Month: February 2018

Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows: Josef Pieper, Thomist and David Benatar, Anti-Natalist

Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences:

When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear.

The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of

. . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refer to the sophism of not encountering death, which Epicurus seems to have been the first to formulate; "Death is nothing to us; for as long as we are, death is not here; and when death is here, we no longer are. Therefore it is nothing to the living or the dead." [In footnote 13, p. 134,  Pieper reports, "Ernst Bloch, too, has recently repeated the old sophism. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, Frankfurt a. M., 1969, p. 1391] The same argument, or variations of it, has been repeated many times since, from Lucretius and Cicero to Montaigne and Ernst Bloch; but the idea has not thereby become more credible. (p. 29)

Why does Pieper consider the Epicurean philosopheme to be a sophism?

What Epicurus attempts to do is to quarantine death, restricting it to the future period when when we will be dead and presumably nonexistent. Or perhaps we can say that Epicurus is engaged in an illicit compartmentalization: there is being alive and there is being dead and the two compartments are insulated from each other.  Thus when we are alive we are wholly alive and death is nothing to us. And when we are dead, death is also nothing to us because we no longer exist.

Josef PieperI read Pieper as maintaining that this is a false separation: death is not wholly other than life; it is a part of life. We are not wholly alive when we are alive. Rather, we are dying at every moment. Compare Benatar for whom death is part of life in that "death [being dead] is an evil and thus part of the human predicament." (The Human Predicament, p. 110) Part of what makes the human predicament bad is that death awaits us all as a matter of nomological necessity. Now Pieper would never say that the human condition is bad or evil, believing as he does that the world is the creation of an all-good God; but the two thinkers seem agreed on the following precise point: death cannot be assigned to the future in such a way that it is nothing to us here and now.

 

For Pieper, the image of death as Grim Reaper, although apt in one way, is misleading in another, suggesting as it does that death is wholly external to us, attacking us from without and cutting us down. Of course it is true that our lives are threatened from without by diseases, natural disasters, wild animals, and other humans. To this extent death is like a scythe wielded from without that cuts us down. But it is not as if we would continue to live indefinitely if not attacked from without. Death does not kill a man the way his murderer kills him. What images such as that of the Grim Reaper hide, according to Pieper, is the fact 

. . . that we ourselves, in living our life away, are on the way to death; that death ripens like a fruit within us; that we begin to die as soon as we are born; that this mortal life moves towards its end from within, and that death is the foregone conclusion of our life here. (28)

If so, then death cannot be pushed off into the future where it will be nothing to us. It is something to us now in that we are now, all of us, dying.  While alive we are yet mortal: subject to death. But not in the sense that it is possible that we die, or probable, but in the sense that it is necessary.  To be mortal is to be potentially dead, and living is the gradual actualization of this potentiality. Death would be nothing to us while we are alive if we were non-mortal until death overtakes us. But this is not the case: we are mortal while we are alive. We don't go from being wholly alive to wholly dead; we go from being potentially dead to actually dead.

The Epicurean therapeutics is supposed to allay our fear of being dead, and to some extent it does, on the assumption that we are wholly mortal.  But it does nothing to allay our anxiety over being mortal. Being mortal, and knowing that I am, I know what is coming, my personal obliteration.     

Related articles
David Benatar on Death and the Challenge of the Epicurean Argument in its Hedonist Form
Benatar, Death, and Deprivation
Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

The Real FISA Scandal

Andrew Klavan:

It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.

Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.

Klavan on Experience

The Left eats its own: pink pussyhats are now ‘racist’

But of course! First, not all 'women' sport pussies. Second, not all female genitalia are pink. 

The second point presupposes that race and skin color are the same, which is demonstrably not the case; that, however, is a serious point upon which I shall expatiate in a rather more serious offering. Here I am engaged in the Alinskyite task of mocking the willful stupidity of leftists.

There is also the irony of protesting an alleged presidential pussy-grabber by parading around like an idiot in a hat that ramps up the vulgarity a couple of orders of magnitude. I'm thinking of you, Madonna. This is the Women's Movement brought to fruition?

Welcome to the Decline of the West brought to you by the Left.

One good thing about leftists, though, is that they eat their own. They seem bent on their own destruction as they drift ever farther leftward. Contemporary Dems are an example. It wasn't so long ago that they took a reasonable line on illegal immigration.  (Whether Clinton, Obama, and their ilk actually believed what they preached is a further question.) Now the Dems support open borders. We of the Coalition of the Sane, trusting in the basic sanity of most Americans, hope they become as unelectable as Libertarians, the perennial losertarians of American politics.

Story here.

Related: Camille Paglia on Pussy Hats 

Related articles
Jordan Peterson and the Lobsters | Minding The Campus

Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire

To repeat some of what I wrote earlier,

According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions.  Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss.  Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. And not only their lives: Communists in the 20th century broke 100 millon 'eggs' in pursuit of an elusive 'omelet.' Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

Allen WoodyPushing the line of thought further, I note that Allen is deeply bothered, indeed obsessed in his neurotic  Manhattanite Jewish intellectual sort of way, by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence.  Why does the apparent lack of an ultimate meaning bother him?  It bothers him because a deep desire for ultimate sense, for point and purpose, is going unsatisfied.  He wants  redemptive Meaning, but Meaning is absent.  (Note that what is phenomenologically absent may or may not be nonexistent.)

But a deep and natural desire for a meaning that is absent may be   evidence of a sort for the possibility of the desire's satisfaction.  Why do sensitive souls feel the lack of point and purpose?  The felt lack and unsatisfied desire is at least a fact and wants an explanation.  What explains the felt lack, the phenomenological absence of a redemptive Meaning that could make all this misery and ignorance and evil bearable?  What explains the fact that Allen is bothered by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence?

You could say that nothing explains it; it is just a brute fact that some of us crave meaning. Less drastically, and more plausibly, one could say that the craving for meaning has an explanation in terms of efficient causes, but not one that requires the reality of its intentional object.  Let me explain.

Garrigou-LagrangeCraving is an intentional state: it is an object-directed state of mind.  One cannot just crave, desire, want, long for, etc.  One craves, desires, wants, longs for something.  This something is the intentional object.  Every intentional state takes an object; but it doesn't follow that every such state takes an object that exists.  If a woman wants a man, it does not follow that there exists a man such that she wants him.  She wants Mr. Right, but no one among us satisfies the requisite criteria.   So while she wants a man, there is no man she wants.  Therefore, the deep desire for Meaning does not guarantee the existence of Meaning. We cannot validily argue, via the intentionality of desiderative consciousness, to the extramental reality of the the object desired.

Nevertheless, if is it a natural (as opposed to an artificially induced) desire we are talking about, then  perhaps there is a way to infer the existence of the object desired from the fact of the desiring, that is, from the existence of the desiderative state, not from the content or realitas objectiva of the desiderative state.  The inferential move from realitas objectiva to realitas formalis is invalid; but the move from the existence of the state to the reality of its object may be valid.

Suppose I want (to drink) water.  The natural desire for water is rooted in a natural need.  I don't just desire it, the way I might desire (to smoke) a cigar; I need it.  Now it doesn't follow from the existence of my need that there is water hereabouts or water in sufficient quantity to keep me alive, but the need for water is very good evidence for the existence of water somewhere. (Suppose all the water in the universe ceases to exist, but I exist for a little longer.  My need for water would still be good evidence for the existence of water at some time.) If there never had been any water, then no critter could desire or need it; indeed no critter could exist at all.

The need for water 'proves' the existence of water.  Perhaps the desire/need for Meaning 'proves' the existence of Meaning.  The felt lack of meaning — its phenomenological absence — is grounded in the natural (not artificial) need for Meaning, and this need would not exist if it were not for the extramental reality of a source of Meaning with which we  were once in contact, or the traces of which are buried deep within us.  And this all men call God. 

Mr. Allen, meet Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange:

Since natural desire can never be in vain, and since all men naturally desire beatitude, there must exist an objective being that is infinitely perfect, a being that man can possess, love, and enjoy. (Beatitude, tr. Cummins, Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 79)

This argument, studied in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, is more impressive than it may seem.  If  nothing else it ought to undermine the belief of Allen and his like that it is known by all of us today that human existence is ultimately meaningless.

Here is a video with relevant excerpts from G-L's Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul.

Is There a Self? A Reader Requests Reassurance

A reader reports that he has recently gone through "a season of depression and extreme anxiety" and has come to doubt what he hitherto believed to be true, namely that there is a self.  He now fears that Sam Harris may be right in the following passage I quote in Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion:

It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

What the reader wants from me are reasons in support of his belief that there is a self in the teeth of Harris' claim that the self is a cognitive illusion. Whether or not I can strictly refute the 'No Self' view, I can show that it is not rationally compelling and that one can very reasonably deny it. Here we go.

An Operator-Shift Fallacy

1) The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Harris looks to be guilty of an operator-shift fallacy. The following is a non sequitur:

a) It is not the case that I find X

ergo

b) I find that it is not the case that there is X.

2) So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

A Transcendental Argument

3) What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even if the self cannot be experienced as a separate object alongside the usual objects of introspection/reflection.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

This is a sort of transcendental argument for the self. We start with a plain fact, namely, that a search is going on, a search for the referent of 'I' given that I am not identical to my property, my body, or any introspectible contents. We then ask: what makes it possible for this search to proceed? We conclude that there must be something that is searching, and what might that be? Well, me! I am searching.  The I, ego, self is not exhausted by its objectifiable features.

A Dogmatic Assumption

It is simply false to say what Harris says, namely, that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?  My point is that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

The Diachronic Unity of Consciousness

4) There are also important considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self — no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness — that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

The above blend of phenomenological and dialectical considerations suffices to ensure at least a standoff with Harris and other latter-day Buddhists/Humeans. 

Another Reason to be Glad Trump Won

Ben Stein:

Thank God that Trump won. Otherwise, this deeply disturbing behavior of the DNC/MSM/Deep State/Russia cabal would go utterly unnoticed and we would continue to snooze as the left emasculated the Constitution.

Three cheers for Devin Nunes. And a special prosecutor now, if you please, to go after the people behind the phony dossier and Mr. Steele and the FISA warrant. These are real crimes. Real subversion of the justice system. What Nixon did was a high school boy’s snatching hubcaps by comparison. Will the media ever be held accountable?

Of course not. Not one person has ever been charged or prosecuted for the tens of millions of deaths under Stalin. The left takes care of its own. The right has a conscience. Big difference. But maybe we have a fighter this time.

Meanwhile, back to the stunning anger, rage, and sullenness of the leftists and the Black Caucus at Mr. Trump’s first State of the Union. Did you notice their jeering silence at praise of family, the military, the police, the churches? As Tucker says, this isn’t just chance. The left in America really hates authority, does not respect their families, despises knowledge, loathes their police. This isn’t an act. This is how they feel.

This is the DNC/MSM People’s Cultural Revolution à la Mao Tse-tung 1965-72. This is an attempt at demolishing the roots of order and decency and replacing them with racial zeal. This is what the Dems have become.

What President Trump has done is to force the American Left to show its true colors. Thus far, Obama, Hillary, and their ilk have been quite successful at camouflaging their true goals, except perhaps for Obama's letting of the cat out of the bag with his "fundamental transformation of America" remark.  Mr. Trump has wittingly or unwittingly enraged them to the extent that they, wittingly or unwittingly, cannot hide their real views and attitudes any longer.

So now, thanks to Trump, you know if you didn't already what the Democrat Party really stands for.  And so, for those of you who are still Democrats, I put the question: 

Why are you still a Democrat?

Malcolm Pollack on SOTU

Our old friend Malcolm Pollack gets to the heart of the matter:

It became very clear indeed that the actual state of the Union doesn’t really interest them [the Democrats] much at all; the only thing that matters to them is the state of their power over it — which is at a providentially low ebb for at least the next several months. All of this was never supposed to happen, and the Left is very, very angry about it.

What’s that you say? The Democrats are simply upset over the fate of the poor “Dreamers”? This is now shown to be obviously, transparently false. In these last days, Mr. Trump has offered legal status to approximately two million of them. This is far more generous than anything Barack Obama ever put on the table, and is an offer, I’m sure, that any “Dreamer” would accept without a moment’s hesitation. It would grant them their fondest hope — and if the Democrats truly cared about them, as they so ostentatiously pretend to do, they would leap at the proposal themselves (which, I should point out, is as unpopular with many to Mr. Trump’s right as it is on the far Left).

So why don’t they? Why, instead, do they spit on it, and denounce it in the vilest terms? The answer is obvious: because it does not immediately give these illegal aliens the vote, and because the offer is contingent upon reducing indiscriminate immigration — legal and illegal — in the future. Let me put that another way: the Democrats will not take this offer, despite it giving so-called “Dreamers” what they most desire, because it is designed not to assure the Democrats of a continuing flood of new Democrat voters. That is all there is to it.

The Left’s Weaponization of Institutions and Language

Chris Cathcart:

The Left is "the party that started it" in treating politics as war by other means; we can now see a pattern in their using of the basic institutions of our social framework as weapons for their political causes.  Obama/Lois Lerner weaponized the IRS against Tea Party groups; the Obama administration weaponized the FBI against Trump and on behalf of Clinton.  Now they are weaponizing the language as per your posting on how Democrats are undermining rational discourse.  This is most obvious in the case of the word "racist," which is no longer used as something with definite and delimited content, but as as an epithet basically against any political opponent who defends the (structurally) "racist" status quo.  It is also used as a guilt-by-association weapon; if you start criticizing the lousy ways Democrats paint Trump as a racist, that opens you up to the very same charge of being a racist by implication.  (This recently happened to me on a facebook group.)  This sort of tactic brings to my mind the words "cult," "witchhunt mentality," and "Stalin-era Soviet Union."  Of course, the Soviets, cultists and witchhunters have taken themselves to be the paragons of intellectual virtue, so – as you point out – reasoning with these folks becomes a futile exercise.

Right. Almost anything a conservative says or does will get him called a racist by these swine who obviously have no respect for their opponents, the English language, or the canons of rational discourse.  You may recall that Brian Leiter called me a racist on the basis of a post in which I carefully sorted through various possible meanings of 'racist.' So even a discussion of what 'racist' might conceivably mean will get you labeled as one.
 
There is clearly no point in 'dialogue' with enemies who say,  absurdly and shamelessly, that 'chain migration' is a racial slur and that people who use it want to put blacks in chains.  Of course, they don't really believe what they say since they are not that stupid. This is proof positive that our opponents are morally defective people.  For the most part they are not stupid, but vile. Nancy Pelosi, however, appears to be both.
 
This leads to the question of how most effectively to punch back.  Of course to punch back at such degenerates is to punch down which will start them whining about 'punching down.' 
 
Actually, Trump is the best weapon we have. He gets under their skin and causes them to go wild with rage. This 'inspires' them to take more and more extreme positions.  This, one may hope, will alienate sufficiently many voters, including old-time Democrats, and seal their fate. Even lefties such as Andrew Sullivan see the danger here for the Dems. 
 
What made Trump's masterful SOTU performance so enjoyable to watch were the cut-aways to the sullen faces of the Democrat obstructionists. What a sorry lot.  I suspect many rank-and-file Dems are beginning to realize that their party has been hijacked by radicals.  This is not the party of Jack Kennedy or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It is not even the party of Bill Clinton in the '90s.
 
As 'the Amy Wax incident' (as I term it) at U Penn demonstrates with all too painful clarity, this leftist weaponizing mentality goes up very high in the chain of intellectual command and isn't merely a third-rate-mind political-activism phenomenon.  (There, it got a little bit more nuanced, with the phrase "white supremacy" being weaponized in place of "racism.")  My main two-part question: how is it that the rest of academia can sit by in silent complicity as if  this is nothing out of the normal, and how can the UPenn philosophy department sit on the sidelines while standards of discourse on that very campus are flushed down the toilet?)
 
To answer your question, academics with the exception of those in the STEM disciplines are almost all leftists. They associate with their own ilk almost exclusively and reinforce their extremism. And of course they hire their own thereby perpetuating their decidedly un-diverse intellectual culture.  So Amy Wax is to them — wait for it — a racist!  Poor Professor Wax, brave girl scout that she is, thinks she can persuade the thugs with her little sermons about classically liberal values, not realizing that that they care not a whit about such values.  
 
'White supremacist' has come to replace 'racist' as the Left's favorite term of abuse, presumably because it is more specific and more abusive. Perhaps our tactic should be to egg them on to even higher heights of abuse.  How about 'white supremacist child molester'?

Sullen Obstructionist Crapweasel Crybabies

Also known as: Democrats. I left out: destructive, gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, religion-hating, Constitution-disrespecting, language-hijacking, terrorist-coddling, dictator-appeasing, race-baiting, distinction-denying, reason-averse, law-nullifying, criminal-shielding, baby-aborting, tribal, totalitarian, . . . socialist . . . and so on ad nauseam.  So sad! And you are still a Democrat?

State of the Union

Related articles
Dick Durbin: Race-Baiting Hypocrite
Maverick Philosopher: The Moronic Level of Leftist Race-Baiting
Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Man as Onion?

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96: 

Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a bulb man is all skin and no kernel.

I disagree completely. Man is no onion or bulb, surface all the way down, with a nonexistent core. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (R. W. Emerson, "The Over-Soul") The central task of life is not to write merely clever aphorisms, but to return to the Source.

Or perhaps I should say that what the stevedore says is true — of extroverts.

Related: Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity.  (On the topic of death.)

An Unsound Argument Against National Borders

The Dark Ostrich extracts the following argument from a TED video:

(1) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to its protection, but

(2) those immediately outside the border and forcibly prevented from entering are subject to the force of the law but not its protection, ergo

(3) this is wrong.

The conclusion follows from the premises, but the conclusion is false. Therefore, one of the premises is false.  Which one? The first. To accept (1) is equivalent to rejecting nations and their sovereignty.

If you insist that the above deductive argument is sound in the technical sense in which most philosophers use the term (valid in point of logical form and possessing premises all of which are true), then I will point out that it is not rationally compelling.  

For it can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety.  "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

I could also say that the above argument begs the question at the first premise.

If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams.

…………………………..

Jacques responds:

"If you accuse me of begging the question, then I say we have a stand-off. I will then suggest that you leave my country and go live in the borderless world of your dreams."

I think it's not even a stand-off (rationally).  Either premise 2 is patently false, or the argument is just invalid, or 1 has to be interpreted in such a way that 1 is patently false: 

First of all, when American immigration agents (legally) deport people or keep them from entering the country, they usually do so in ways that are legal relative to American law.  And they can be charged with crimes themselves if they don't.  They don't mow down would-be illegal immigrants with machine guns or drop them back in Mexico from helicopters.  They don't force them to convert to Islam or steal their pocket change.  When aliens [are] being deported or prevented from entering [,] the legal standing or rights assigned to such people by American law are generally respected, and are supposed to be respected under American law.  So 2 is patently false on one reasonable interpretation. 

BV: I agree.

Maybe the meaning of premise 2 is that illegal aliens, or would-be illegal aliens, are not legally granted exactly the same protections (rights or powers or whatever) as some other people–American citizens, for example.  But then, in order for the argument to be valid, premise 1 would have to say something like this:

BV: That is the way I read premise (2).

(1*) It is wrong that anyone subject to the force of the law should not be subject to all the same legal 'protections'  to which any other arbitrary person subject to the force of the law is subject.

BV: And that is the way I read premise (1).

But 1* is even more absurd than 1.  If 1* were true, then all the following scenarios would be morally wrong:

i. The President of the United States is legally protected by the Secret Service in ways that some Americans are not.

ii. Some citizens who are poor and unemployed are legally protected against starvation and life-threatening illness by means of welfare payments and publicly subsidized healthcare but the President of the United States is not.

iii. Some citizens who are not convicted child molesters are legally protected against certain forms of invasion of privacy in ways that citizens who are convicted child molesters are not.

iv. Some citizens who are not in the process of carrying out an armed robbery are legally protected against gunfire from police officers but some of those who are in the process of carrying out armed robberies are not.

v. Female citizens are legally protected against sexual harassment in ways that male citizens are not.

vi. Citizens who are 7 years old are legally protected against certain forms of self-harm–doing tequila shots at strip clubs, for example, or having sexual relationships with people who are 30 years old–but some other citizens are not. 

BV: Those are all good points.

Well, this could go on for a while.  So either 2 is patently false or 1, on the relevant interpretation, is patently false. 

BV: I say that (1) is false, (2) is true, charitably interpreted, the argument is valid but unsound. I think we agree or could agree on this.

Why then did I say that it is a stand-off?  Because the open borders defender could bite the bullet and insist on (1)/(1*).  To so insist is equivalent to denying the moral legitimacy of nation-states and their sovereignty. If he is denying said legitimacy, and I am affirming it in virtue of running the argument in reverse, then we are at loggerheads and we have a stand-off. 

Of course I could go on to argue why we have need of nation-states and why they are morally justified. But then we are deep into the bowels of political philosophy. What if the opponent turns out to be a (philosophical) anarchist who denies the moral justification of states and their coercive powers?  We will soon encounter other stand-offs. For example, we will soon enough enter the philosophy of human nature (philosophical anthropology).  What if he takes the anarchist line that people are by nature good and that states and their laws are corrupt and corrupting? Of course, one can argue against that too, and as a conservative I will, but have sophisticated anarchists been decisively refuted to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners of political philosophy?

The task of the political philosopher is to dig down to the deepest underpinnings of the 'surface' debates such as DACA, the need for a border wall, etc.  Unfortunately, when we dig deep, we find that we cannot get to bedrock, a bedrock upon which we can all agree.

I fear that I must now open the ComBox.