One often hears people say, 'You can't legislate morality!' People who say this are often people who confuse the genus morality with the species sexual morality. But even upon acquiescence in this genus-species confusion, it is obvious that we can, do, and ought to legislate morality. After all, we have laws against rape, and we ought to have them. Rape is both immoral and illegal, and it is right that it be illegal. The fundamental problem, however, is the confusion of morality with sexual morality. That the two are distinct should be self-evident, hence I won’t spare the reader the pleasure of providing his own examples. But perhaps I should give one example to prime the pump of the reader's thinking. Suppose a woman poisons her husband in order to collect on a life insurance policy. The act is immoral but has nothing to do with sex in the way that committing adultery has something to do with sex.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Proud To Be a Human Being
It’s a hell of a thing to be a consciousness encased in flesh and riding on a rickety skeleton. A precarious predicament, exposed as we are to the rude impacts of a physical universe that cannot even be called indifferent. A mere reed, but a thinking reed, an engineering reed. A reed who risks his hide to explore and to know.
In the westbound lane of U. S. 60 a huge tractor rig appears, escorted by police cars and hauling a long flat-bed trailer atop of which sits a monstrous turbine or reactor core. A surge of pride energizes me, a pride in belonging to a species of animal that envisages and implements great projects. I am reminded of the exhiliration I felt as a man of twenty two returning from a six month European sojourn. As we took off from London’s Heathrow, I glanced out at the wings and the jet engines and contemplated the audacity of essaying to ride through the air on a controlled explosion.
How pusillanimous and shortsighted, therefore, those who balk at space exploration. Have they stopped to consider what ‘satellite TV’ means? Are they aware of how those communication satellites were placed in their geosynchronous orbits? Do they think that money spent on a Mars expedition would be wasted and better spent on terrestrial needs? That’s an illusory way of thinking.
Had all the time and money spent on pure research and exploration over the centuries been spent on alleviating immediate needs we would have none of the technological wherewithal with which we most marvelously and most efficiently — alleviate our immediate needs.
‘One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter’
Often and thoughtlessly repeated, 'One man's terrorist in another man's freedom fighter' is one of those sayings that cry out for logical and philosophical analysis. Competent analysis will show that clear-thinking persons ought to avoid the saying.
Note first that while freedom is an end, terror is a means. So to call a combatant a terrorist is to say something about his tactics, his means for achieving his ends, while to call a combatant a freedom fighter is to say nothing about his tactics or means for achieving his ends. It follows that one and the same combatant can be both a terrorist and a freedom fighter. For one and the same person can employ terror as his means while having freedom as his end.
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Peter Lupu on My Gun Rights Argument
A guest post by Peter Lupu. Editing by BV. BV will respond to PL in the ComBox. Here in his own words is the argument that BV presented:
1. Every human person possesses a natural right to life.
2. If every human person has a natural right to life, then he has a right to defend his life against those who would seek to violate this right.
3. If every human person has a right to defend his life, then he has a right to an effective means of defending his life.
Therefore
4. Every human person has a right to an effective means of defending his life. (From 1, 2, 3 by Modus Ponens and Hypothetical Syllogism.)
5. In many circumstances, a gun is the only effective means of defending one's life.
Therefore
6. In many circumstances, human persons have a right to possess guns, a right that is not conferred by constitutions but ought to be respected by them.
In “Deriving Gun Rights from the Right to Life” Bill presented a powerful argument on behalf of gun rights that is grounded on the right to life. The argument is based on the assumption that the right to life is a natural right and, hence, is logically prior to positive law, where by positive law we mean a law that is enacted by society. In addition to the principle that natural rights are logically prior to positive law, Bill’s argument features two additional very important principles.
Wonder at Existence
Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:
. . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)
What elicited Magee's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of Magee's intuition of existence?
Nausea at Existence
Existence is often 'invisible' to analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme methods to bring it into view I will quote from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.
Now it goes without saying that I don't agree with Sartre that existence is an unintelligible surd. For me it is the opposite of unintelligible. But what I will borrow from Sartre is the insight that existence is extralogical: it is precisely not what Quine said it was whn he said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage.
How Roquentin Relieved His Nausea
By listening to this song. Art reveals pure ideality sans existence.
The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
Recently discovered. Warning: it may induce nausea.
Excerpt:
Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word "cake." I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.
Liberal Dreckmeisters and Their Decadent Drivel
How is that for a polemical title?
The first decades of televison were comparatively wholesome compared to what came later. An example of outstanding TV was Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, which ran from 1959-1964. Comparing a series like TZ with trash like The Sopranos, one sees the extent of the decline.
Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two
Near the end of Part One of this two-part series, I wrote,
. . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.
This may well be the crux of the matter. But we need to explore it in greater depth. For a theist, God is the absolute. But Sartre famously denies God on the ground that a for-itself-in-itself is impossible: see Being and Nothingness. For Sartre the God-denier, man is the absolute. But there is no Man, only men. Man is an abstraction. So the absolute fractures into finite individual subjectivities, each of which exists contingently. Here is a crucial passage:
Continue reading “Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two”
Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part One
Suppose we divide theories of the meaning of human life into the exogenous and the endogenous. According to the exogenous theories, existential meaning derives from a source external to the agent, whereas on endogenous theories, meaning and purpose are posited or projected by the agent. Classical theism provides an example of an exogenous theory of meaning: because man was created by God for a purpose, namely, to serve and glorify him in this world and commune with him in the next, the purpose of human life is to live in accordance with the divine will so as to achieve one's higher destiny of unending bliss. Jean-Paul Sartre's theory as presented in the manifesto "Existentialism is a Humanism" is an example of an endogenous theory. Indeed, it is the polar opposite of a theistic theory of existential meaning: "Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position." (369, Kaufmann anthology) Herewith, some critical commentary on Sartre's theory as we find it in the essay mentioned.
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Is Smoking a Moral Obligation?
Readers of this weblog know that I am no friend of those benighted purveyors of misplaced moral enthusiasm, the 'tobacco wackos.' But the best way to oppose fanaticism is not by an equal and opposite fanaticism, but by moderation and good sense, qualities usually absent in cults. In The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, a very good essay, Murray Rothbard relates the Randian party line on smoking:
Deriving Gun Rights From the Right to Life
I take the view that some rights are logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as a group decision or a constitution. Thus the right to life is not conferred by any constitution, but recognized and protected by well-crafted ones. In simple terms, you don't have the right to life because some people say you do; they correctly say you do because you have this right quite apart from anything they say. The right to life is a natural right. It is logically antecedent to anything of a conventional nature such as the positive law.
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What the Pelosi Health Care Bill Really Says
You say you haven't gotten around to reading H. R. 3962? What's wrong with you? It's only 1,990 pages long. Here is a summary. Section and page numbers are provided. Please read it. My summary of the summary: this is the most massive assault on our liberty by the Left to date.
Joe Pyne Remembered
The other day I happened to think of the confrontational talk show host from the 1960's, Joe Pyne. He was perhaps the original angry white guy. A little search revealed that chainsmoker Pyne died in 1970, at age 44, of lung cancer.
He once said to Frank Zappa, "I see you have long hair. You must be a girl." Zappa: "I see you have a wooden leg. You must be a table."
Addendum: David Gordon e-mails: " I used to enjoy Joe Pyne too. Two favorite phrases of his that come to mind are 'Go shinny up a tree' and 'Go gargle with razor blades.' "
And now I recall a segment he did on marijuana. He insisted that one drank alcohol to relax, but smoked weed to get stoned. My 16 year-old self thought that a bogus distinction: you can relax with either and get stoned with either.