Author: Bill Vallicella

On the Word ‘Racism’ and Some of its Definitions

Racist'Racism' and 'racist' are words used by liberals as all-purpose semantic bludgeons.  Proof of this is that the terms are never defined, and so can be used in wider or narrower senses depending on the polemical and ideological purposes at hand.  In common parlance 'racism' and 'racist'  are pejoratives, indeed, terms of abuse.  This is why it is foolish for conservatives such as John Derbyshire to describe themselves as racists while attempting to attach some non-pejorative connotation to the term.  It can't be done.  It would be a bit like describing oneself as as an asshole, 'but in the very best sense of the term.'  'Yeah, I'm an asshole  and proud of it; we need more assholes; it's a good thing to be.'  The word has no good senses, at least when applied to an entire human as opposed to an orifice thereof.  For words like 'asshole,' 'child molester,' and 'racist' semantic rehabilitation is simply not in the cards.  A conservative must never call himself a racist.  (And I don't see how calling himself a racialist is any better.)  What he must do is attack ridiculous definitions of the term, defend reasonable ones, and show how he is not a racist when the term is reasonably defined.

Let's run through some candidate definientia of 'racism':

1. The view that there are genetic or cultural differences between racial groups and that these differences have behavioral consequences.

Since this is indeed the case, (1) cannot be used to define 'racism.'  The term, as I said, is pejorative: it is morally bad to be a racist.  But it is not morally bad to be a truth-teller.  The underlying principle here is that it can't racism if it is true.  Is that not obvious?

Suppose I state that blacks are 11-13% of the U.S. population.  That cannot be a racist statement for the simple reason that it is true.  Nor can someone who makes such a statement be called a racist for making it.  A statement whose subject matter is racial is not a racist statement.  Or I inform you that blacks are more likely than whites to contract sickle-cell anemia.  That too is true.  But in this second example there is reference to an unpleasant truth.  Even more unpleasant are those truths about the differential rates of crime as between blacks and whites.  But pleasant or not, truth is truth, and there are no racist truths. (I apologize for hammering away at these platitudes, but in a Pee Cee world in which people have lost their minds, repetition of the obvious is necessary.)

2. The feeling of affinity for those of one's own racial and ethnic background.

It is entirely natural to feel more comfortable around people of one's own kind than around strangers.  And of course there is nothing morally objectionable in this. No racism here.

3. The view that it is morally justifiable  to put the interests of one's own race or ethnic group above those of another in situations of conflict or limited resources.  This is to be understood as the analog of the view that it it morally justifiable to put the interests of oneself and one's own family, friends, and neighbors above the interests of strangers in a situation of conflict or limited resources.

There is nothing morally objectionable in his, and nothing that could be legitimately called racism.

4. The view that the genetic and cultural differences between races or ethnic groups justifies genocide or slavery or the denial of political rights.

Now we arrive at an appropriate definiens of 'racism.'  This is one among several  legitimate ways of defining 'racism.'  Racism thus defined is morally offensive in the extreme.  I condemn it and you should to.  I condemn all who hold this. 

Siger of Brabant on Why Something Rather Than Nothing

London Ed offers this quick, over-breakfast but accurate as far as I can tell translation from the Latin (available at Ed's site):

For not every being has a cause of its being, nor does every question about being have a cause. For if it is asked why there is something in the natural world rather than nothing, speaking about the world of created things, it can be replied that there is a First immoveable Mover, and a first unchangeable cause. But if it is asked about the whole universe of beings why there is something there rather than nothing, it is not possible to give a cause, for it's the same to ask this as to ask why there is a God or not, and this does not have a cause. Hence not every question has a cause, nor even every being.

Ed comments, "I'm not sure how Siger's reply falls into the categories given by Bill."  Note first that the question that interests me is in the second of Siger's questions, the 'wide-open' question: not the question why there are created things, but the question why there is anything at all.   To that wide-open question Siger's response falls under Rejectionism in my typology of possible responses.  Siger rejects the question as unanswerable when he says, idiosyncratically to our ears, "it is not possible to give a cause," and "not every question has a cause."  That could be read as saying that not every interrogative form of words expresses a genuine question.

Ed also mentions Wittgenstein and suggests that he "had a go" at the Leibniz question.  I don't think so.  We must distinguish between 'Why is there anything at all?' as an explanation-seeking why-question and the same grammatically interrogative formulation as a mere expression of wonderment equivalent to 'Wittgenstein's "How extraordinary that anything should exist!"  Wittgenstein was not raising or trying to answer the former.  He was merely expressing wonder at the sheer existence of things.

I would be very surprised if someone can find in the history or philosophy, or out of his own head, a response to the wide-open explanation-seeking Leibniz question that cannot be booked under one of my rubrics.  (Credit where credit is due: my catalog post is highly derivative from the work of N. Rescher.)

Maverick Philosopher Eighth Blogiversary

I began this weblog eight years ago today in 2004.

The rumors of blogging's demise have been vastly exaggerated.  What has happened is that those whose purposes all along were more social and less serious have moved on to the so-called social media, Facebook and Twitter.   Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on. A post beats a tweet any day, and no day without a post. Nulla dies sine linea. It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful. After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries.

To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless, quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008. Traffic is good, with 1.3 million total pageviews for this version alone.  That averages out to 1024 page views per day since Halloween 2008. This incarnation sports 3,333 posts.  I thank you for your patronage.

A Catalog of Possible Types of Response to ‘Why Is There Anything At All?’

By my count there are seven possible types of response to the above question, which I will call the Leibniz question.  I will give them the following names: Rejectionism, Mysterianism, Brutalism, Theologism, Necessitarianism,  Nomologism/Axiologism, and Cosmologism.  As far as I can see, my typology, or rather my emendation of Rescher's typology,  is exhaustive.  All possible solutions must fall under one of these heads.  You may send me an e-mail if you think that there is an eighth type of solution.

Either the Leibniz question is illegitimate, a pseudo-question, or it is a genuine question.  If the   former, then it cannot be answered and ought to be rejected.  Following Rescher, we can call this first response  

Rejectionism.  The rejectionist rejects the question as ill-formed, as senseless.  Compare the question, 'How fast does time flow?'  The latter is pretty obviously a pseudo-question resting as it does on a false presupposition, namely, that time is a  measurable process within time.  Whatever time is, it is not a process in time. If it flows, it doesn't flow like a river at some measurable rate.  One does not answer a pseudo-question; one rejects it.  Same with such complex questions as 'When did you stop smoking dope?' The Leibniz question in its contrastive formulation — Why is there something rather than nothing? — may well be a pseudo-question. I gave an argument for this earlier.

If the the Leibniz question is legitimate, however, then it is either unanswerable or answerable.  If unanswerable, then the question points to a mystery.  We can call this response

Mysterianism.  On this approach the  question is held to be genuine, not pseudo as on the rejectionist approach, but unanswerable.  The question has a clear sense and does not rest on any false presupposition.  But no satisfying answer is available.

If the question is answerable, then there are five more possible responses.

Brutalism or Brute Fact Approach.  On this approach there is no explanation as to why anything at all exists.  It is a factum brutum.  As Russell said in his famous BBC debate with the Jesuit Copleston, "The universe is just there, and that is all." (Caveat lector: Quoted from memory!)  A brute fact may be defined as an obtaining state of affairs that obtains without cause and without reason.  If the Principle of Sufficient Reason holds, then of course there are no brute facts.  The principle in question, however, is contested.

Theologism or Theological Approach.  There is a metaphysically necessary and thus self-explanatory  being, God, whose existence and  activity explains the existence of everything other than God.  Why is there anything at all?  Because everything is either self-explanatory (causa sui) or caused to exist by that which is self-explanatory.

Necessitarianism.  On this approach, the metaphysical necessity that traditional theology ascribes to God is ascribed to the totality of existents: it exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity.  It is necessary that there be some totality of existents or other, and (what's worse) that there be precisely this totality and no other. There is no real contingency. Contingency is merely epistemic.  Why is there anything at all?  Because it couldn't have been otherwise!

Nomologism/Axiologism. Theories of this type have been proposed by A. C. Ewing (Value and Reality, 1973), John Leslie (Universes, 1989), and Nicholas Rescher, The Riddle of Existence, 1984).  I will provide a rough sketch of Rescher's approach. 

For Rescher, there is a self-subsistent realm of real possibilities or "proto-laws" whose mode of being is independent of the existence of substances.  This realm of real possibilities is  not nothing, but it is not a realm of existents.  Rescher's claim is that the proto-laws account for the existence of things "without being themselves embodied in some existing thing or things." (27)  Some facts, e.g., that there are things (substances) at all, is "Grounded in the nature of possibility." (27)  What is the nature of this grounding? R. speaks of "nomological causality" as opposed to "efficient causality." (21)  Somehow — and I confess to finding this all rather murky — the proto-laws nomologically cause the existence of physical substances.  How does this explain why there is something rather than nothing?

R. argues, p. 31: (a) If every R-possible world is F, then the actual world is F. (b) Every R-possible world is nonempty. Therefore, (c) The actual world is nonempty: there is something rather than nothing (31).  That is, only nonempty worlds are really possible. As R. remarks, the reasoning here is like the ontological argument: only an actual God is really possible.  Rescher's view seems to be that, while there is a plurality of possible worlds, there is no possible world empty of physical existents.  But how does Rescher support premise (b): Every R-possible world is nonempty?  He gives a ridiculous question-begging argument (p. 32) that I won't bother to reproduce.

Cosmologism.  The above six approaches are listed by N. Rescher (The Riddle of Existence, 1984, Ch. 1).  But I believe there is a seventh approach which I learned from my old friend Quentin Smith. (A later post will deal with this in detail.)    On this approach the Leibniz question is genuine (contra Rejectionism) and has an answer (contra Mysterianism).  Moreover, the answer has the form of an explanation (contra Brutalism).  But the answer do not involve any necessary substance such as God, nor does it take the line that the universe itself exists of necessity.  Nor does the answer ascribe any causal efficacy to abstract laws or values.  The idea is that the universe has the resources to explain its own existence:  it caused itself to exist.  Roughly, everything (space-time, matter, laws) came into existence 13.7 billion years ago; it was caused to come into existence; but it was not caused to come into existence by anything distinct from the universe.  How?  Well, assume that the universe is just the sum total of its states.   Assume further that if each state has an explanation, then this suffices as an explanation of the sum total of states.  Now each state has a causal explanation in terms of an earlier state.  There is no first state despite the fact that the universe is metrically finite in age: 13.7 billion years old.   There is no first state because of the continuity of time and causation: for every state there are earlier states in its causal ancestry.  Because every state has a cause, and the universe is just the sum-total of its states, the universe has  a cause.  But this cause is immanent to the universe.  So the universe caused itself to exist!

Liberals and Leniency

One of dozens of reasons not to be a liberal is that liberals have a casual toward crime.  The best writer on this topic that I know of is Theodore Dalrymple.  His latest is Leniency and Its Costs.  Get thee hence!

I feel sorry about the decline of the mother country, but I'm glad that the consequences of liberalism are playing out there more quickly and dramatically than here, so that we Americans may learn something before it is too late. Excerpt:

What, you might ask, was such a man doing at liberty? Well, most importantly, he was providing a living for the lawyers who defended him when he was caught: he was what one might call a criminal Keynesian. And he was providing ammunition for penological liberals who argue that prison doesn’t work. After all, he had been to prison and still he set fire to the furniture store, endangering the lives of so many people! On this argument, of course, he shouldn’t be sent to prison even now, for it will not “cure” him of his “disease,” and he will learn nothing from it. Among the penological liberals, alas, are to be counted more than one chief justice and our current minister of justice (an Orwellian term unknown to British government until that of Prime Minister Blair): the consistently careerist Kenneth Clarke, who values his reputation with the Guardian, our principal liberal newspaper, more than he does the lives and property of the people of Croydon.

 

Politics: Would That I Could Avoid It

Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. (I mean 'thinking' in a very broad sense that embraces all forms of intentionality as well as meditative non-thinking.)  The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper.  I recommend his Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

So the dominant note of my personality is quietism in the sense just sketched. The Big Questions turn my crank, not this foreground rubbish about abortion, illegal immigration, social security, misuse of eminent domain, leftist race-baiting, etc. It would be nice to be able to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace.

Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats. So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be  avoided.  Besides, the issues of the day all have roots in the Big Questions.  So an assiduous and deep-going application to the issues of the day will lead one to the Big Questions.  An excellent example is abortion.

April 30th, 1945, Berlin

Why did Hitler commit suicide on this day in his bunker in Berlin in 1945?  One reason was that he didn't want to end up like Mussolini and his girlfriend.

I was in Hitler's suicide bunker.

Despite the attempts on Hitler's life, in particular Claus von Stauffenberg's of July 1944, the Leader of the 1000 Year Reich died by his own hand. 

Addendum.  I woke up in the middle of the night and asked myself how Hitler could have known how Mussolini and his girlfriend ended up.  After all, the execution of the two Italians occurred on 29 April, 1945, the day before Hitler's murder of Eva Braun and his suicide.  Could Hitler in his Berlin bunker have gotten word that quickly?  Apparently yes, as I discovered when I pulled Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Penguin, 2002) from the shelf of my well-stocked library:

Apart from Himmler's betrayal, Hitler's other great preoccupation remained his fear of being taken alive by the Russians.  News had come through of Mussolini's execution by partisans and how the bodies of the Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been hoisted upside down in Milan.  A transcript of the radio report had been prepared in the special outsized 'Fuehrer typeface' which saved Hitler from wearing spectacles.  It was presumably Hitler who underlined in pencil the words 'hanged upside down.'  (p. 357)

For another excerpt from Beevor's book, one  which recounts the savage rape inflicted upon German women by the Soviet army as it approached Berlin from the east, see  They raped every German female from eight to 80.

It is important  to rub one's nose in the horrors of history as prophylaxis against the dangerous utopianism of progressives with their Rousseauean fantasies about  man as inherently good. Man is capable of some good, but he is not inherently good.  The study of the history of just the 20th century should disabuse one of that notion once and for all.

PC Conservative Andrew McCarthy’s Lame Response to John Derbyshire

It is well known by now that NRO has cut its ties with John Derbyshire ('Derb') over the latter's publication in another venue of The Talk: Nonblack Version.  Both Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy have commented on this severing of ties and both sets of comments are unbelievably lame.  Here is the substance (or rather 'substance') of McCarthy's response (numerals added):

[1] We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency toward every person — no matter what race, no matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. [2] It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. [3] But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone. [4] To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration of e pluribus unum.

Ad [1].  Well, don't we all (including Derb) believe in the equal dignity of human persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, sex, age?  Is McCarthy suggesting that Derb rejects this principle?   But of course equality of rights is not the same as empirical equality.  That people are not empirically equal is a factual claim in two senses of 'factual': it is a non-normative claim, and it is a true claim.  That people have equal rights is a normative claim. The non-normative and normative claims are logically independent.  One cannot infer empirical equality from normative equality.  More importantly, one cannot infer normative inequality from empirical inequality.  For example, human infants are pretty much helpless, but this fact does not detract from their equal right to life.  Women are on average shorter than men, and less muscular, but these facts do not detract from their status as persons, as rights-possessors.  90 year-olds tend to be more frail than 60 year-olds, but this fact does not entail that a 90 year-old is less of a person, has a lesser normative status, than a 60 year-old. 

Ad [2].  Who could disagree with this bromide?

Ad [3].  It is in his third sentence where McCarthy ascends into Cloud Cuckoo Land.  Suppose it is a fact that "Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery."  A fact is a fact.  There are no false facts, and there are no racist facts.  There are racial facts (facts about race), but a racial fact is not a racist fact.  Now suppose I encounter at night, in a bad part of town, an "individual person" in McCarthy's phrase whom I do not know, a person who is young, male, black, and dressed gangsta-style.  His dark glasses prevent me from seeing his eyes and judging his sobriety.  His deep pockets might conceal a pistol.  Would I be justified in using statistical common sense and avoiding said individual?  Of course.  The guy might be harmless, but I do not know that.  I do know that he fits the profile of an individual who could cause me some serious trouble.  Common sense dictates that I give him a wide berth just as I would with a drunken Hells (no apostrophe) Angel exiting a strip joint.  There are no black Hells Angels, by the way.

Does that mean that I don't consider the black man or the biker to have rights equal to mine?  No. It means that  I understand that we are not mere rights-possessors or Kantian noumenal agents, but also possessors of animal bodies and socially formed (and mal-formed) psyches and that these latter facts induce empirical inequalities of various sorts.

Am I drawing an a priori  conclusion when I avoid the black guy?  Of course not.  My reasoning is a posteriori and inductive.  I am reasoning from certain perceived facts: race (not skin color!), behavior, dress, location, time of day, etc. to a conclusion that is rendered  probable (not certain) by these facts.  And note that in a situation like this one does not consider "race alone" in McCarthy's phrase.  If I considered "race alone" then there would be no difference between the dude I have just described and Condoleeza Rice.

Is my inductive reasoning and consequent avoidance behavior morally censurable?  Of course not.  After all, I have a moral duty to attend to my own welfare.  (See Kant on duties to oneself.)  If anything, my reasoning and behavior are morally obligatory.  And I am quite sure that Andrew McCarthy would reason and behave in the same way in the same circumstances.

Ad [4].  What McCarthy is saying here is nonsense and beneath commentary.  But I will point out the tension between calling for a "pluralistic society" while invoking the phrase e pluribus unum, "out of many, one."  One wonders how long before McCarthy cries for more "diversity." 

The Pee Cee conservative is an interesting breed of cat.  We shall have to study him more carefully.

A Pithy Summary of the Trayvon Martin Case

Here:

The liberal narrative about the [Trayvon Martin] case is now destroyed; it had nothing to do with finding out the truth, whether a trigger-happy vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, or a desperate neighborhood watchman saved his head from being pounded to smithereens by pulling out a gun and shooting his assailant, or something in between. The narrative instead was solely concerned with taking a tragic shooting case and turning it into more fuel for a fossilized civil rights industry (since the case broke, dozens of violent crime cases of blacks against whites and Asians are splashed over the news, enraging readers and escaping liberal commentary). All we know now is that the “narrative”—a preteen shot “like a dog” while eating candy by a white “assassin” who uttered racial epithets and was never even touched by the victim, only to be let go by a wink-and-nod police force—is false.

I think it will be very hard to get a second-degree murder conviction, given the absence of racial malice on the tape (the narrative’s “coons” and NBC’s version of Zimmerman on his own volunteering “he’s black” are now inoperative), eyewitness accounts of the fray, and the clear injuries to Zimmerman. Instead, the authorities will hope that by inflating the indictment, by airing the facts, and by making Zimmerman testify, tensions will ease–and so when he is acquitted or a judge throws out the case, or a lesser count is pressed, riots will fizzle.

[. . .]

Perhaps before the second-degree-murder charge is thrown out, the prosecution can so entangle Zimmerman in testimony that they can recharge him with perjury or conspiracy and then plea bargain him down to a year or two. The case is now not concerned with justice, but with politics, defusing threats of violence, and salvaging the careers of so many who so foolishly rushed to judgment.

Something and Nothing Again: Krauss Takes Another Stab at Defending His ‘Bait and Switch’

In the pages of Scientific American, Lawrence M. Krauss writes:

As a scientist, the fascination normally associated with the classically phrased question “why is there something rather than nothing?”, is really contained in a specific operational question. That question can be phrased as follows: How can a universe full of galaxies and stars, and planets and people, including philosophers, arise naturally from an initial condition in which none of these objects—no particles, no space, and perhaps no time—may have existed? Put more succinctly perhaps: Why is there ‘stuff’, instead of empty space? Why is there space at all? There may be other ontological questions one can imagine but I think these are the ‘miracles’ of creation that are so non-intuitive and remarkable, and they are also the ‘miracles’ that physics has provided new insights about, and spurred by amazing discoveries, has changed the playing field of our knowledge. That we can even have plausible answers to these questions is worth celebrating and sharing more broadly.

This paragraph is a perfect example of why I find Krauss exasperating.  They guy seems incapable of thinking and writing clearly.

First of all, no one can have any objection to a replacement of the old Leibniz question — Why is there something rather than nothing? See On the Ultimate Origin of Things, 1697 — with a physically tractable question, a question of interest to cosmologists and one amenable to a  physics solution. Unfortunately, in the paragraph above, Krauss provides two different replacement questions while stating, absurdly, that the second is a more succint version of the first:

K1. How can a physical universe arise from an initial condition in which there are no particles, no space and perhaps no time?

K2. Why is there 'stuff' instead of empty space?

These are obviously distinct questions.  To answer the first one would have to provide an account of how the universe originated from nothing physical: no particles, no space, and "perhaps" no time.  The second question would be easier to answer because it presupposes the existence of space and does not demand that empty space be itself explained.

Clearly, the questions are distinct.  But Krauss conflates them. Indeed, he waffles between them, reverting to something like the first question after raising the second.  To ask why there is something physical as opposed to nothing physical is quite different from asking why there is physical "stuff" as opposed to empty space.

One would think that a scientist, trained in exact modes of thought and research, would not fall into such a blatant confusion.  Or if he is not confused 'in his own mind' why is he writing like a sloppy sophomore?  Scientific American is not a technical journal, but it is certainly a cut or two above National Enquirer.

To make matters worse, Krauss then starts talking about the 'miracles' of creation.  Talk of miracles, or even of 'miracles,' has no place in science.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to give, as far as possible, a wholly naturalistic account of nature.  It is a noble enterprise and ought to be pursued to the limit.  But what is the point of bringing in a theological term with or without 'scare' quotes?  The same goes for 'creation.'   In his book he refers to the physical universe as creation.  But creation implies a creator.   Why the theological language? Is he trying to co-opt it?  What game is he playing here?  Whatever it is, it doesn't  inspire confidence in anything he says.

Go back to my opening point.  There can be no objection to a replacement of the Leibniz question with one or more physically tractable questions.  Unfortunately, Krauss is not clearly doing this.  He thinks he is answering the Leibniz question.  But he waffles, and he shifts his ground, and he backtracks when caught out and criticized.

Whatever merit his book has in popularizing recent cosmology, it is otherwise worthless.  The book is a miserable exercise in 'bait and switch.'    From the very title (A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing), Krauss purports to be  answering the old philosophical question using nothing but naturalistic means.  But having baited us, he then switches and waffles and backtracks and plays semantic games.

Related post:  "We're Just a Bit of Pollution," Cosmologist Says