Keith Burgess-Jackson's new blog.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Everything
VDH: Stretching or breaking the law on her behalf would have been rewarded by a President Clinton.
Democrats: The New Palestinians on Immigration
Just as the Palestinians twenty-five years and four significant offers after Oslo have demonstrated they really don't want a two-state solution with the Israelis, Democrats have now revealed they don't want to solve the U.S.e immigration problem.
As with the Palestinians, it's all a shell game.
Donald Trump just offered the Dems an agreement on DACA that gives two million "Dreamers" a pathway to full citizenship after 10-12 years — something not even done by Barack Obama! — and the Dems didn't even want to discuss the proposal. All that happened was their increasingly unhinged minority leader screamed Trump was "making America safe for white people!"
Wonder if the rabid press dogs who all but rolled on the floor begging that Navy doctor to say Trump was somehow unfit or senile after scoring 100% on a cognitive test would demand the same thirty questions be put to Ms. Pelosi?
Never mind. The point is that Pelosi revealed herself to be a repellent racist… or racialist (someone who plays the race card no matter what). More importantly, the Democratic Party unmasked themselves as not all that interested in the "Dreamers" as people. They just want to make the Republicans look, well, racist and lose elections. Otherwise they would be jumping up and down for this proposal.
Nancy Pelosi is the stupidest woman in American politics as is obvious if you simply listen to her rants. Stupid and vile, though not as vile as Maxine Waters. Nancy's fund-raising abilities, however, endear her to the destructive Dems.
Related: Nancy Pelosi on the Word. You won't believe it.
The Arc de Trump: The President’s New Nationalism Takes the Stage
An appropriately celebratory account of Trump's triumph in Davos. (HT: Bill Keezer)
What does 'America First' mean? It is explained in this penetrating post.
Hillary the Irrelevant
Poor Hillary is reduced to reading from a crummy book at the Grammys while President Donald J. Trump prepares for his first State of the Union address.
Hillary the Inevitable has become Hillary the Irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Hollywood liberals 'argue' that border control, a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government, is 'white supremacist' and that a physical barrier is a symbol of hate. Actress Alyssa Milano tweets:
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants are rooted in white supremacy. His racist wall is a symbol of hate.
How could any reasonable person disagree with that?
On Making a Splash and Making a Dent
Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, had "made quite a splash." The metaphor is unfortunately double-edged. When an object hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps it would have been more in the spirit of self-promotion to say that his book had made quite a dent. A splash is ephemeral and what makes it sinks. A dent, however, lasts and the denting object remains in sight.
On second thought the first is the more apt metaphor given the quality of the book in question. It captures both the immediate significance of an event and its long-term insignificance.
Homo Viator
The life of inquiry is the way to go for those on the way. Neither complacent dogmatism nor complacent Pyrrhonism.
Two Measures of Personal Success
One measure of success is how far you've gotten, and the other is how far you've come.
The second is the better measure.
On the occasions when you feel you haven't gotten very far in life, tell yourself, "But look where you started from, and what you had to work with, and the obstacles you had to overcome."
Patrick Kurp on Whittaker Chambers
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cars, Trucks, and Roads with Numbers
Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick 6. Wow! Undoubtedly the best cover of the Dylan number. And better than the original. Sorry, Bob. Bonds had a number of hits in the early '60s such as Twist, Twist, Senora. Cute video. The girls look like they stepped out of the '40s. They remind me of my aunts.
Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement. Gas was cheap in those days.
Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' version.
YouTuber Tom Foyle comments, feelingly, with remarks that apply just as well if not more to Sovine's effort:
I don't know what it is about this particular Tom Waits song. Out of all the music I've heard, this is the only one that tears me up from the first chord. I'm a big boy, all grown-up. But I'm helpless to stop those tears. I've seen my fair share, and more, of pain and suffering and death, and so should be fairly immune to such sentimentality. Many songs are supposedly more tear-jerking, ("Honey" springs immediately to mind), but NOT ONE moves me like this. Maybe because I used to hitch-hike a lot? Maybe because I've seen, and been involved in, several car accidents? Maybe because a trucker friend was drowned when the ferry he was travelling on sunk? I don't know. I've always appreciated, and liked a lot, Tom Waits' compositions and performances, and yet this one song captures me completely, emotionally. Perhaps I'm turning into a softy. More likely, I'm just getting too old for this life. Answers on a postcard, please . . .
Asleep at the Wheel, Route 66.
Johnny Winter, Highway 61 Revisited
Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, Rocket 88. First R & R song? Featuring footage and 'leggage' of Miss Bettie Page. What ever happened to her? She 'got religion' in the end.
Kathy Mattea, 455 Rocket
UPDATE (1/29). A U. K. reader/listener recommends Junior Brown's cover of 409 in which the aging Beach Boys sing backup. Brown wields a curious hybrid axe, half steel guitar and half 'regular' guitar. An amazing, and very satisfying shitkicker redneck version. Check it out! Amazing the stuff the Dark Ostrich digs up from the vasty deeps of the Internet.
Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement
Herewith, the eighth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death." This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the conclusions of which adversely affect your doxastic complacency.
Epicurus, you will recall, is the presiding shade. His core idea, presented very simply, is that death can be nothing to us since when we are, it is not, and when it is, we are not. How then can death be bad for the person who dies? But for Benatar, being dead is bad, objectively bad, and for all. So our man faces an Epicurean challenge. I concluded a few entries back that he met the challenge in its Hedonist Variant.
If the only intrinsic goods and bads are conscious or experiential states, then being dead can't be bad since the dead don't experience anything. But there are intrinsic goods and bads that are not experiential. If so, then being dead can be bad in virtue of depriving the decedent of goods that would otherwise have accrued to him. A good or a bad can accrue to one even if it cannot be experienced by the one to whom it accrues.* That, roughly, is the Deprivation Response to the Epicurean challenge.
Benatar supplements it with the Annihilation Response: death is bad for the person who dies because it annihilates or obliterates him, whether or not it deprives him of future goods that he would otherwise have had. (102-103) One has an interest not only in future goods, but also an "independent interest" in continued existence.
The Existence Requirement
One fairly intuitive objection to the Deprivation Response, even when supplemented by the Annihilation Response, runs as follows. How can a person be deprived of anything, whether positive feelings or non-experiential goods, if he does not exist at the time the deprivation occurs? The Existence Requirement, then, is this:
ER. In order for something to be bad or good for somebody, that being must actually exist at the time at which the bad occurs. (111, 115)
It is not enough for the person to exist; the person must exist at the time at which the bad occurs. But when a person is dead, he is no more, so when is the badness of death upon him? Not when he is dead, given the truth of (ER). Recoiling from "Subsequentism," some have adopted "Priorism," the view that death is bad before the person dies. But how can being dead be bad for me if I am alive and kicking? Benatar goes on to consider three other unlikely views. But brevity is the soul of blog, and so I will ignore this discussion and jump to what I consider the heart of the matter.
The Aporetics of Being Dead
I lay it down that a philosophical problem is in canonical form when it is expressed as an aporetic polyad. When the problem before us is poured into the mold of an inconsistent triad, it fairly jumps out at us:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
3) Badness of Death: Being dead is bad for the one who dies.
The limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot (logically) all be true. Any two of the above propositions, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). And yet each of the propositions makes a strong claim on our acceptance.
How do we solve this bad boy? Given that logically inconsistent propositions cannot all be true. we need to reject one of the propositions. Which one?
The Epicurean denies (3) and accepts (1) and (2). Benatar denies (2) and accepts (1) and (3). Benatar
. . . see[s] no reason why we should treat the existence requirement as a requirement. To insist that the badness of death must be analyzed in exactly the same way as other bad things that do not have the distinctive feature of death is to be insensitive to a complexity in the way the world is. (115)
Now is there any way to decide rationally between the two positions? I don't see a way.
I was initially inclined to hold that the Existence Requirement holds across the board, even for the 'state' of being dead. To put it rhetorically, how can it be bad for me to be dead when there is no 'me' at the times I am dead? It seems self-evident! Epicurus vindicatus est. But what is the source of the self-evidence?
The source seems to be the assumption that the 'state' of being dead and the state of having a broken leg are states in exactly the same sense of the term. If they are, then (ER) follows. But Benatar has brought me to see that it is not obvious that being dead is a state like any other.
The bad of a broken leg is had by me only at times at which I exist. This makes it natural to think that the bad of being dead, if a bad it is, is had by me only when I exist, which implies that being dead is not bad. But death is very different from other bad things. (115) Perhaps we can say that the bad of death is sui generis. If so, then we ought not expect it to satisfy the Existence Requirement.
We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand we have the strong intuition that death is bad for the one who dies in that it (a) deprives the person of the goods he would otherwise have enjoyed or had non-experientially, and (b) annihilates the person. This is part of the explanation why Epicurean reasoning smacks of sophistry to so many. On he other hand, The Existence Requirement obtrudes itself upon the mind with no little force and vivacity. Our Czech colleague Vlastimil V finds it self-evident.
Benatar, however, thinks it merely "clever" to adopt the Existence Requirement, but "wise" to recognize that death is different from other bad things. (115-116) The wise course is to "respond to difference with difference and to complexity with nuance." (116)
Given my aporetic bent, I am inclined to say that the triad is rationally insoluble. I see no compelling reason to take either the side of Benatar or that of Epicurus.
What say you, Vlastimil?
________________
*The following example, mine, not Benatar's, might show this to be the case. A philosopher is holed up, totally incommunicado, in a hermitage at a remote monastery in the high desert of New Mexico. While there, the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft awards him its coveted Pessimist of the Year Award which brings with it a subtantial emolument. Unfortunately, our philosopher dies at the very instant the award is made. Not only does he not become aware of the award; he cannot become aware of it. And yet something good happened to him. Therefore, not everything good that happens to one need be something of which one is aware or even can be aware. And the same goes for the the bad.
On Putting Words Into People’s Mouths
Conor Friedersdorf takes British journalist Cathy Newman to task for her perverse refusal, or perhaps knuckleheaded inability, to attend to what Jordan Peterson actually maintains.
I suppose it makes me a 'sexist' to pass on this link.
Merton the Conflicted
Thomas Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular — to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).
Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted, so much so that some view his death by electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968 as a case of suicide. There is some plausibility to that conjecture, but I don't share the view.
Is It Always Morally Wrong to Take One’s Own Life? Part I
A reader poses a question:
A 45 year old lady wants to kill herself. This is not a view that she has come to lightly. She has been thinking about suicide fairly systematically for the last five years – ever since she turned forty in fact. She can think of reasons to live – her sister, for example, will miss her if she’s gone – but she can think of many more reasons not to live.
She has thought hard about the morality of suicide. She knows that there are religious objections to the taking of one’s own life. She is aware, for instance, that the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states that suicide is ‘seriously contrary to justice, hope, and charity’. But she isn’t religious, and doesn’t believe in the afterlife, so she isn’t much impressed by such pronouncements. She has taken into account that some people, such as her sister, will mourn her death. But she does not believe that their suffering will be very great, and certainly not great enough to outweigh what she sees as her right to do as she wishes with her own life – including ending it. She is also aware that she might feel differently about things at some point in the future. However, she thinks that this is unlikely, and, in any case, she is not convinced of the relevance of this point: certainly, she does not think that she has any responsibility towards a purely hypothetical future version of herself.
She has canvassed other people’s opinions about suicide, but so far she has heard nothing to persuade her that killing herself would be wrong. She is frequently told that she "shouldn’t give up", that "things will get better", and that she "should just hang on in there", but nobody has been entirely clear about why she should do these things. For her part, she can’t really see that she stands to lose much of anything by ending her life now. She does not value it, and in any case, if she’s dead, she’s hardly going to regret missing out on whatever it is that might have happened to her had she lived.
Question.
Would it be [morally] wrong for this woman to commit suicide? If so, why?
I will assume that the lady in question has no human dependents and that her sister has agreed to take care of her cats or other pets. My answer is that I see no compelling reason to think that it would be wrong for this woman, precisely as described, to commit suicide, assuming that she harms no one else in doing so. Of course, one can give reasons contra. But I see no rationally compelling reason contra. Let's run through some reasons that have merit. The 'argument' that suicide is always an act of cowardice has no merit.
Augustine's Main Argument
Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 20): “Hence it follows that the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ refer to the killing of a man—not another man; therefore, not even thyself. For he who kills himself, kills nothing else than a man.”
To kill oneself is to kill a man; to kill a man is wrong; so, to kill oneself is wrong. Suicide is homicide; homicide is wrong; ergo, etc. Tightening up the argument:
1) Every intentional killing of a human being is morally wrong.
2) Every act of suicide is the intentional killing of a human being.
Therefore
3) Every act of suicide is morally wrong.
The syllogism is valid, but the major is not credible. Counterexamples in decreasing order of plausibility: just war, capital punishment, self-defense, abortion in some cases, and, of course, suicide!
Note that (1) cannot be supported from the "Thou shalt not kill" of the Decalogue. As Paul Ludwig Landsberg correctly comments, "The Christian tradition, apart from a few sects, has always allowed two important exceptions: [just] war and capital punishment." (The Experience of Death, p. 78) I would add that the allowance is eminently reasonable.
How could suicide count as a counterexample to (1)? Well, as Landsberg points out, killing oneself and killing another are very different. (79) As I would put it, in a case of rational suicide such as the case my reader proposes, one kills oneself out of loving concern for oneself whereas the killing of another is typically, though not always, a hostile and hateful act.
Although Augustine's argument cannot be dismissed out of hand it is not rationally compelling.
Next time: The arguments of the doctor angelicus.
I'll end with one of my famous aphorisms:
One Problem with Suicide
Suicide is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.
So don't do anything rash, muchachos. Your girlfriend dumped you and you feel you can't go on? Give it a year and re-evaluate.
Amy Wax on Free Speech
I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,
It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.
Of course I agree with this brave little sermon. But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions. Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.
Related: