The Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means. (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.) The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is. This puts them at a serious disadvantage.
David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:
In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.
You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.
Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)
Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties deploy. Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard. He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles. Joe needs to be fired up and energized. The Left understands this. You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America." That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective. Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances, as the 2012 election showed. The nice man Romney was just no match for the street fighter Obama and the slander machine behind him.
The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions. But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions, then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.
As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over. If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting. But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.
Although I incline toward the Horowitz view, I am not entirely comfortable with it. I would like to believe that amicable solutions are available. You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation. Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.' I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming. Things are about to get very interesting indeed.
Uncontroversially, ordinary material particulars such as cats and cups have parts, material parts. Equally uncontroversial is that they have properties and stand in relations. That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. So far we are at the 'datanic,' pre-philosophical level. We start philosophizing when we ask what properties are and what it is for a thing to have a property. So the philosophical question is not whether there are properties — of course there are! — but what they are. Neither is it a philosophical question whether things have properties — of course they do! The question concerns how this having is to be understood.
For example, is the blueness of my cup a universal or a particular (e.g.,a trope)? That is one of several questions one can ask about properties. A second is whether the cup has the property by standing in a relation to it — the relation of exemplification — or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent. Can property-possession be understood quasi-mereologically?
It is this second question that will exercise me in this post.
At a first approximation, the issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff rather infelicitously calls 'relational ontologists' (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts. C-ontologists maintain that ordinary particulars have such parts, and that among these parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts.
Bundle theories are clear examples of C-ontology. If my cup is nothing more than a bundle of compresent properties, then (i) it has parts that are not ordinary physical parts, and (ii) its properties are these parts. The properties could be either universals or particulars (tropes, say). Either way you have a constituent ontology.
Suppose you think that there has to be more to an ordinary particular than its properties suitably bundled. You might reason as follows. If properties are universals, and it is possible that there be two numerically distinct particulars that share all property consituents, then there must be an additional constituent that accounts for their numerical difference. Enter bare or thin particulars. Such substratum theories also count as C-ontologies.
Hylomorphic theories are also examples of C-ontology. The form of a thing is not a property external to it to which the thing is related by exemplification or instantiation, and this is a fortiori true of its matter, whether proximate or prime. It follows that form and matter are ontological constituents of ordinary particulars.
The notion that ordinary particulars have ontological parts in addition to their commonsense parts is admittedly not the clearest. 'Part' in exactly what sense? So it is no surprise that many of the best analytic metaphysicians are R-ontologists. These philosophers think of properties as abstract objects residing in a realm apart. Having decided on that view of properties, they naturally conclude that it makes no sense to maintain that a coffee cup, say, could have causally inert, nonspatiotemporal abstract objects as constituents. So they maintain that for a concrete thing to have a property is for it to stand in a exemplification relation or tie or nexus to an abstract property. According to Michael J. Loux, relational ontologists
. . . restrict the parts of ordinary objects to their commonsense parts. Nonetheless, they insist that ordinary objects stand in a variety of significant nonmereological connexions or ties to things that have character kath auto or nonderivatively; and they tell us that in virtue of doing so those objects have whatever character they do. ("What is Constituent Ontology?" in Novak et al. eds. Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, p. 44, emphasis added)
Why I am Inclined to Reject Relational Ontology
What follows is a sketch of argumentation more rigorously presented, with the standard scholarly apparatus, in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 170 -176, "Rejection of Nonconstituent Realism."
1. The 'Nude Particular' Objection
Relational ontologists don't deny that things have properties; what they deny is that those properties are at or in the things that have them in a way that would justify talk of properties being special metaphysical parts of ordinary concrete things. They maintain that properties are abstracta in a realm apart, and that things are related to them. Hence the phrase 'relational ontology.' It seems to me, however, that on this view of properties and property-possession, ordinary particulars turn out to be what I will call 'nude particulars.'
Nude particulars are similar to, but not to be confused with, Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars or David Armstrong's thin particulars. Bare and thin particulars are constituents of ordinary or thick particulars. Nude particulars are not ontological constituents of anything. A nude particular is an ordinary particular all of whose properties are abstracta. Like bare particulars, nude particulars lack natures. Lacking natures, there is nothing about them that dictates which properties they have. This won't stop an R-ontologist from speaking of essential properties. He will say that an essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which it exists. He cannot say, however, that what grounds this circumstance is that ordinary particulars as he conceives them have natures in them or at them.
I maintain that (i) R-ontologists are committed to nude particulars, but that (ii) there are no such critters. Certainly, the meso-particulars that surround me now are not nude. My trusty coffee cup, for example, is blue at this time and in this place.
The cup is blue, and I see (with my eyes) that it is blue. This seeing is not a visio intellectualis, after all, a 'seeing' wth the 'eye of the mind,' as would befit the inspection of some colorless, atemporal, nonspatial, abstract Platonic object in a realm insulated from the flux and shove of the real order. It is a seeing with the eyes of the head. When I see the cup's being blue, I am not seeing a state of affairs that spans the abyss separating concreta from abstracta; I am seeing a state of affairs that is itself concrete.
Moreover, I see blue (or blueness), again with my eyes. (How could I see that the cup is blue without seeing blue?) It is therefore phenomenologically evident that at least some of the properties of my trusty cup are empirically detectable via ordinary outer perception. But they wouldn't be empirically detectable if they were abstract objects in a realm apart, a Platonic or quasi-Platonic topos ouranos. Empirical detection involves causation; abstracta, however, are causally inert. Therefore, at least some of a thing's properties are at it or in it, and in this sense ontological constituents of it. If so, R-ontology is mistaken.
The empirically detectable properties of an ordinary particular cannot be stripped from it and installed in a realm of abstracta. For then what you would have here below would be a nude particular.
You might object that I have made a travesty of the R-ontologist's position. After all, doesn't Loux in the bolded passage above imply that ordinary particulars have "character" where they are, namely, in the sensible world and that they are therefore not nude? If this is the response that is made to my first objection, then it triggers my
2. Duplication Objection
Suppose the R-ontologist grants that my cup has the character blue (or blueness) and other empirical features at the cup, and that this character can be seen with the eyes of the head, and is therefore not a denizen of a realm of abstracta separated by an ontological chasm from the realm of concreta. I will then ask what work abstract properties do. Why do we need them if the blueness and hardness and so on of the cup are already right here at or in the cup? What is the point of positing 'duplicates' of these empirical characters in a realm of abstracta? They are explanatorily otiose.
The R-ontologist appears to face a dilemma. Either he must say that my coffee cup is a nude particular in denial of the plain fact that the blueness of the cup is an empirically detectable feature at the cup and not a colorless abstract object in a realm apart; or, denying that the cup is nude, he must admit that his abstract properties are explanatorily idle and fit candidates for Occam's Razor.
3. Conclusion
Can we infer that C-ontology is in the clear? Not so fast! Loux brings powerful arguments against it, arguments to be considered in a separate post. My suspicion is that that both styles of ontology lead to insurmountable aporiai.
Chapter III of Etienne Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers is highly relevant to my ongoing discussion of common natures. Gilson appears to endorse the classic argument for the doctrine of common natures in the following passage (for the larger context see here):
Out of itself, animal is neither universal nor singular. Indeed, if, out of itself, it were universal, so that animality were universal qua animality, there could be no singular animal, but each and every animal would be a universal. If, on the contrary, animal were singular qua animal, there could be no more than a single animal, namely, the very singular to which animality belongs, and no other singular could be an animal. (77)
This passage contains two subarguments. We will have more than enough on our plates if we consider just the first. The first subargument, telescoped in the second sentence above, can be put as follows:
1. If animal has the property of being universal, then every animal would be a universal. But:
2. It is not the case that every animal is a universal. Therefore:
3. It is not the case that animal has the property of being universal.
This argument is valid in point of logical form, but are its premises true? Well, (2) is obviously true, but why should anyone think that (1) is true? It is surely not obvious that the properties of a nature must also be properties of the individuals of that nature.
There are two ways a nature N could have a property P. N could have P by including P within its quidditative content, or N could have P by instantiating P. There is having by inclusion and having by instantiation.
For example, 'Man is rational' on a charitable reading states that rationality is included within the content of the nature humanity. This implies that everything that falls under man falls under rational. Charitably interpreted, the sentence does not state that the nature humanity or the species man is rational. For no nature, as such, is capable of reasoning. It is the specimens of the species who are rational, not the species.
This shows that we must distinguish between inclusion and instantiation. Man includes rational; man does not instantiate rational.
Compare 'Man is rational' with 'Socrates is rational.' They are both true, but only if 'is' is taken to express different relatons in the two sentences. In the first it expresses inclusion; in the second, instantiation. The nature man does not instantiate rationality; it includes it. Socrates does not include rationality; he instantiates it.
The reason I balk at premise (1) is because it seems quite obviously to trade on a confusion of the two senses of 'is' lately distinguished. It confuses inclusion with instantiation. (1) encapuslates a non sequitur. It does not follow from a nature's being universal that everything having that nature is a universal. That every animal would be a universal would follow from humanity's being universal only if universality were included in humanity. But it is not: humanity instantiates universality. In Frege's jargon, universality is an Eigenschaft of humanity, not a Merkmal of it.
Since the first subargument fails, there is no need to examine the second. For if the first subargment fails, then the whole Avicennian-Thomist argument fails.
(1) One of the major pieces of evidence the group cites is a study that was presented at a conference over the summer. The WSJ description:
In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.
Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.
What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). They're effectively saying, "If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits."
Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."
Exactly right. As I say in "One Man, One Vote: A Dubious Principle":
Suppose you have two people, A and B. A is intelligent, well-informed, and serious. He does his level best to form correct opinions about the issues of the day. He is an independent thinker, and his thinking is based in broad experience of life. B, however, makes no attempt to become informed, or to think for himself. He votes as his union boss tells him to vote. Why should B's vote have the same weight as A's? Is it not self-evident that B's vote should not count as much as A's?
I think it is well-nigh self-evident. The right to vote cannot derive simply from the fact that one exists or has interests. Dogs and cats have interests, and so do children. But we don't grant children the right to vote. Why not? Presumably because they lack the maturity and good judgment necessary for casting an informed vote. Nor do we grant felons the right to vote despite their interests. Why should people who cannot wisely order their own lives be given any say in how society should be ordered?
Read the rest of that meaty post. It is like a red flag before a liberal bull(shitter).
Mickey "Guitar" Baker died this last week at age 87. He is perhaps best known as one half of the Mickey and Sylvia duo whose Love is Strange was a hit in 1956. Also from '56:
Doris Day, Que Sera Sera. It was a different world, muchachos.
Big Joe Turner, Corrine, Corrina. I don't remember hearing this in '56. Hell, I was only six years old. I remember the tune from the 1960 cover by Ray Peterson. Youtuber comments, which in general are the worst in the whole of cyberspace, on this one are good. There is a lovely version by Bob Dylan on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, under the slightly different name, Corrina, Corrina.
Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Could there be a stream without a source? A wind blowing towards objects (Sartre) that blew from no direction and for no cause?
Changing metaphors once again: you say you like riding the wild horse of the mind into dispersal and diremption? Then do so, and see where it gets you. If self-loss in the manifold proves to be unsatisfactory, you may be a candidate for re-collection.
No pain to speak of, leastways. And I've been at it over 38 years. Your mileage may vary, as does Malcolm Pollack's who, in his Pain, No Gain, reports:
I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.
Mileage is indeed the key. Malcolm never ran far enough to experience what running is really about. He didn't take the first step. Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):
The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness. I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing. I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.
That's one hell of a first step. But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week. I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked. And then the real run begins. Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for yourself.
I don't move very fast these days. I do the old man shuffle. But I've got staying power. Completed a marathon at age 60. Enjoyed the hell out of last week's 10 K Turkey Trot. Surprisingly, the satisfactions of running are the same now as they were in fleeter days.
To avoid injuries, limit your running to two or three days a week and crosstrain on the other days. I lift weights, ride bikes, use elliptical trainers, hike, swim, and do water aerobics.
And don't forget: LSD (long slow distance) is better than POT (plenty of tempo).
Bill O'Reilly does a lot of good, but he made a fool of himself last night on his O'Reilly Factor. It was painful to watch. In the course of a heated exchange with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O'Reilly claimed that Christianity is not a religion, but a philosophy. At first I thought I had misheard, but Mr. Bill repeated the ridiculous assertion.
And yet O'Reilly was right to oppose the extremism of Silverman and the zealots who seek to remove every vestige of religion from the public square, though they seem to be rather less zealous when it comes to the 'religion of peace.'
It is not enough to have the right view; one must know how to defend it properly. A bad argument for a true conclusion gives the impression that there are no good arguments for it. And this is where conservatives tend to fall short. See my Anti-Intellectualism on the Right and Why Are Conservatives Inarticulate?
O'Reilly's bizarre assertion shows that he has no understanding of the differences among philosophy, religion, and Christianity. For part of my views on the differences between philosophy and religion, see here. There is room for disagreement on the exact definition of 'religion,' but if anything is clear, it is that Christianity is a religion. O'Reilly only dug his hole deeper when he claimed that while Christianity is a philosophy, Methodism is a religion!
I am reminded of the inarticulate George W. Bush. He once claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. That silly assertion showed that Bush understood neither philosophy nor Jesus. Jesus claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth. "I am the way, the truth, and the life . . . ." That is a claim that no philosopher qua philosopher can make. A philosopher is a mere seeker of truth, not a possessor of it, let alone truth's very incarnation. A philosopher is a person who is ignorant, knows that he is, and seeks to remedy his deficiency.
Neither God nor Christ are philosophers. And we can thank God for that!
I happened across a post from a couple of years ago on a defunct blog named Throne and Altar. For some reason the post's title drew me in: Another Casualty: Maverick Philosopher Embraces Tolerance. The author, one "bonaldo," claims that Islam has turned me into "a raving liberal." The entry of mine that drew his ire was a defense of the Pope entitled Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. The post so offended bonaldo the extremist that he removed me (or rather a hyperlink to my weblog) from his blogroll. What got his goat were the final two paragraphs of my entry:
That is why both leftists and Islamists must be vigorously and relentlessly opposed if we care about our classically liberal values.
The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism put in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn’t alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying ‘infidels’ — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear ‘event’ in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000.
Now one would think that such a ringing statement would be greeted by two cheers of approbation, if not three, from anyone on the Right. To a fanatical right-winger, however, anyone who sees a scintilla of value in anything the least bit classically liberal is an enemy to be banished to the blogospheric equivalent of Siberia. For these ultra-reactionary extremists one cannot be Right enough. And so bonaldo the fanatic says the following:
After affirming his commitment to liberalism, MP asserts that Christianity is a false religion. Truth doesn’t need to be “chastened” or “checked”. Since truth never contradicts itself, the only thing that can check truth would be falsehood.
I have never asserted anywhere on this blog that Christianity is a false religion. The benighted bonaldo, however, takes this to be an implication of what I do say because he fancies himself to be in possession of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So fancying himself, he is blind to the importance of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, and blind to the murderous intolerance that religions can breed. He quotes from a second post of mine, How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?:
To the extent that Islam takes on jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West. Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be tolerated, including Christianity. We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing.
Bonaldo sees something "ironic" in my position: "What about the belief system that suppresses all belief systems that would suppress other belief systems?" He ignores the fact that I have repeatedly said that toleration has limits. I am not advocating universal toleration. That would be incoherent. If one were universally tolerant, one would have to tolerate those who reject the principle of toleration. Said principle, however, is not a suicide pact. A toleration that tolerated every belief system would undermine itself. What I am saying, from the point view of my conservatism, is that:
No religion that attempts to suppress (by killing, imprisoning, or in any way harming) adherents of other religions ought to be tolerated. Toleration has limits. No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration. And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status. Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive. The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.
Bonaldo speaks of "irony," but I think what he means is that my position is internally inconsistent. But it would be inconsistent only if I were advocating universal toleration – which I am not. It would be inconsistent to maintain both that one ought to tolerate every belief system and suppress the belief system that suppresses other belief systems. But there is no logical inconsistency in maintaining what I do maintain. It is true: I want to suppress radical Muslims when their murderous beliefs spill over into murderous actions. And I extend that to radical religionists of any stripe who act upon murderous beliefs.
But why must we be tolerant? I explain this in On Toleration: With a Little Help From Kolakowski. I also explain there why toleration must not be confused with indifference to truth or relativism about truth. There are too many knuckleheads on the fanatical Right who cannot distinguish between fallibilism and relativism, a distinction explained in: To oppose relativism is not to embrace dogmatism.
I'll be having more to say about ideological extremism later. Lawrence Auster is another prime offender. For just a small taste of his fanatical hostility to conservatives that don't toe his exact party line, see The Trouble with Larry.
Whittaker Chambers long ago warned that the source of the Left's strength was not the appeal of its theory, but the power of its faith. It is believing in something worth dying for that makes leftists a formidable foe. Reason and experience are neutralized by the Left's preening assurance of its own rectitude and of being on the side of the angels. It never has to explain how its efforts to create economic "justice" and plan social abundance have blighted the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings and caused mass murder on an epic scale. The radical faith has outlived "the end of history" and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ideas that inspired its odious schemes continue to thrive because there is only one law that the Left obeys, a law on which its survival is based: don't look back. Reactionary in ideology, immune to evidence, impervious to logic, the Left still sees itself as forward-look-ing and humane and its opponents as regressive and "mean spirited."
I've continued to think on one of our old disagreements, the one about religion and zealotry, and I'd like to continue the discussion. Previously, I'd put forward the argument attempting to show that religious belief is rationally unacceptable. Now, I'm thinking it might be profitable to repackage the argument for a more modest conclusion. I want to say something like, "Given other epistemic commitments that I have and, on reflection, find myself unable to give up, I find that I am rationally unable to accept religious belief of the sort in question." Since I take these commitments to be closely related to the conservative disposition which you and I share, perhaps you will find that you, too are committed to abandoning religious belief." This is, to use a phrase from Robert Nozick, non-coercive philosophy, and I am growing increasingly inclined to think that herein all real persuasion lies.
BV: I suggest we divide persuasion into nonrational and rational, and then subdivide rational persuasion into coercive and noncoercive. Noncoercive rational persuasion, I take it, would be rational persuasion that makes use only of propositions already accepted by the person to be persuaded in an attempt to get him to accept a proposition to which he is logically committed by what he already accepts but does not yet accept. I agree that in the vast majority of cases only noncoercive rational persuasion has a chance at success.
Let me now re-frame the argument that I have presented earlier, with the hope that I can improve on my earlier formulations. When I was a soldier in Afghanistan, I attended a ceremony for a fallen comrade. Nobody I knew. In main sermon, the chaplain said, "Sgt. So-and-so got a big promotion that day," referring to the day an IED [improvised explosive device] ended the life of this unfortunate soldier. His reasoning is that now this soldier was enjoying the loving embrace of Jesus. Whatever suffering this caused him or his family is comparatively small.
I found the chaplain's speech off-putting because his account robbed this soldier's death of its tragedy. He went well beyond consoling the survivors to telling us that we should be positively happy that this event occurred. What disturbed me more, though, is that the chaplain arrived at this conclusion very reasonably from very widely held set of religious beliefs. If one believes, as a majority of the people of the world do, that an eternity of happiness of a much higher grade than any that exists on earth awaits the righteous after death, then one is left to draw this, and other unpalatable conclusions. For instance, if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it.
I too am put off by the chaplain's speech but for a different reason. What I find offensive is his presumption to know that the unfortunate soldier is now in a far better state. No one can legitimately claim to know that God exists, or that we survive our bodily deaths as individuals, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that a given person is in heaven as opposed to the other place, etc. (Nor can one legitimately claim to know the negations of any of these propositions.) People can and do believe these things, and some have good reasons for (some of) their beliefs. Since no one can know about these things, the chaplain had no right to offer the kind of ringing assurance he offered or to make the claim that one should be positively happy that the soldier was blown to bits.
So I would say that the chaplain was doubly presumptuous. He presumed to know what no one can know, and he presumed to make a comforting assurance that he was not entitled to make. But had he said something tentative and in keeping with our actual doxastic predicament, then I wouldn't have been offended. Suppose he had said this: "Our faith teaches us that death is not the end and that this life is but a prelude to a better life to come. We hope and pray that Sgt So-and-So is now sharing in that higher life." I would not be put off by such a speech. Consolation without presumption.
What you are offended by is something different, the very content of the Christian message. But suppose it is true. Then there is nothing ultimately "tragic" about the soldier's death. (I also think you are misusing 'tragic.' Was hubris displayed by the soldier prior to his death?) He has left this vale of tears and has gone to a better 'place.' You see, if Christianity is true, then death does not have the 'sting' that it has for an atheist (assuming the atheist values life in this world). Are you then just assuming that Christianity is false? If it is false, then Nietzsche is right and it is a slander upon this life, the only life there is. But is it false? You can't just assume that it is.
Distinguish the question whether Christianity is true from the question whether it can be known to be true (by anyone here below). I claim that it cannot be known to be true, using 'know' in a strict and intellectually responsible way.
Now one of the "unpalatable consequences" you mention is this: "if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it." But this is not a consequence of Christian belief, but at best a consequence of the fanatical and dogmatic belief that one knows that Christianity is true. Suppose I did know that Christianity — or rather some fire-and- brimstone variant of Christianity– is true, then why wouldn't I be justified in torturing someone until he accepts the saving truth, the truth without which he will spend all eternity in hell? What's worse, a day of torture or an eternity of it? Besides, if I really care about you, wouldn't I want you to have an eternity of bliss?
What you are giving us, I think, is an argument against religious fanaticism, not an argument against religion. Religion is a matter of faith, not knowledge. More precisely, genuine religion is a matter of a faith that understands that it is faith and not knowledge. Once that is understood your "unpalatable consequences" do not ensue. For if I understand that my faith transcends what I can legitimately claim to know, then this understanding will prevent me from torturing someone into acceptance of my creed. For surely it is clearer that one ought not torture people into the acceptance of metaphysical propositions than that said propositions are true.
Now, as our previous discussions have shown, one is not compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook, as I have done, because of these considerations. One is only compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook if one also accepts the idea that earthly goods are not negligible in terms of the reasons they provide. To be clear, I mean things like: the pleasures of laughter, friendship, sex, families, etc., as well as achieving important life goals (including the goal of living a philosophical life in a tumultuous world.) I accept that these things are non-negligible and I feel confident that any theory of the Good Life must afford them a central place. I don't think I can provide a further justification for why I believe this, other than I find the thought compelling. If an interlocutor is happy to accept that these are all axiological ciphers because they are nothing when compared with the goodness of God in the next world, then I must part ways with him. I would, however, be surprised for a conservative to take that view, since conservatives, more than progressives, tend to value the familiar.
I am not sure I follow this last paragraph, but I take you to be saying that there are certain non-negligible goods that this life provides (friendship, etc.) and that anyone who accepts that there are must adopt a non-religious outlook. Your argument can perhaps be put as follows:
1. If a religion such as Christianity is true, then the good things of this world are relatively unimportant as compared with the good things of the world to come.
2. But it is not the case that the good things of this world are relatively unimportant: they are absolutely important.
Therefore
3. Someone of conservative bent, someone who is capable of appreciating what actually and presently exists, ought to reject a religion such as Christianity.
I would respond to this by saying that the goods of this world are certainly not absolutely important, but they are not "axiological ciphers" either. A theist will say that what exists in this world is good because it comes from the source of all goodness, God. So the conservative theist has plenty of reason to appreciate what actually and presently exists, but he is also in a position to evaluate the goodness of finite goods properly and without idolatry because he appreciates that they are other than that which is wholly good. The goods of this world are neither negligible nor absolute, neither illusory nor absolutely real.
I would further argue that atheists typically succumb to axiological illusion: they take what is relatively valuable for absolutely valuable.
1. Care about truth. 2. Care about grammar. 3. Care about eloquence in speaking.
4. Develop refined tastes in everything you can. 5. Develop a masterful BS detector. 6. Speak truths that no one else will, but which need to be heard. 7. Never flatter. 8. Don't sell character for success. 9. Be skeptical of whatever "the herd" likes. 10. Do not watch TV. In fact, turn them off whenever possible. 11. Lament stupidity, inanity, and insanity. They are everywhere.
