Author: Bill Vallicella

Should a Pro-Lifer Advocate the Killing of Abortionists?

Mike Valle on his Facebook page raises the title question in these terms: "If you believe that abortion is truly murder, then wouldn't it be incumbent on you to kill an abortion doctor? After all, wouldn't you kill a serial killer in the act? " One way to construe the question is as follows. Is it logically consistent for a pro-lifer to hold both of the following:

a) Abortion is morally wrong.

b) Killing abortionists is morally wrong. 

To focus the issue, let's consider only cases of third-trimester abortion in which both fetus and mother are healthy and normal, the pregnancy did not result from rape or incest, and the mother's carrying the child to term will not endanger the mother's life.  To sharpen the issue even more, suppose the fetus is likely to be born within a week.  

To my mind, abortion in a case like this is a grave moral evil for reasons I supply elsewhere, for example here. If you agree with me on this, is it "incumbent on you," i.e., morally necessary for you, to at least try to kill any late-term abortionists you are in a position to kill?  Or is it morally justifiable to hold both (a) and (b)?

Answer A. Yes, one can hold both (a) and (b) because all intentional killing of humans is wrong, regardless of who the humans are, what they have done and what they have left undone.  This pacifist answer is no good because it rules out killing in self-defense, just war, capital punishment, and suicide, and surely at least one of these is morally justifiable.  Surely some intentional killing of human beings is morally justifiable.

Answer B. Yes, because abortion is legal and we have a moral obligation to uphold the rule of law by obeying particular laws and by not taking the law into our own hands. This is a much better answer.  The rule of law is a precious thing because civil order is a precious thing. Laws enacted and enforced by proper procedures have a prima facie claim on our respect. To tolerate mass lawbreaking is to invite social chaos. We should work within the system to have the abortion laws changed.

Answer B is better than Answer A although it is not quite satisfactory. I myself am not about to kill abortion providers, nor do I advocate that anyone else do so.  In explanation I would invoke something like Answer B.

But if I am not willing to kill abortion providers, do I really believe that abortion is a grave moral evil?  Yes, I really believe it. My belief is demonstrated by such actions as voting and arguing against abortion over many, many entries that have cost me a lot of time and effort without making me a cent.   Note that if a person lacks the full courage of his convictions, in the sense that he is not willing to sacrifice his life or liberty for them, it does not follow that he lacks convictions.  Most of us are moral mediocrities and I am no exception. The fact that my efforts to save the unborn are paltry and insignificant does not show that I do not really believe that abortion is wrong. 

The Higher Hypocrisy

A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible.  A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them. 

Presentism: The Triviality Objection

Presentism in the philosophy of time is the thesis that the present moment enjoys an ontological privilege over the other two temporal modi. The basic idea is that only (temporally) present items (individuals, events, times) exist.  If so, past and future items do not exist. What is no longer is not, and what is not yet is not. Presentism presupposes the A-theory of time according to which pastness, presentness, and futurity are monadic properties irreducible to the B-relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than.  Presentness is an absolute property. To say of an event that it is present is not to say that it is simultaneous with a reference to it or perception of it.  

Presentism, then, is the claim all that exists is present, or

P) Nothing exists that is not present.

On a present-tensed reading of 'exists,' however, (P) collapses into a tautology:

P1) Nothing presently exists that is not present.

This trivial truth is not what the presentist intends. What he intends is a restriction of temporal things, things in time, to present things:

P2) Nothing exists in time that is not present.

I am assuming that there  are timeless things, numbers for example.  If there are no timeless things, and everything is in time, then (P2) reduces to 

P2*) Nothing exists that is not present.

The trouble with (P2) and its starred cousin, however, is that they seem obviously false. Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. That is: it did exist, but it does not now exist.  Given that it did exist, it is a temporal item as opposed to an atemporal item such as a number.  Now it it reasonable to think that its being past has consigned it to utter nonexistence?  Arguably not. Here is a little argument.

a) What exists is actual. 
b) What does not exist is either merely possible or impossible. 
c) If a wholly past object such as SS does not exist, then it is either merely possible or impossible. From (b)
d) It is not the case that SS is either merely possible or impossible: what passes away does not become merely possible or impossible.
e) SS exists. From (c), (d), by modus tollens.
f) SS is not present. Datum.
g) Something exists in time that is not present.  From (e), (f).

The intuition behind the argument is that actuality includes the past.  An historian is neither a fiction writer nor a speculator about the merely possible. If it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then there there was a time when Socrates drinks hemlock, Socrates himself, not his haecceity.

The foregoing is a version of the triviality objection to presentism.  It has the form of a dilemma. (P) is trivally true if read as (P1) or trivially false if read as (P2), and these are the only two ways of reading (P).  Either way it is trivial.

Convinced? 

For a full-blown technical treatment, see Ulrich Meyer, The Triviality of Presentism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: An Appeal to Obstructionist Democrats

Wilbert Harrison, Let's Work Together.  Canned Heat cover. The original beats all covers.

Youngbloods, Get Together

Jackie De Shannon, Put a Little Love in Your Heart This one goes out to Maxine Waters.  You reap what you sow. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Jackie De Shannon, What the World Needs Now is Love. Love trumps hate, Nancy Pelosi.

And while we've got this cutie (Jackie, not Nancy!) cued up: When you Walk in the Room. Needles and Pins. Bette Davis Eyes. Kim Carnes' 1981 version was a drastically re-arranged cover.

Study Everything, Join Nothing

What does my masthead motto mean?  I have been asked. One correspondent opined that it is "inhuman."

Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?

It depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And what if I join you for lunch, or join in a discussion?

Human life is obviously a cooperative venture, and the good life involves a certain amount of free association. You will improve your chess if you join the local chess club. Examples are easily multiplied.

Note also that to convey an important truth in four words is not easy.  The punch comes from the pith, but the latter excludes qualification. 

I borrow the motto from a man little read these days. In the context of Paul Brunton's thought, "Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example, and not just a recent one.)

"Join nothing" means avoid group-think; avoid associations which will limit one's ability to think critically and independently; be your own man or woman; draw your identity from your own resources, and not from group membership. Be an individual, and not in the manner of those who want to be treated as individuals but expect to gain special privileges from membership in certain 'oppressed' or 'victimized' or 'disadvantaged' groups.  Most despicable are those who fake membership in, say, the Cherokee tribe, to gain an undeserved benefit.  

"Join nothing" is quintessentially American. Be Emersonian, as Brunton was Emersonian:

"Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one one of its members."

"We must go alone."

"But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation."

(All from Emerson's great essay, "Self-Reliance.")

In Brunton's mouth, the injunction means: study all the religions and political parties, but don't join any of them, on pain of losing one's independence.

Note finally, that the motto is mine by acceptance, not by origin; it does not follow that it ought to be yours.

Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Nagel, and David Benatar

What do these three have in common besides uncommon intellectual penetration and the courage to speak and write publicly on controversial topics?

Each has been viciously attacked by ideologues. Dershowitz and Nagel have been attacked from the Left and Benatar from the Right and the Left.

It is all over for the West if we don't punch back hard against the the forces of dogmatism and darkness in defense of free speech and open inquiry.

Alan Dershowitz

I have already said a bit in defense of the Harvard law professor. I now invite you to listen to his account of how a Martha's Vineyard woman wants to stab him through the heart, presumably because he has not aligned himself with the anti-Trump crowd. He speaks so well in his own defense that there is no need for me to say more.

Thomas Nagel

Another classical liberal who has ignited the rage of the Left is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher.  He has impeccable liberal and atheist credentials and yet this does not save him from the wrath of ideologues who think his 2012 Mind and Cosmos (Oxford UP) and other of his works  give aid and comfort to theism.  Simon Blackburn attacks him in a New Statesman article that suggests that if there were a philosophical index librorum prohibitorum, then Nagel's 2012 book should be on it. The article ends as follows:

There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index [of prohibited books].

The problem with the book,  Blackburn states at the beginning of his piece, is that

. . . only a tiny proportion of its informed readers will find it anything other than profoundly wrong-headed. For, as the title suggests, Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain.

Blackburn doesn't explicitly say that there ought to be a "philosophical Vatican," and an index of prohibited books, but he seems to be open to the deeply unphilosophical idea of censoring views that are "profoundly wrong-headed."  And why should such views be kept from impressionable minds?  Because they might lead them astray into doctrinal error.  For even though Nagel explicitly rejects God and divine providence, untutored intellects might confuse Nagel's teleological suggestion with divine providence.

Nagel's great sin, you see, is to point out the rather obvious problems with reductive materialism as he calls it.  This is intolerable to scientistic  ideologues since any criticism of the reigning orthodoxy, no matter how well-founded, gives aid and comfort to the enemy, theism — and this despite the fact that Nagel's approach is naturalistic and rejective of theism!

So what Nagel explicitly says doesn't matter.  His failing to toe the party line makes him an enemy  as bad as theists such as Alvin Plantinga.  (If Nagel's book is to be kept under lock and key, one can only wonder at the prophylactic measures necessary to keep infection from leaking out of Plantinga's tomes.)

Blackburn betrays himself as nothing but an ideologue in the above article.  For this is the way ideologues operate.  Never criticize your own, your fellow naturalists in this case.  Never concede anything to your opponents.  Never hesitate, admit doubt or puzzlement.  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Winning alone is what counts.  Never follow an argument where it leads if it leads away from the party line.

Treat the opponent's ideas with ridicule and contumely.  For example, Blackburn refers to consciousness as a purple haze to be dispelled.  ('Purple haze' a double allusion, to the eponymous Jimi Hendrix number and to a book by Joe Levine on the explanatory gap.) 

What is next Professor Blackburn? A Naturalist Syllabus of Errors?

Another philosophical ideologue who has attacked Nagel is Brian Leiter.  David Gordon lays into Leiter with justice, and Keith Burgess-Jackson has this to say about the Nagel bashers:

The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of alternatives (i.e., logical possibilities), (2) the questioning of dogma, and (3) the patient distinguishing between what is known and what is not known (or known not to be) in a given area of human inquiry? Nagel's book is smack dab in the Socratic tradition. Socrates himself would admire it. That Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who has made important contributions to many branches of the discipline,  is vilified by his fellow philosophers (I use the term loosely for what are little more than academic thugs) shows how thoroughly politicized philosophy has become. I find it difficult to read any philosophy after, say, 1980, when political correctness, scientism, and dogmatic atheism took hold in academia. Philosophy has become a handmaiden to political progressivism, science, and atheism.  Nagel's "mistake" is to think that philosophy is an autonomous discipline. I fully expect that, 100 years from now, philosophers will look back on this era as the era of hacks, charlatans, and thugs. Philosophy is too important to be given over to such creeps.

Burgess-Jackson puts his finger on the really important point, namely, the politicization of philosophy. This is part and parcel of the Left's politicization of everything.

David Benatar

The Right too has its share of anti-inquiry ideologues, and Benatar's anti-natalist views have drawn their ire and fire. I come to his defense in the following entries:

A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack. The piece begins:

By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.

Mindless Hostility to David Benatar 

Jordan Peterson Throws a Wild Punch at David Benatar

I end on a personal note. When I met Benatar in Prague in late May at the Anti-Natalism Under Fire conference, I found him to be a delightful man, friendly and chipper, receptive to criticism, open for dialog and not the least bit arrogant and self-important in the manner of some academics.  He said to me, "Are you the Maverick Philosopher?"  Apparently someone had informed him of the series of posts I have written on his work.  

Those posts are collected in the Benatar and Anti-Natalism categories. I focus on his The Human Predicament. 

My series of posts on Nagel's Mind and Cosmos can be found in the Nagel, Thomas category.

The Rage of the Never-Trumpers: The Case of the Bootless Max Boot

I trust you all know what 'bootless' means in this context. If my trust is misplaced, 'bootless'  has not to do with footwear or the lack thereof. It means useless, ineffectual. 

Boot's column ends on a spiteful note:

That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

This is childish rage at not getting one's way. It is like biting off one's nose to spite one's face. 

No principled conservative could want Democrats in power, especially now when it has been made abundantly clear what they have been aiming at all along.

One conservative principle here is that no nation can exist without enforceable and enforced borders.

Either Boot rejects this principle or he does not. If he does, then he is no conservative. If he does not, then we ought to conclude that he thinks that the principle is something to talk about and write about, but not act upon.  For when a man comes along with the will to act on the principle, Boot and the Beltway Boys get their bow-ties in a knot and shrink back in horror at the man's boorishness and lack of class.

Suppose that the Republican Party is destroyed like postwar German and Japan. Who will rebuild it? Jeb! Bush?  Boot, like George Will, has lost his mental balance.  

Early in the piece, Boot characterizes the party under Trump as "white-nationalist."

What is the reasoning here? 

Perhaps it goes like this. Trump stands for the rule of law and therefore a secure border. He opposes illegal immigration. Now most of the illegal immigrants are Hispanic. Therefore Trump is a racist.  He has no Constitutionally-grounded reason to secure the border.  He just hates Hispanics and considers them all to be criminals: rapists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, etc.  Not only does he hate Hispanics; he hates all  'people of color.'

And so he is a "white-nationalist!"

The truth, however, is that Trump is an America-Firster. This has nothing to do with "white nationalism" or 'white supremacism' as I explain here. 

Finally, there is the business of the Supreme Court. The bootless Boot presumably would have preferred Hillary nominations to the high bench.

Dershowitz versus the Dems

 Chris Cathcart writes,

When it's Alan Dershowitz saying this stuff, you'd better believe the Democratic Party is going off the deep end. But it's probably too late to expect much sanity.
“I won’t let the Democrats steal my party from me. I want to regain the center,” Dershowitz told WABC Radio’s “Curtis and Cosby” show, noting that he will remain a Democrat as “as long as there’s some chance the Democratic Party can return to normalcy.”
 
“I want to make sure that the radical Left, the woman who got elected in the Bronx and Queens to Congress on the Democratic ticket, that they and Sanders and others don’t represent the Democratic Party,” he continued, referring to socialist Ocasio-Cortez who pulled off a shock victory last week against incumbent Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley.
“I want a fight within the Democratic Party to restore it to the days when it was a great centrist party, when it united people rather than divided people,” he added.
 
It shows how deranged and self-destructive the Dems have become when they turn on Alan Dershowitz, one of the finest legal minds in the country, a man invariably worth listening to, a Democrat and civil libertarian who voted for Hillary.  He is as intelligent as Nancy Pelosi is stupid, and as decent as Maxine Waters is vile.
 
When Dershowitz speaks I grab a notebook. Just the other night on Fox he brought up stare decisis and I took note. He discussed in an even-handed way its pros and cons. To listen to Dershowitz is to learn something about the law, while to listen to Pelosi is to learn something about her addled mental state.   
 
Will the Democrat Party return to normalcy? I don't think so. It will be interesting to see how long Professor Dershowitz remains a Dem.  

Before Trump Derangement Syndrome . . .

. . . there was Bush Derangement Syndrome. (The famous 2003 article by the late Charles Krauthammer.)

What is amazing in retrospect is how viciously the Left treated the mild-mannered, civil, only moderately conservative milque-toast. Remember the Buck Fush bumperstickers? Also interesting is that the intensity of the Left's rage is pretty much the same whether the target is a gentlemanly Bush or an obnoxious and crude Trump.

No matter how moderate and conciliatory you are, leftists will hate you and smear you in every conceivable way. Here:

Consider the "civility" shown by Democrats toward the eminently civil "compassionate conservative" President Bush.

Protesters regularly carried signs saying things like "Save Mother Earth, Kill Bush," "Hang Bush for War Crimes," "Bush=Satan," "Bush is the only Dope worth Shooting." They burned Bush and other administration officials in effigy countless times.

Jonathan Chait wrote a 3,600-word word piece for the New Republic in 2003 on "the case for Bush hatred." In it, he admitted that "I have friends who … describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams gave a speech at a women's peace conference in Dallas in 2007 declaring that "right now, I could kill George Bush." The audience laughed, and she won praise for her "bravery."

Pollster Geoff Garin told The New York Times that Bush hatred was "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling."

The winning film at a 2006 Toronto film festival was a movie — Death of a President — that realistically depicted Bush's assassination.

The left regularly compared Bush to Hitler, just as they are now with Trump.

Playwright Harold Pinter said that "the Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany."

Harry Belafonte called Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world."

Civility, like truth, is not a leftist value. To understand the Left you must understand that they have no qualms about using our values against us. Thus they accuse Trump of incivility when he punches back at them despite their having no respect for civility in the first place. After all, it is a bourgeois value, and they are radicals and 'transgressives.' They will use civility if if it helps their cause but abandon it when it doesn't. It is the same as with free speech and other values we cherish.

They don't care about these values; what they care about is power. Truth counts for nothing. This is why it does no good to point out to them the absurdity of the Hitler comparisons and the falsehood of rest of their smears. As long as the smears work to mobilize their benighted base, leftists will hurl them. 

If we said, falsely, that Hillary = Stalin to give them a taste of their own medicine it would do no good. They would accuse us of smearing Hillary, again using our values against us when they have no objection to smears that work for them.

This is also why it is a mistake to call leftists hypocrites. They are worse than hypocrites since they have no allegiance whatsoever to the values that their behavior betrays.  And the same goes for accusing them of applying double standards. They don't share our standards. 

You can't shame them either, for they have no shame.

Since for a leftist it is all about power, the only way to defeat them is by overpowering them. This is what Trump, but no other Republican, knows how to do.  He knows how to get under their skin and cause them to adopt ever more extreme positions that lose them credibility with reasonable voters. He knows how to  use power and he has the courage to use it.

The Donald delivers. 

Let Roe Go

Megan McArdle:

I am myself uneasily pro-choice. Moreover, just a few days ago, I argued that the increasingly bitter judicial wars tearing apart today’s politics can only be ended with more judicial deference to legislatures and to precedent. It stands to reason that I would be dismayed by the politically electrifying prospect that Roe might be overruled entirely. But I wouldn’t be dismayed. I’d be glad to see Roe go, as quickly as possible.

[. . .]

Somewhat paradoxically, the way to make abortion less contentious is to throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it. Debating the difficult decisions regarding gestational age and circumstances would force people to confront the hard questions that abortion entails, which tends to have a moderating effect on extreme opinions.

Returning the matter to the states would give most people a law they can live with, defusing the rage that permeates politics and has more than once culminated in acts of terrorism against doctors who perform abortions.