance with it; I have obeyed it only if I have so acted because it was commanded.

Consider an example. If one is obliged to feed one's children, if this is what one ought to do, there is a strong tendency to say that one ought to do it whether anyone or anything (God, the law, the state) commands it, and regardless of any consequences that might accrue if one were to fail to do it. One ought to do it because it is the right thing to do, the morally obligatory thing to do, something one (morally) must do. Thinking along these lines, one supposes that the oughtness or obligatoriness of what we are obliged to do as it were 'hangs in the air' unsupported by a conscious being such as God or some non-divine commander. Or to change the metaphor, the obligatory is 'laid up in Plato's heaven.' William James, however, reckons this a superstition:

 

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true "in themselves," is therefore either an out‑and‑out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in The Will to Believe, p. 194.

 

James' point is that there is no abstract moral 'nature of things' existing independently of conscious beings. Thus the obligatoriness of an action we deem obligatory is not a property it has intrinsically apart from any relation to a subject who has desires and makes demands. The obligatoriness of an act must be traced back to the "de facto constitution of some existing consciousness."

Building on James' point, one could argue persuasively that if there is anything objectively obligatory, obligatory for all moral agents, then obligatoriness must be derivable from the will of an existing consciousness possessing the power to enforce its commands with respect to all who are commanded. A theist will naturally identify this existing consciousness with God.

Ad (2). In contradiction to the foregoing, however, it seems that (2) is true. To derive the obligatoriness of acts we deem obligatory from the actual commands of some de facto existing consciousness involves deriving the normative from the non-normative — and this seems clearly to be a mistake. If X commands Y, that is just a fact; how can X's commanding Y establish that Y ought to be done? Suppose I command you to do something. (Suppose further that you have not entered into a prior agreement with me to do as I say.) How can the mere fact of my issuing a command induce in you any obligation to act as commanded? Of course, I may threaten you with dire consequences if you fail to do as I say. If you then act in accordance with my command, you have simply submitted to my will in order to avoid the dire consequences — and not because you have perceived any obligation to act as commanded.

The Problem Applied to Islam

Now it seems clear that there is nothing meritorious in mere obedience, in mere submission to the will of another, even if the Other is the omnipotent lord of the universe. Surely, the mere fact that the most powerful person in existence commands me to do something does not morally oblige me to do it. Not even unlimited Might makes Right. It is no different from the situation in which a totalitarian state such as the Evil Empire of recent memory commands one to do something. Surely Uncle Joe's command to do X on pain of the gulag if one refuses to submit does not confer moral obligatoriness on the action commanded. In fact, mere obedience is the opposite of meritorious: it is a contemptible abdication of one's autonomy and grovelling acceptance of heteronomy.

And here is where Islam comes into the picture. The root meaning of 'Islam' is not 'peace' but submission to the will of Allah. But a rational, self-respecting, autonomous agent cannot submit to the will of Allah, or to the will of any power, unless the commands of said power are as it were 'independently certifiable.' In other words, only if Allah commands what is intrinsically morally obligatory could a self-respecting, autonomous agent act in accordance with his commands. In fact, one could take it a step further: a self-respecting, autonomous agent is morally obliged to act in accordance with Allah's commands only if what is commanded is intrinsically obligatory.

Of course, this way of thinking makes God or Allah subject to the moral law, as to something beyond divine control. But if there is anything beyond divine control, whether the laws of morality or the laws of logic, then it would seem that the divine aseity and sovereignty is compromised.  For perhaps the best recent defense of absolute divine sovereignty, see Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012.  For my critique, see "Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 149-161.

God is the absolute, and no absolute can be subject to anything 'outside' it. (If you say that God is not the absolute, then there is something greater than God, namely the absolute, and we should worship THAT. Presumably this is one of Anselm's reasons for describing God as "that than which no greater can be conceived.") Otherwise it would be relative to this 'outside' factor and hence not be ab solus and a se.

The antinomy, therefore, seems quite real and is not easily evaded. The divine aseity demands that God or Allah not be subject to anything external to him. A god so subject would not be God. On the other hand, the unlimited voluntarism of the Muslim view (see Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges for documentation here and here) is also unacceptable. A god who, at ontological bottom, was Absolute Whim and Arbitrary Power, would not be worthy of our worship but of our defiance.  I am reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens who thought of God as an all-seeing, absolute despot.

The Muslim view is quite 'chilling' if one thinks about it. If God is not constrained by anything, not logic, not morality, then to use the words but reverse the sense of the famous Brothers Karamazov passage, "everything is permitted." In other words, if the Muslim god exists then "everything is permitted" just as surely as "everything is permitted" if the Christian god does not exist. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality has no foundation. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality's foundation is in Absolute Whim.

To put it in another way, a foundation of morality in unconstrained and unlimited will is no foundation at all.

To 'feel the chill,' couple the Muslim doctrine about God with the Muslim literalist/fundamentalist doctrine that his will is plain to discern in the pages of the Koran. Now murder can easily be justified, the murder of 'infidels' namely, on the ground that it is the will of God.

In the West, however, we have a safeguard absent in the Islamic world, namely reason. (That there is little or no reason in the Islamic world is proven by the fact that there is little or no genuine philosophy there, with the possible slight exception of Turkey; all genuine philosophy — not to be confused with historical scholarship — in the last 400 or so years comes from the West including Israel; I am being only slightly tendentious.) God is not above logic, nor is he above morality. It simply cannot be the case that God commands what is obviously evil. We in the West don't allow any credibility to such a god. In the West, reason acts as a 'check' and a 'balance' on the usurpatious claims of faith and inspiration.

A Thomist Solution?

But this still leaves us with the Euthyphro Problem. (1) and (2) are contradictories, and yet there are reasons to accept both. The unconditionally obligatory cannot exist in an ontological void: the 'ought' must be grounded in an 'is.' The only 'is' available is the will of an existing conscious being. But how can the actual commands of any being, even God, the supreme being, ground the obligatoriness of an act we deem obligatory?

Suppose God exists and God commands in accordance with a moral code that is logically antecedent to the divine will. Then the obligatory would not be obligatory because God commands it; it would be obligatory independently of divine commands. But that would leave us with the problem of explaining what makes the obligatory obligatory. It would leave us with prescriptions and proscriptions 'hanging in the air.' If, on the other hand, the obligatory is obligatory precisely because God commands it, then we have the illicit slide from 'is' to 'ought.' Surely the oughtness of what one ought to do cannot be inferred from the mere factuality of some command.

But if God is ontologically simple in the manner explained in my SEP article, then perhaps we can avoid both horns of the dilemma. For if God is simple, as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas maintained, then it is neither the case that God legislates morality, nor the case that he commands a moral code that exists independently of him. It is neither the case that obligatoriness derives from commands or that commands are in accordance with a pre-existing obligatoriness. The two are somehow one. God is neither an arbitrary despot, nor a set of abstract prescriptions. He is not a good being, but Goodness itself. He is self-existent concrete normativity as such.

But as you can see, the doctrine of divine simplicity tapers of into the mystical. You will be forgiven if you take my last formulations as gobbledy-gook. Perhaps they are and must remain nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But then we have reason to think the problem intractable. (1) and (2) cannot both be true, and yet we have good reason to accept both. To relieve the tension via the simplicity doctrine involves a shift into the transdiscursive — which is to say that the problem cannot be solved discursively.

One thing does seem very clear to me: the Muslim solution in terms of unlimited divine voluntarism is a disaster, and dangerous to boot. It would be better to accept a Platonic solution in which normativity 'floats free' of "the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness," to revert to the formulation of William James.

Peter's Insight

My friend Peter Lupu sees clearly that there is a connection between the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma and the competing conceptions of God.  The first horn – The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands — aligns naturally with the conception of God as Being itself, as ipsum esse subsistens, as self-subsistent Being.  God is not a norm enforcer, but ethical Normativity Itself. The second horn – The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it — aligns naturally with the conception of God as a being among beings, albeit a being supreme among beings.  Supreme, but still subject to the moral order.

But of course there is trouble, and the alignment is not as smooth as we schematizers would like.  For on either horn, God is a supreme commander, and this makes little sense if God is self-subsistent Being itself. One feels tempted to say that on either horn God is a being among beings.

Concluding Aporetic Postscript

We cannot genuinely solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by affirming either limb.  Our only hope is to make an ascensive move to a higher standpoint, that of the divine simplicity according to which God is self-subsistent Being and Ethical Requiredness Itself.  But this ascension is into the Transdiscursive, a region in which all our propositions are nonsensical in Wittgenstein's Tractarian sense.  We are in the Tractarian predicament of  trying to say the Unsayable.

So I submit that the problem is a genuine a-poria.  There is no way forward, leastways, not here below. Both horns are impasses, to mix some metaphors.  But here below is where we languish.  The problem is absolutely insoluble for the Cave dweller.

Philosophers who simply must, at any cost, have a solution to every problem will of course disagree.  These 'aporetically challenged' individuals need to take care they don't end up as ideologues.

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

JamesWe are coming up on the 60th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene.  He died  in 2010 at the age of 88.   But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming?  His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964).  But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal.  Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)

James Dean, Public Service Announcement

James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby

Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951).  The first R & R song?  With footage of Bettie Page.  'Footage' indeed.

Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young

James_dean_died_here

Public Service Announcement.

Slow down, speed kills.  You'll die soon enough.   And stop tail-gating.  And turn off that bloody cell phone.  Or I kill you.

Like Aaachmed the Terrorist.  Trigger warning!  Not for liberals. 

 

 

 

Evidence and Actuality: A Modal Punch at W. K. Clifford

Clifford, W. K.W. K. Clifford is often quoted for his asseveration that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  Now one of my firmest beliefs is that I am an actual individual, not a merely possible individual. A second is my belief that while there is an infinity of possible worlds, there is exactly one actual world and that this world of me and my world mates is the world that happens to be actual.  (Think of the actual world as the total way things are, and of a merely possible world as a total way things might have been.  For a quick and dirty primer, see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.)

But not only do I have insufficient evidence for these two beliefs, it looks as if I have no evidence at all.  And yet I feel wholly entitled to my acceptance of them and in breach of no plausible ethics of belief, assuming there is such a subject as the ethics of belief.

Consider the following argument that I adapt from D. M. Armstrong, who borrowed it from Donald C. Williams:

1. Exactly one of the infinity of possible worlds is actual.

2. This world of me and my mates is a possible world.

Therefore, very probably,

3. This world of me and my mates is merely possible.

This is an inductive argument, but a very strong one.  While it does not necessitate its conclusion, it renders the conclusion exceedingly likely.  For if there is an infinity of worlds, how likely is it that mine is the lucky one?

And yet the conclusion is absurd, or to be precise: manifestly false.  Is it not perfectly obvious that this world of ours and everything in it is actual?  I am convinced that I am actual, and that all this stuff I am interacting with is actual.  I am sitting in an actual chair in an actual room which is lit by an actual sun, etc. 

But how do I know this?  What is my evidence?  There are no facts known to me that are better known than the fact that I am actual (that I actually exist).  So my evidence cannot consist of other facts.  Is it self-evident that I am actual?  You could say this, but how do I know, given the above argument, that my actuality is objectively self-evident as opposed to merely subjectively self-evident?  Subjective self-evidence is epistemically worthless, while objective self-evidence is not to be had in the teeth of the above argument.  No doubt I seem to myself to be actual.  But that subjective seeming does not get the length of objective self-evidence.  I now argue as follows:

4. If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe anything on no evidence.

5. I have no evidence that me and my world are actual.

6. It is not wrong to believe what is obviously true.

7. It is obviously true that I am actual.

Therefore, contra Clifford,

8.  There are some things it is not wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.

This is not a compelling argument, but it is a very powerful one.  Not compelling because the Cliffordian extremist could bite the bullet by denying (7).  He might say that the ethics of belief enjoins us to suspend belief on the question whether one is actual.  

Now this is psychologically impossible, for me anyway.  But apart from this impossibility, it is surely better known that I am actual than that Clifford's extreme thesis is true.

There are other obvious problems with the thesis.  Any tyro in philosophy should see right away that it is self-vitiating.  If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe Clifford's thesis on insufficient evidence.  But what conceivable evidence could one have for it?  None that I can see.  It is not only a normative claim, but one stuffed with universal quantifiers.  Good luck!  If you say that the thesis needn't be taken as applying to itself, then other problems will arise that you can work out for yourself.  Why do I have to do all the thinking?

Note also that if you take Clifford's thesis to heart you will have to suspend belief on all sorts of questions outside of religion, questions in ethics, politics, economics, climatology, etc., questions you have extremely firm opinions about.  The practical upshot, if one were consistent, would probably be a full retreat into Skeptic ataraxia.  At least until the political authorities came to put you in prison.  Then you would begin believing that some things are just and some are not, etc., and damn the insufficiency or nonexistence of the evidence for the contentious beliefs.

Our doxastic predicament is a bitch, ain't she?  Well, what do you want for a Cave?

The Decline and Fall of American Political Debate

A good article by John Daniel Davidson.  Excerpt:

For years it’s been remarked that we no longer have one American culture but many, that we’ve become Balkanized into a dizzying array of interests and identity groups separated by race, ethnicity, religion, and much else.

But we’re also separated, increasingly, by the news and commentary we read and watch. To the extent that it informs us of what’s going on, and why, and what to expect, our fragmentation and insularity has reached a dangerous tipping point: we no longer agree on what’s real.

Davidson illustrates his point by analysis of three recent examples: Ahmed Mohamed the Clock Maker; Carly Fiorina vs. Planned Parenthood; the invasion of illegals from Central America.

But what makes Davidson's article especially good is that he provides historical context by suggesting that the current mess had its origin in 1968 in a rancorous exchange between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal.

Buckley and Vidal met ten times over the course of the two conventions and spent most of their time attacking one another. Much of the debate footage is online, but the documentary plumbs the motivations of each man and the profound consequences of their televised battle. Of Vidal, Heritage Foundation historian Lee Edwards said, “I don’t think he was really interested in conducting a debate about the issues, or about the parties, or about the policies, or about the platforms of the two parties. What he wanted to do was to expose Bill Buckley.” In this Vidal succeeded, but not quite in the way he’d hoped.

The infamous moment came while they were debating the Vietnam War. Buckley compared opponents of the war to Nazi appeasers. Vidal, an opponent of the war, responded: “The only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” Back then, calling someone a Nazi was taboo (unlike today, when it is mostly ridiculous). Buckley lost his temper. He leaned toward Vidal, shaking with anger, narrowed his eyes and said: “Now listen, you queer, quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

That moment, together with all the rancor and ad hominem attacks that had led up to it, inaugurated a new era in American media: the end of the old, sober centrism and the beginning of open ideological warfare. It didn’t happen overnight, but ABC’s success—the Buckley-Vidal debates propelled them to No. 1—didn’t go unnoticed, and on-air political debates between liberal and conservative pundits gradually became a regular feature of TV news programming: “The McLaughlin Group,” “Capital Gang,” “Crossfire,” and all the rest. The personal, vituperative tone of the Buckley-Vidal debates became the now-familiar register of political punditry.

We are now one step further into the cultural sewer:

Instead of shouting each other down the way they did on “Crossfire,” the new pundits are more apt to sneer and mock in the style of Jon Stewart. There’s little to be gained in arguing with an opponent but much to be gained by mocking him. What this means in practice is that we tend to seek out news and commentary that more or less reflects our own opinions back to us. Reading the news becomes an exercise in confirmation bias.

Related:  Pessimistic Thoughts on Political Discourse in America

A Case for Voluntary Segregation

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Look Back in Anger: The Buckley – Vidal Debates of 1968
The Decline And Fall Of American Political Debate

A Warning

Apropos of my last entry, a warning to those may be thinking of heading for the desert.  The following observation from a November 2009 post, "Demons of the Desert."

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.

Distracted from your distractions, you may get more than you bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.

My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did

A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus.

. . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything all the time? I have been thinking a lot about the issues you raised both in The Big Unplug post and in your post on Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration . . . . Thanks for reading this and for the writing you have contributed over the years – it has truly been  signal amidst a great deal of noise.

How did I go about it?  I got as far away as practicable from the hype and hustle and hyperkineticism of the modern world.

From July 26th to August 30th I lived in a hermitage on the grounds of the most remote monastery in the Western hemisphere in a place of great natural beauty.  I have decided not to post any photographs or reveal the identities  of any interlocutors in keeping with the monastic spirit of silence, solitude and seclusion.

An average day went something like this.  Up at my usual time of 2:00 AM. (The monks arise at 3:30.) Instant coffee.  I drank no good coffee for five weeks as part of the self-imposed discipline.  Spiritual-philosophical reading until 3:00: Bible, Garrigou-Lagrange, Edith Stein, Theresa of Avila, et al.  Formal, seated meditation until 3:30 in the hermitage.  Then a 10-15 minute hike through a dark and spooky canyon to the oratory for Vigils at 4:00.  This is the first hour of the liturgia horarum, the liturgy of the hours.  It lasts one hour weekdays, one hour, twenty minutes on Sundays.  Some of the 'little hours' are as short as ten minutes.  The liturgy, chanted by the monks, is essentially psalmody with Christian elements interspersed.  After Vigils, a light breakfast outside the monks' refectory. Then back to the hermitage for study and writing.  I usually attended three of the seven hours per day and meditated on a 'regulation' Zen cushion and mat three times per day.  I gave myself the rule, "No pray, no eat."  So I attended Vigils before breakfast, Sext before the main meal, taken with the monks in the refectory, in silence of course, with one of the monk doing a reading, and Vespers before supper.

Did I struggle with the urge to check my 'devices' all the time?  Not at all.  I brought only a laptop computer for writing, but there was no wi-fi at the hermitage.  For that I had to hike to the monastery proper where I could tap into a weak wi-fi signal.  I did that a grand total of four times in five weeks, and only to check e-mail.  The only other device I had with me was a primitive cell phone which was useless to me in the remote location.

From my journal:

Here in the hermitage I stand naked before my own conscience.  Its penetrating power is enhanced by the exterior and interior silence.

No Escape.  And now it is night.  Alone in the hermitage which is itself alone and off by itself under stars undiminished by light pollution.  Dead silence.  No distractions of the usual sort: other people, pets, television, radio, Internet.  Just me, my books, and my past — and the spiritual dimension that the silence and solitude allow to approach.  The hour glass of my existence is running out, which is why I am here to repent of my sins and prepare for death.  The hour of death is the hour of truth when the masks fall, and evasions evaporate.

Modern man, distracted and diverted by endless self-referential yammering, firmly entrapped within the human horizon, is so deluded and lost as to be incapable of even raising the question, seriously, of whether anything lies beyond that stifling horizon.

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Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism

In Does Matter Think? I wrote:

. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .

I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics.  My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.

I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case.  But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case.  A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation.  Christians believe that God became man.  Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction.  For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc.  One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible.  The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us — where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense –  does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.

A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways.  He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature.  Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.

If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first.  Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible.   Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson: 

Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them.  As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case).  But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists.  Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is.  ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)

Strawson and I agree on two important points.  One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential.  The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.

In the Comments Vlastimil V. asked:

But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.

It is matter as understood by current physics.  And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel.  I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic  (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical.  But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving. 

An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality.  For qualia, esse = percipi.  If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means.  The notion strikes me as absurd.  We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective.  If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.

As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness  of the experience.  And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental.  But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning.  His materialism is a vacuous materialism.

Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69)  Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature.  This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret.  Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.

But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry?  It doesn't strike me as particularly  intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental.  It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.