Politics – Page 63 – Maverick Philosopher

A Right to Health Care?

Food, shelter, and clothing are more important than health care in that one can get along for substantial periods of time without health care services but one cannot survive for long without food, shelter, and clothing. Given this plain fact, why don’t the proponents of ‘free’ universal health care demand ‘free’ food, shelter, and clothing? In other words, if a citizen, just in virtue of being a citizen, has a right to health care, why doesn’t the same citizen have the right to what is more fundamental, namely, food, shelter, and clothing?

Why isn't health care a commodity in the way that automotive care is? If I want my car to run well, I must service it periodically. I can either do this myself or hire someone to do it for me. But surely I have no right to the free services of an auto mechanic. Of course, once I contract with a mechanic to do a specified job for a specified sum of money, then I have a right to his services and to his services being performed correctly. But that right is contingent upon our contract. You could call it a contractually acquired right. But I have no right to free automotive services just in virtue of the fact that I own a car. So why is it any different with my body? Do I have a right to a colonoscopy just in virtue of my possession of a gastrointestinal tract?

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‘Islamophobia’

This is another one of those silly PeeCee expressions liberals love to use to obfuscate issues and slander their opponents. A phobia is an irrational fear. There is nothing phobic about opposition to radical or militant Islam. To fear it is entirely rational. Militant Islam and Islam are presumably distinct. I could be wrong, but I doubt that Islam as such is the problem. But militant or radical Islam — sometimes called Islamism — most assuredly is a threat to the West and its values. Still, someone (Robert Spencer?) who thinks that Islam as such is the problem cannot be accused of suffering from any phobia. So when I heard the liberal Karen Armstrong use 'Islamophobia' or a cognate during a C-Span presentation, my estimation of her dropped several notches lower.

Someone who uses such words as 'homophobe' or 'Islamophobe' may as well just put a sign on his back declaring: I'm a dumbass PeeCee liberal!

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists. One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism. Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion:

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A Further Thought on State-Run Lotteries: The Morality of Accepting a Payout

In Good Societies and Good Lives I argued against the morality of state-run lotteries. Now let's consider the morality of accepting a payout. Suppose you win big, in the millions. Chances are excellent that this will ruin you for the rest of your life, but that is not my present point. Suppose you can handle the windfall, the onslaught of long-lost cousins, the openly-displayed envious hatred of your 'friends,' the army of 'financial planners' and tax advisors who will beat a path to your door, etc. Aren't the winnings ill-gotten gains?

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Good Societies and Good Lives: On State-Run Lotteries

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state lotteries.

Any government that promotes lotteries is promoting behavior that is harmful to many and positively good for none, not even the few winners who are morally if not economically undermined by them. Sufficiently disciplined people can of course gamble without harming themselves economically. They gamble for diversion and they know when to stop. They have no illusions about it and they appreciate that in the long run it is a losing proposition. But even these people are not doing themselves much good by gambling: they are wasting time that could otherwise be used in some productive way. The undisciplined, however, positively harm themselves, and not only by going into debt. They wallow in irrationality and ‘innumeracy’ (the mathematical analog of illiteracy). How many gamblers could explain the Gambler’s Fallacy? They associate with people who are likely to have a bad influence on them. Since the virtues and vices tend to come in clusters, the gambler is likely to become a drinker, a glutton, and so on. In the words of an old Mose Allison tune: "Drinkin’ and gamblin’, stayin’ out all night; . . . livin’ in a fool’s paradise."

I am not saying that gambling should be illegal; nor am I saying that it is immoral. Some gamble for relaxation, and no ill comes of it. I am saying that gambling ought not be state-sponsored. Government should cause no harm. Some will respond by pointing to the supplemental revenue that state lotteries generate, revenue that can be put to good uses. The tacit assumption seems to be that, if X is a source of supplemental revenue, then X is a good thing.

This assumption is false. State-sponsored prostitution would be an excellent source of revenue — there would be no lack of eager customers — but prostituion is not something a state should sponsor. If it is wrong for the government to promote prostitution, the use of tobacco products, the drinking of alcohol, and the taking of drugs, then it is wrong for the government to support gambling in the form of lotteries.

One can argue with some show of plausibility that governments should permit the aforementioned activities; but I cannot see how any rational person could argue that governments should support or promote them.

If You are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal!

I saw Michael Smerconish on C-Span one morning. His conservative credentials are impressive, but he used the word 'homophobe.'

I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic ground. So we ought to resolutely oppose the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

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A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders

John Hospers lays into 'limousine libertarians.'

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. 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.

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Jacques Maritain on Right and Left

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, or by party affiliation, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. My suspicion is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the upshot. Pointing to this skepticism I betray my own conservative bias. For surely one of the differences between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives are sober where leftists are sanguine about the power and role of reason in the transforming of society.

I recently found a beautifully pithy formulation of the difference between Left and Right in Jacques Maritain's The Peasant of the Garonne (1968, tr. De Brouwer):

The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is. [footnote by J.M.: "What is not is the only thing that is beautiful," said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Jean-Paul Sartre: "The real is never beautiful."] The pure man of the right detests justice and charity, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Goethe (himself an enigma who masked his right with his left), injustice to disorder. Nietzsche is a noble and beautiful example of the man of the right, and Tolstoy, of the man of the left. (pp. 21-22.)

Maritain is of course speaking of ideal types. No sane political philosophy could be purely leftist or purely rightist in the above senses. But it is useful to have the extremes of the spectrum so clearly delineated, especially since political opponents love to paint each other as extremists.

A Liberal Asks: What are the Bases of Liberal Opposition to Religion?

Harriet E. Baber, professor of philosophy, "unrepentant liberal," and proprietor of The Enlightenment Project writes,

I'm an academic. Most of my friends and colleagues are atheists, have no sympathy for religion of any kind and, in particular, detest Christianity. Being a good liberal I read good liberal sources because I like to read people who agree with me but when it comes to religion they don't agree with me. [. . .] As a Christian, I am exceedingly pissed off about about being characterized as Other, and not only Other but Dangerous Other. What is the problem?

Is it because we hold beliefs you regard as false or flat out stupid? I have some sympathy with that because I don't have any sympathy with stupidity. [. . .]

Is it because you take Christianity to be a moral and, more importantly, political agenda, putting a lid on sexual expression and generally making people miserable?

Which is it? Or is it something completely different? I'm just curious. OK, not just. I want to convert the wor[l]d.

I would certainly not characterize myself as a liberal as this term is popularly understood, but I am deeply sympathetic to religion, though also quite critical of it as readers of this blog know. Like Baber, I am puzzled by the depth of the animus against religion, Christianity in particular, that emanates from the Left. Why the blind, raging hostility to it? Why the inability to see anything good in it? Why the fulminations of people like A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling? As I see it, the following are some of the main reasons why otherwise intelligent liberals oppose religion. It is obvious that not every person who self-identifies as 'liberal' is opposed to religion; it is equally obvious that most are. So when I speak of liberals I mean most contemporary liberals.

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A Tax Day Observation

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. In Good Societies and Good Lives, I discuss one such feature, state lotteries. Another impediment is a tax code that punishes productive behavior and rewards behavior that is imprudent.

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Hypocrisy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Left

If, per impossibile, there were such a catalog as the Seven Deadly Sins as seen from the Left, hypocrisy would be in first place. Why? Although some who identify themselves as liberals or leftists can be counted among the religious, the dominant note of the Left from at least 1789 on has been anti-religious. Couple this with the fact that perhaps the most egregious forms of hypocrisy are found among religionists, especially the televangelical species thereof, and you have the beginning of an explanation why liberals and leftists find hypocrisy so morally abhorrent. That men of the cloth and their followers exhibit the worst forms of hypocrisy is captured in standard dictionary definitions of 'hypocrisy.' My Webster's shows, "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; esp.: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion." One reads something similar in the OED.

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