Category: Substack

Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

Substack latest. It opens like this:

Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following:

Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:

1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.

2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.

Foot 3In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones.  One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.  

ComBox open.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

Top o' the Stack.

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

 

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your attitudes and values into others.

Leader of the Stack. Excerpts:

We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes that dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name— can get your irenic self killed.

Coexist sticker
 
[. . .]
 

There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, one-sidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or be cancelled in one’s livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

‘Post-Truth’

A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.

Top o' the Stack.

You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.

Emmett Till

Top of the Stack. 

Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly.   To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case.