Bill Vallicella – Page 410 – Maverick Philosopher

David Gelernter on Political Correctness

This is one of the best articles on political correctness I have read. Study it. It will be on the final. (Italics in original; bolding added; a comment of mine in blue.)

Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years — havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it — or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.

We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won't even say "Islamic terrorism." It sounds like a joke — but it isn't funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America's non-elites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don't belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.

[Please don't misuse the word 'theology'; you're talking like a liberal now and foolishly buying into the assumption that theism and theology are buncombe, which of course is not what you intend to do.]

Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What's more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force—as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles—is rage-making.)

The mainstream press largely ignored the Marines story. Mainstream reporters can't see the crucial importance of political correctness because they are wholly immersed in it, can't conceive of questioning it; it is the very stuff of their thinking, their heart's blood. Most have been raised in this faith and have no other. Can you blame them if they take it for granted?

Why did the EPA try to issue a diktat designed to destroy the American coal industry in exchange for decreases in carbon emissions that were purely symbolic? Political correctness required this decree. It is not just a matter of infantile posing, like pretending to be offended by the name Washington Redskins. Bureaucrats have been ordered by those on high to put their p.c. principles into practice, and the character of American government is changing.

The IRS attacks conservative groups — and not one IRS worker has the integrity or guts to resign on principle, not one. Political correctness is a creed, and the creed holds that American conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil. This has been the creed for a generation, but people are angry now because we see, for the first time, political correctness powering an administration and a federal bureaucracy the way a big V-8 powers a sports car. The Department of Justice contributes its opinion that the IRS was guilty of no crime — and has made other politically slanted decisions too; and those decisions all express the credo of thought-police liberalism, as captured by the motto soon to be mounted (we hear) above the main door at the White House, the IRS, and the DOJ: We know what's best; you shut up.

[. . .]

The State Department, naturally, is installing the same motto above its door — together with a flag emblazoned with a presidential phone and a presidential pen, the sacred instruments of invasive leftism. Christians are persecuted, enslaved, murdered in the Middle East, but the Obama regime is not interested. In a distant but related twist, Obama orders Christian organizations to dispense contraceptives whether they want to or not. This is political correctness in action — invasive leftism. Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant. If you don't believe it, go to the universities that trained Obama, Columbia and Harvard, and listen. We live in the Biblical Republic, founded by devout Christians with a Creed (liberty, equality, democracy) supported directly — each separate principle — by ancient Hebrew verses. Christianity created this nation. But p.c. people don't know history. Don't even know that there is any. Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born. Radically different levels of violence; same underlying class-warfare principle.

And we still haven't come to the main point. Many white male job-seekers have faced aggressive state-enforced bigotry their whole lives. It doesn't matter much to a Washington wiseguy, left or right, if firemen in New Haven (whites and Hispanics) pass a test for promotion that is peremptorily thrown in the trash after the fact because no blacks scored high enough. Who cares? It hardly matters if a white child and a black child of equal intelligence study equally hard, get equally good grades and recommendations—and the black kid gets into college X but the white kid doesn't. Who would vote for a president based on that kind of trivia? This sort of corruption never bothers rich or well-educated families. There's always room at the top. But such things do matter to many citizens of this country, who are in the bad habit of expecting honesty and fairness from the institutions that define our society, and who don't have quite as many fancy, exciting opportunities as the elect families of the p.c. true believers. In analyzing Trump, Washington misses the point, is staggeringly wide of the point. Only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.

Why, by the way, was Trump alone honored by a proposal in the British Parliament that he be banned from the country? Something about Trump drives Europeans crazy. Not the things that drive me crazy: his slandering John McCain, mocking a disabled reporter, revealing no concept of American foreign policy, repeating that ugly lie about George W. Bush supposedly tricking us into war with Iraq. The British don't care about such things one way or the other — they are used to American vulgarians. But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody's life properly. Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.

The day Obama was inaugurated, he might have done a noble thing. He might have delivered an inaugural address in which he said: This nation used to be guilty of race prejudice, but today I can tell you that there is no speck of race prejudice in any corner of the government or the laws of this country, and that is an amazing achievement of which every American ought to be deeply proud. An individual American here or there is racist; but that's his right in a free country; if he commits no crime, let him think and say what he likes. But I know and you know, and the whole world knows, that the overwhelming majority of Americans has thoroughly, from the heart, renounced race prejudice forever. So let's have three cheers for our uniquely noble nation—and let's move on tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

But he didn't.

Worst of all its crimes is what invasive leftism has done to our schools. Trump's unprivileged, unclassy supporters understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don't always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.

Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson — even Kasich — could slam thought-police liberalism in every speech. They'd concede that Trump was right to bring the issue forward. Their own records are perfectly consistent with despising political correctness. It's just that they lacked the wisdom or maybe the courage to acknowledge how deep this corruption reaches into America's soul. It's not too late for them to join him in exposing this cancer afflicting America's spirit, the malign and ferocious arrogance of p.c.

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Abraham, Isaac, and Trumping ‘From Above’: A Partial Retraction

I say on my Welcome page:

I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not. Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization. Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something. I admit mistakes if mistakes they be.

Time to admit a mistake. Johannes Argentus comments and I respond (in blue):

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

You wrote in your June 01 post:

"To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abraham would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abraham slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling."

The key factor for a correct understanding of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, and with relation to human reason’s gradual illumination and liberation, by God’s word, from the darkness into which it had fallen since the time of original sin.

According to the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, there was no problem in God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son because it was centuries before He decreed the prohibition of human sacrifices in the Law given through Moses (Deut 18:10). Thus the command did not contradict any positive divine law known by Abraham.

BV: Excellent criticism. I mistakenly ignored the proper sequence of Biblical events. Contrary to what I suggested, God was not putting Abraham in a situation where he had a non-moral reason to override a known divine absolute moral command. Nevertheless, in commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac God was commanding an absolutely immoral act. The act-type — slaughtering an innocent human being — was no less ojectively immoral for being unknown to Abraham.

And according to the timing of the event with relation to human reason’s gradual liberation from darkness, there was no problem either because that process was just starting, and Abraham lived within a culture in which it was a common practice to sacrifice the firstborn son to the personal or local god. Thus the command did not contradict the clouded knowledge that Abraham had of natural law.

The command, then, was not a case of 'trumping from above' a rationally discovered or divinely revealed moral commandment, because Abraham was not aware of any such commandment forbidding the sacrifice of his firstborn, which in his cultural environment was a fairly common practice.

BV: Argentus is right.

Neither does the command necessarily show that God is arbitrarily sovereign over the moral code, which would be the case only if the event had taken place after the revelation of the Decalogue. Rather, the event is wholly dependent on Abraham's (and his contemporaries') state of ignorance regarding moral law and more broadly the meaning of life, which required the establishment of the only base on which the whole edifice could be built: absolute trust and obedience to Absolute Being.

Thus, the pedagogical and "that-time-only" nature of the event is fully consistent with the notion that moral law is inherent to human nature and therefore fully determined once human nature is, so that the acts forbidden by the Ten Commandments are not morally bad because they are forbidden, but rather they are forbidden because they are bad, because they are against human nature. Thus, God is absolutely sovereign to design human nature (except of course for logical contradictions), but once designed, He cannot contradict the moral law inherent in that nature because He cannot contradict Himself. Moral design is already in the ontological design.

BV: Whatever the solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma, it remains the case that God commanded Abraham to do something objectively immoral, even if Abraham did not know it was immoral or believed it was not immoral.

Hillary’s Vacuous ‘Major Foreign Policy Speech’

K. T. McFarland has her number:

Hillary Clinton has begun the policy wars with Donald Trump. She gave it her best shot Thursday with what was billed as a major foreign policy speech. I’ll save you the effort to read the transcript. She said in essence, nothing.

But she wasted many words in saying it. This is par for the course for Madame Secretary. Have you ever heard a speech of hers that had any content?

Sharia: Coming to a Swimming Pool Near You

Enjoy!

Let me see if I understand this. Every vestige of Christianity is to be removed from the public square, while Muslims are allowed to impose their anti-Enlightenment and un-American values and practices in said square at taxpayer expense?

Lecturer on Personal Identity Denied Honorarium

The members of the philosophy department were so convinced by the lecturer's case against diachronic personal identity that they refused to pay him his honorarium on the ground that the potential recipient could not be the same person as the lecturer. This from a piece by Stanley Hauerwas:

It is by no means clear to me that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. Although philosophically I have a stronger sense of personal identity than Daniel Dennett, who after having given a lecture to a department of philosophy on personal identity, was not given his honorarium. The department refused to give him his honorarium because, given Dennett's arguments about personal identity, or lack thereof, the department was not confident that the person who had delivered the lecture would be the same person who would receive the honorarium.

That has to be a joke, right? It sounds like the sort of tall tale that Dennett would tell.

My understanding of character, which at least promises more continuity in our lives than Dennett thinks he can claim, does not let me assume that I am the same person who wrote Hannah's Child. I cannot be confident I am the same person because the person who wrote Hannah's Child no doubt was changed by having done so. While I'm unable to state what I learned by writing the book, I can at least acknowledge that I must have been changed by having done so.

Hauerwas is confusing numerical and qualitative identity. Yes, you have been changed by writing your book. No doubt about it. Does it follow that you are a numerically different person than the one who wrote the book? Of course not. What follows is merely that you are qualitatively different, different in respect of some properties or qualities.

Perhaps there is no strict diachronic personal identity. This cannot be demonstrated, however, from the trivial observation that people change property-wise over time. For that is consistent with strict diachronic identity.

Trump, the Right’s Alinsky

I said recently that in this age of post-consensus politics we need fighters not gentlemen. We need people who will use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them. Civility is for the civil, not for destructive leftists who will employ any means to their end of a "fundamental transformation of America." So please enjoy the graphic to the left which I found here.

"Ridicule," said Saul Alinsky, is "man's most potent weapon." Here are all thirteen rules. You decide how well Trump's behavior conforms to them. It is too bad they are needed, but it is about time the Left gets a taste of its own medicine.

“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from two main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
“Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
“Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
"The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
“If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Regret Become Denial

There are past actions one disowns to such an extent that one comes to deny having done them. "I could never have done such a thing!"

Apatheia and the News

Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do nothing about them? Apatheia and the news don't go well together. Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider. But on the other side of the question:

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. But if you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left. Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea. We should all consume less media dreck. But there is no final retreat from totalitarians. They won't allow it. At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual, but also of the mediating structures of civil society.

Richard Cohen on Donald Trump

Mr. Cohen feels that Trump is betraying the principles that America stands for:

It ['betrayal'] is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some Trump surrogate defend his position on one of the cable news shows. How can you? I want to ask. Do you believe that the government should apply a religious test to let people into this country? Christians? Yes. Jews? Sure. Buddhists, Hindus and Zoroastrians, step this way. Muslims? Not so fast.

Do the people who support Trump realize that they are betraying not merely Muslims but the principles that America stands for? We don't apply religious tests to anything. In that way, we are different than some other countries. In that way, we are better.

How foolish can a liberal be? There is no right to immigrate and the U.S. has no obligation to allow subversives into the country. Now sharia-supporting Muslims are subversives. The values of sharia are antithetical to American values. So it makes perfect sense to carefully vet Muslims who seek to come here. Only those who renounce sharia and show a willingness to assimilate should be allowed in. We have every right to preserve and protect our culture and values.

The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it obviously needs to be interpreted in such a way that it is not made into one. Article VI ends as follows: ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Whether a test is religious depends on what counts as a religion. Is Islam a religion? There are those who maintain that it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. If this is right, 'no religious test' does not apply to Islam. On a more moderate view, Islam is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political ideology incompatible with American values. But then my point about subversive elements kicks in.

Only if a Muslim renounces sharia, embraces American values, and shows a willingness to assimilate should he be allowed into our country. Isn't this just common sense? Of course it is, and it is precisely what liberal idiots like Cohen lack. These same idiots typically label 'xenophobic' those who express such rational concerns as I am now expressing. A phobia is an irrational fear, but there is nothing irrational about fear of Muslim subversives. Typical liberal behavior: misuse language and slander your opponent.

With fools there can be no productive dialogue. We are left with condemning them for their willful stupidity.

So while Trump's rhetoric is incendiary and irresponsible, the essential content of his message about Muslim immigration and Mexican illegal immigration is sound and easily defended.

Are There Non-Moral Justifications for Action That Trump Moral Justifications?

A reader offers the following comment on the immediately preceding post on the problem of dirty hands:

You write that even if one admits an absolute moral standard there are (hypothetically) situations wherein 'moral considerations are trumped by survival considerations'. Yet surely the latter collapses into the former, for what is the implicit presumption that it is good to survive but an axiological position? I use 'axiological' because it has a wider remit than moral/ethical . . . . In other words I would deny that your scenario actually 'gets outside' morality at all.

The issues are deep and difficult. I should make clear that I was not asserting that there are situations in which moral justifications are trumped by survival considerations, or by any non-moral considerations. I was merely examining how and whether this proposition enters the structure of the problem of dirty hands.

The question is whether both of the following propositions could be true. (1) It is objectively and absolutely morally wrong to kill innocent human beings, by nuking the cities of an enemy, say. (2) It is nonetheless justifiable in non-moral terms for a state, a nation, a culture, to do this to survive. (A 'reasons of state' justification.) If the joint truth of (1) and (2) is conceivable, then it is conceivable that there are situations in which moral considerations are trumped by non-moral ones.

Note that the issue is not whether nuking enemy cities, say, can be sometimes justified by moral reasoning. It can. Consequentialist moral reasoning justified Harry Truman's decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The issue is whether, on the supposition that nuking enemy cities and thus killing vast numbers of noncombatants is absolutely morally wrong –wrong always and everywhere regardless of circumstances and consequences — the absolute moral prohibition can be trumped or overruled or suspended, not by a further moral consideration, but by a non-moral one.

To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abe would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abe slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling. We are also hard by the vexing Euthyphro Dilemma. (Is a command obligatory because God commands it, or does God command it because it is obligatory?) I bring up Abraham and Isaac only to suggest how there might be a 'dimension' relative to which even an absolute morality can be relativized — to put it paradoxically.

If morality can be trumped 'from above,' it can be trumped 'from below.' Imagine someone arguing that moral prescriptions and proscriptions are for the sake of human life and not the other way around. Morality is for the living, not the dead. Now human living is always the living of particular animal individuals and particulars groups. So preservation of life, my life, our life, underpins all morality. Morality is for human flourishing; it cannot enjoin our destruction. Socrates was wrong: it is not better to suffer evil than to commit evil. It is sometimes better to commit evil than to suffer it, not morally better, but better for the sake of our preservation. The non-moral imperative of survival trumps the moral imperative to not shed innocent blood. If it is us versus them, it is better that we nuke them than that they nuke us. In some circumstances there is a non-moral rational justification for violating an absolute moral prohibition.

The Counterargument. "You are assuming that survival is a value, and you are justifying the contravention of the absolute moral prohibition by invoking that value. But that value is an objective moral value. So you are not outside morality, but presupposing morality."

A Response. First, survival is something we human animals value, but it is not a moral value; it is pre-moral presupposition of their being any moral values at all. Without agents, there are no actions, hence no free actions, hence no morally responsible actions, hence no moral and immoral actions and failures to act, hence no actions attuned to moral values. The existence of agents and their preservation are values prior to the moral sphere.

Second, survival cannot be an objective moral value. In Kantian terms, consider the "maxim" of the action that would flow from the objective moral value of survival if the latter were an objective moral value. The maxim would be something like: One ought always to look to one's survival first regardless of moral prohibitions which, if honored, could terminate or severely impair one's quality of life.

Example. Iran together with other rogue-state allies launches a war of annihilation against Israel using so-called conventional weapons. Applying the above maxim, Israel could justify nuking Teheran and others population centers. But now here is the question: could the maxim be universalized? What is universalizability?

The requirement that moral judgments be universalizable is, roughly, the requirement that such judgments be independent of any particular point of view. Thus, an agent who judges that A ought morally to do X in situation S ought to be willing to endorse the same judgment whether she herself happens to be A, or some other individual involved in the situation (someone who, perhaps, will be directly affected by A's actions), or an entirely neutral observer. Her particular identity is completely irrelevant in the determination of the correctness or appropriateness of the judgment. (Troy Jollimore, SEP)

It seems to me that the survival maxim cannot be universalized. I cannot coherently will that it should become a law of nature that everyone act according to the maxim. Kant's moral insight is that morality requires impartiality; it requires that one view matters impartially by abstracting from one's particular circumstances and identity. But survival is inherently partial. Living and surviving and flourishing in a material world is inherently one-sided: one cannot help but privilege one's own point of view.

My conclusion is that surivival, while a value, is not an objective moral value. So it seems to me that a survival justification of action that violates absolute moral norms is indeed non-moral and not moral in disguise.

Consider what a Stateside conservative talk jock, Dennis Prager, recently wrote:

The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer's house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say that Opdyke's actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.

In my view — and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians — she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because circumstances almost always determine what is moral, even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That's why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.

Surely Prager is contradicting himself. As Keith Burgess-Jackson comments, "It's shocking that this man doesn't understand the nature of a moral absolute. What he is espousing is situational ethics!" If there is an absolute prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then this prohibition is in force regardless of circumstances and consequences. What is absolutely immoral cannot be "made moral" by a particular set of circumstances.

Can a view like Prager's be rescued from contradiction? It is clear that what is absolutely immoral cannot be morally justified. But it does not follow that it cannot be justified. For there may be non-moral modes of justification.

The Problem of Dirty Hands

I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands.

A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected to lead to the destruction of the leader's state. The leader must act, but he cannot authorize the actions necessary for the state's survival without authorizing immoral actions. He must act, but he cannot act without dirtying his hands with the blood of innocents. In its sharpest form, the problem arises if we assume that certain actions are absolutely morally wrong, wrong in and of themselves, always and everywhere and regardless of circumstances or (good) consequences. The problem stands out in sharp relief when cast into the mold of an aporetic triad:

A. Moral reasons for action are dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'

B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of situation, context, circumstances.

C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.

It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent. The limbs cannot all be true. (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons. But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.

The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected. Which one?

(A)-Rejection. One might take the line that in some extreme circumstances non-moral considerations take precedence over moral ones. Imagine a ticking-bomb scenario in which the bomb-planter must be tortured in order to find the location of the bomb or bombs. (Suppose a number of dirty nukes have been planted in Manhattan, all scheduled to go off at the same time.) Imagine a perfectly gruesome form of torture in which the wife and children of Ali the jihadi have their fingers and limbs sawn off in the presence of the jihadi, and then the same is done to him until he talks. Would the torture not be justified? Not morally justified of course, but justified non-morally to save Manhattan and its millions of residents and to avert the ensuing disaster for the rest of the country? One type of hard liner will say, yes, of course, even while insisting that torture of the sort envisaged is morally wrong, and indeed absolutely morally wrong. I am in some moods such a hard liner.

But am I not then falling into contradiction? No. I am not maintaining that in every case it is morally wrong to torture, but in this case it is not. That would be a contradiction. I am maintaining that it is always morally impermissible to torture but that in some circumstances moral considerations are trumped by — what shall I call them? — survival considerations. These are external to the moral point of view. So while morality is absolute in its own domain, its domain does not coincide with the domain of human action in general. The torture of the jihadi and his wife and children are justified, not morally, but by non-moral reasons.

(B)-Rejection. A second solution to the triad involves rejecting deontology and embracing consequentialism. Consider the following act-type: torturing a person to extract information from him. A deontologist such as Kant would maintain that the tokening of such an act-type is morally wrong just in virtue of the act-type's being the act-type it is. It would then follow for Kant that every such tokening is morally wrong. A consequentialist would say that it all depends on the outcome. Torturing our jihadi above leads or can be reasonably expected to lead to the greatest good of the greatest number in the specific circumstances in question, and those on-balance good consequences morally justify the act of torture. So, contra Kant, one and the same act-type can be morally acceptable/unacceptable depending on circumstances and consequences. Torturing Ali the jihadi is morally justified, but torturing Sammy the jeweler to get him to open his safe is not.

On this second solution to the triad, we accept (A), we accept that moral considerations reign supreme over the entire sphere of human action and cannot be trumped by any non-moral considerations. But we adopt a consequentialist moral doctrine that allows the moral justification of torture and the targeting of non-combatants in certain circumstances.

Now we must ask: Do the consequentialist torturers of the jihadi and their consequentialist superiors who order the torture have dirty hands? Suppose the hands of the torturers are literally bloody. Are they dirty? I am tempted to say No. They haven't done anything wrong; they have the done the right thing, and let us assume, at great psychological and emotional cost to themselves. Imagine snapping off the digits of a fellow human being with bolt cutters or high-torque pruning shears. Could you do that to a child in the presence of his father and do it efficiently and with equanimity? Could you do your job, your duty, despite your contrary inclination? (I am turning Kant's phraseology against him here.) But you must do it because the orders you have been given are morally correct by the consequentialist theory.

Do the torturers have dirty hands? It depends on what exactly it is to have dirty hands whch, of course, is part of the problem of dirty hands. On a narrow understanding, a dirty hands situation is one in which the agent acts, and must act, while both accepting all three limbs of our inconsistent triad and appreciating that they are inconsistent. A dirty hands situation in the narrow and strict sense is an aporetic bind. You must act and you must act immorally in violation of absolute moral prohibitions, and you cannot justify your actions by any non-moral considerations that trump moral ones. That's one hell of a bind to be in! Some will be tempted to say that there cannot ever occur such a bind. But if so, then there cannot ever occur a dirty hands situation. So maybe talk of 'dirty hands' is incoherent.

If this is what it is to be in a dirty hands situation, then a consequnetialisdt cannot be in a dirty hands situation. He is not in an aporetic bind since he rejects (B). And the same goes for those who reject (A) or (C).

(C)-Rejection. A third solution to the problem involves holding that there is no necessity to act: one can abstain from acting. A political leader faaced with a terrible choice can simply abdicate, or simply refuse to choose. He does not order the torture of the jihadi and and hence does not act to save Manhattan; but by not acting he willy-nilly aids and abets the terrorist.

Interim Conclusion

I have the strong sense that I will be writing a number of posts on this fascinating topic. For now I will conclude that if we leave God and the soul out of it, if we think in purely immanent or secular terms, then we are in a genuine aporetic bind, and the problem of dirty hands, narrowly construed, is a genuine one, but also an insoluble one. For rejecting any of the limbs will get us into grave trouble. That needs to be argued, of course. One entry leads to another, and another . . . .

Philosophia longa, vita brevis.

Could a Jew Pray the Our Father?

A rather obvious point swam before my mind this morning: there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian. When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer. (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that there is no mention in it of anything specifically Christian: no mention of Jesus as the Son of God, no mention of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us (the Incarnation), no mention of the Resurrection, nothing that could be construed as even implicitly Trinitarian. So I thought to myself: a believing Jew could pray this prayer. There is nothing at the strictly doctrinal level that could prevent him. Or is there?

Christians pray the Psalms. Do any Jews pray the Our Father? Would they have a good reason not to? No more than a Christian would have a good reason not to incorporate into his prayer life Plotinus' "It is by the One that all beings are beings" despite the non-Christian provenience of this marvellous and beautiful saying.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

OUR FATHER, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

UPDATE (31 May). Andrew Bailey comments:

A long-standing tradition at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame was to recite the Our Father before meetings. Many (but not all) Jewish philosophers associated with the Center would join in these prayers in the years I was there. I asked about it once, and the answer I got was along these lines: "Of course I pray the prayer. Whoever wrote it — whether Jesus of Nazareth or one of his disciples — was definitely a Jew, after all."

Why Trump Over Hillary?

In Kristol's Betrayal Gets Serious, David Horowitz explains why conservatives ought to unite behind Trump:

Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so. Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Read it all.

The Tomb of the Philosopher

Supposedly found. Appropriately enough, in Stagira. How long before Islamists destroy it?