Steve Cortes provides four reasons.
I offer a fifth: Barrett is of the female persuasion. Justice Bork was easy to bork: he was stern of visage and appeared mean to many. The borking of the sweet and amiable Barrett will make the Dems look bad and expose them for what they are: bent upon power by any means, and especially vicious toward blacks and females who will not toe the party line but dare to stray from the p.c. reservation.
Presentism in the philosophy of time is the thesis that only the (temporally) present exists. This is not the tautology that only present items (times, individuals, events . . .) exist at present; it is the substantive metaphysical thesis that only present items exist simpliciter. So if something no longer exists, it does not exist at all.
But what could this mean? It is counterintuitive and, contrary to what prominent presentists claim, not commonsensical. After all, the past is not nothing. It was and it actually was. When Boston's Scollay Square ceased to exist, it did not quit the actual world and become a merely possible object. It became a past actual object.
There are those who remember Scollay Square. Some of their memories are veridical and some are not. How is this possible if there is nothing that they are remembering? What makes the veridical memories veridical? I will assume that we do not want to say that the past exists only in the flickering memories of mortals. However things stand with the future, the reality of the past is near-datanic.
Historians of Boston study Scollay Square making use of various physical remnants, documents such as newspaper stories, photographs and whatnot. Are these historians writing fiction or speculating about possibilities? No, they are faithfully trying to record reality, past reality. So again, what no longer exists cannot be nothing. What is no longer temporally present retains some sort of ontological status.
These datanic points do not of course refute the presentist, but they present (pun intended!) a serious challenge to him, namely the challenge of accounting for them while holding fast to the thesis that only what presently exists exists simpliciter. Past-tensed contingent truths about Scollay Square — 'During the War Scollay Square was where sailors on shore leave in Boston went for girls and tattoos' — presumably need truthmakers; on presentism these will have to exist at present. What sort of item presently existing could do the job? Several suggestions have been made, none of them satisfactory.
Here is a related datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:
DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.
For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date. For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.
It seems to follow that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present. But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away.
So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining
P-Taut: Only present items presently exist
for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's equally substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that
P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter
for this is solipsism of the present moment, a lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, exists, and will exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment. If our presentist pals cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, then they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists. Thus
P-Cont: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.
But this seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Cont) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.
It is obvious that (P-Taut) and (P-Solip) are nonstarters. So we were driven to (P-Cont). But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items. To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to admit that there are times that are not present.
My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense. This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems.
The only good thing about it is that I won't have to hear my wife say, "Haven't you seen this episode before?"
I've seen 'em all before, countless times.
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.
In 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.
I think there are reasons to be skeptical about locating norms in nature, in particular moral norms. If these reasons are credible then we have reason to be skeptical of the notion of a natural right if a natural right is understood to be, not just a non-conventional right, but a right grounded in the natural world.
Foot Notes
Philippa Foot, following Michael Thompson, speaks of Aristotelian categoricals. "The deer is an animal whose form of defence is flight" is an example. (Natural Goodness, Oxford UP, 2001, 34) The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) Foot is not assuming the immutability of species. But species must have a "relative stability" if true Aristotelian categoricals are to be possible at all. (29) "They tell us how a kind of plant or animal , considered at a particular time, and in its natural habitat, develops, sustains itself, defends itself, and reproduces." (29)
Foot, stepping beyond Thompson, stresses the teleological aspect of Aristotelian categoricals. "There is an Aristotelian categorical about the species peacock to the effect that the male peacock displays his brilliant tail in order to attract a female during the mating season." (31) Not that the male strutting his stuff has any such telos in mind. The thought here is that there is a teleology in nature that works itself out below the level of conscious mind. The heliotropism in plants is another example of a kind of teleology in nature below the level of conscious mind. Plants 'strive' to get into the light, but not consciously. Migrating birds are not trying to get somewhere warmer with better eats; they do not have this end in view. And yet the migratory operation is teleologically directed. Why do the birds head south? In order to survive the winter, find food, and reproduce. This is an example of a teleological explanation.
The idea is that there are purposes or Aristotelian final causes at work in the natural world. They are just there for an Aristotelian naturalist like Foot. God did not put them there. Nature is not a divine artifact. If it were, then of course nature would embody divine purposes. As I read Foot, however, she is saying that there is a teleology built into nature whether or not God exists.
In a slogan: Nature is naturally teleological. To be precise, the world of living things is essentially and intrinsically goal-directed. Plants 'strive' toward the light; their roots 'seek' water and nutrients. This goal-directedness is essential to them. They wouldn't be what they are without it.
The Crucial Question
Can we say of an individual plant or animal that it is intrinsically good or bad independently of our interests or desires? This is the crucial question that Foot answers in the affirmative. Norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes. They are ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature. Living things bear within them norms that ground the correctness of our evaluations. Evaluation occurs at "the intersection of two types of propositions: on the one hand, Aristotelian categoricals (life form descriptions relating to the species), and on the other, propositions about particular individuals that are the subject of evaluation." (33)
Foot bravely resists the fact-value and fact-norm dichotomies. (You could say she will not stand for them.) Values and norms are neither ideal nor abstract objects in a Platonic realm apart, as Continental axiologists such as Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann maintained, nor are they psychological projections. Nor do they come from God. They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts.
How does the resistance to the dichotomies go? We start with an Aristotelian categorical such as 'The deer is an animal whose form of defense is flight.' The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) The individual as a member of its species is intrinsically or naturally good if it is able to serve its species by maintaining itself in existence and reproducing. The species sets a standard that the individual specimen either meets or fails to meet. Thus the species is inherently normative.
I now note something not mentioned by Foot but which I think is true. An individual organism does not reproduce itself; it produces (usually in conjunction with an opposite sexed partner) an organism distinct from itself, the offspring. Thus an individual's 'reproduction' is quite unlike an individual's self-maintenance. It is the species that reproduces itself, strictly speaking, not the individual. A biological individual needs ancestors but it doesn't need descendants. The species needs descendants. Otherwise it becomes extinct.
Evaluation of Humans in Light of Contribution to Species?
I mention this to underscore the fact that Foot evaluates individuals and their parts, traits, and actions in the light of the species to which the individual belongs. The goodness of a living thing "depends directly on the relation of an individual to the 'life form' of its species." (27) This is said to hold for all living things including human animals. It would seem to follow that human individuals have no ultimate intrinsic value or goodness as individuals: their value and goodness is relative to the contribution they make to the health and preservation of the species. This is going to be a problem for those of us with a personalist bent. Perhaps we could say that for Foot man is a species-being in that his existence and flourishing are necessarily tied to his being a specimen of a species. (It would make an interesting post to explore how this relates, if it does, to the Marxian notion of Gattungswesen.)
For example, suppose a deer is born with deformed limbs that prevent its engaging in swift flight from predators. This fact about it makes it an intrinsically or naturally bad deer. For such a deer will not be able to serve its species by preserving itself in existence until it can reproduce. The evaluation of an individual deer is conducted solely in the light of its relation to its species. It is not evaluated as an individual in its own right.
I am not suggesting that deer be evaluated as individuals in their own right with an intrinsic moral worth that would make it wrong to treat them as means to our ends as opposed to treating them as ends in themselves. What I am doing is preparing to resist Foot's claim that human beings can be evaluated in the same way that plants and non-human animals are evaluated.
Or consider the roots of an oak tree. (46) What makes them good roots? In virtue of what do they have this evaluative/normative property? They are good because they are robust, not stunted; they go deep and wide in search of water and nutrients; they do not remain near the surface or near the tree. They are good because they are healthy. They are healthy because they preserve the oak in existence so that it can contribute to the propagation of the species. Bad roots, then, are defective roots, roots that don't serve the propagation of the species.
So evaluative properties are 'rooted in' — pun intended! — factual, empirically discernible, characteristics of living things. (The empirical detectability of normative properties makes Foot a cognitivist in meta-ethics.) The vitality of the roots and their goodness are one in reality. We can prise apart the factual from the evaluative mentally, but in reality there is no distinction. Foot does not say this in so many words, but surely this is what her position implies. Somehow, the factual and the normative are one. There is no dichotomy, split, dualism — at least not in reality outside the mind. If so, there is no problem of deriving norms from facts. The facts of nature are 'already' normative. The rabbit is already in the hat: no magic. The health of the roots and their goodness are somehow the same.
Foot would of course resist the following Moorean move: "These roots are healthy, but are they good?" You may recall that G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good? The point is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure. For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good.
Dualism in Through the Back Door
Note, however, that this monism is purchased in the coin of an extramental dualism, namely, that between species and specimen. The normative properties are 'inscribed' in the species if you will. A three-legged cat is a defective cat, but still a cat: it is is a defective specimen of its species. The generic generalization 'Cats are four-legged' cannot be refuted by adducing a three-legged cat. This is because 'cat' in the Aristotelian categorical, which is a generic generalization, is about the species, or, as Foot also writes, the life form of the species, which is distinct from any and all of its specimens. The species is normative for its specimens. The species is not identical to any one of its specimens, nor is it identical to all the specimens taken together.
In sum, the sameness or 'monism' of normative and factual properties presupposes the dualism of species and specimen. The ontological status of species, however, remains murky.
The idea, then, is that the species to which the individual organism belongs encapsulates norms of goodness for its members which the individual either meets or fails to meet. If an individual deer, say, satisfies the norms 'inscribed' in the species to which it belongs, then it is a good deer. Otherwise it is not. This allows for evaluations to be objectively either true or false.
Interim Critical Remarks
A. This naturalistic scheme strikes me as obscure because the status of species has not been sufficiently clarified. Aristotelian categoricals are generic statements about species, but what exactly are species or the "life forms of species"? The species peacock presumably exists only in individual peacocks, but is not identical to any such individual or to the whole lot of them. (The species is not an extensional entity such as a mereological sum, or a set.) It looks to be an immanent universal, a one-in-many. And this in a two-fold sense: (i) the species is in the individual as a sort of ontological constituent of it, and (ii) a species cannot exist uninstantiated. (A transcendent universal is a one-over-many.) But then species, as immanent universals, are not natural in the very same sense in which an individual peacock is natural, i.e., in space and time at a definite spatiotemporal location, and only there. (Immanent universals are multiply located.) So Foot's natural norms are not natural in the same sense in which the organisms of which they are the norms are natural.
I am tempted to say, with a certain amount of poetic excess, that Foot's natural norms are secularized Platonic Forms, Forms that that been brought down from the superlunary and installed in the sublunary.
There are two senses of 'nature' in play here as you may have noticed. In one sense, nature is just the space-time system and its contents. In this sense, nature is just the physical universe, the material world. In a second sense, a nature is an essence. Thus it is man's nature to be rational as it is God's nature to be good; but only man is a natural being, i.e., a denizen of the material world. God by contrast is a super-natural being.
One could say that for an Aristotelian, 'sublunary' natures (essences that encapsulate norms) are in nature (the space-time system). God's nature (essence), however, is not in nature (the space-time manifold).
So there still is a fact-norm distinction in the form of the distinction between a member of a living species and the species. The member is a physical individual, a particular lion for example. The species is an essence which is not a physical individual but an immanent universal. This whole scheme will remain murky until it is explained what a species is and how it is present in its members. We are entangled in the the ancient problem of universals. Foot's norms are not outside of things in a realm apart, nor are they in the mind; they are 'in' things, but not parcelled out among the things they are in. But what does this 'in' mean exactly?
My experience with Aristotelians is that they do not satisfactorily confront, let alone solve, the various problems that arise in this connection.
B. My second remark concerns an individual organism that cannot serve its species such as an infertile human male, or a human female who cannot have children and is therefore biologically defective in this respect. Does her biological defect make her a bad human being? Foot would seem to have to say yes: the defective woman does not come up to the norm for her species. She is abnormal in a normative sense and not merely in a statistical sense. She is not a good woman! How is this any different from the case of the lame deer? A lame deer is a defective deer, hence not a good deer. It is not a good deer because it cannot flee from predators thereby maintaining its life so that it can go on to procreate and serve its species by so doing. Likewise, a woman who cannot reproduce and fulfill her function in service to her species is a defective woman who fails of her purpose and is therefore a bad woman, not morally bad, of course since no free will is involved, but objectively bad nonetheless.
Foot wants to bring normativity down to earth from Plato's heaven; at the same time she wants to extrude it from the mind and install it in natural things outside the mind. This makes plenty of sense with respect to plants and non-human animals. But of course she wants to extend her scheme to humans as well. This is where trouble starts.
Foot sees the individual organism in the light of the species: as a specimen of the species and not as an individual in its own right. This is not a problem for plants and non-human animals, with the possible exception of our pets. But Foot wants to extend her natural normativity scheme to humans as well. But how can what I ought to do, and what I ought not to do, and what I should be and how I should be be dictated by my species membership? Am I just an animal, a bit of the world's fauna? I am an animal, but I am also a person: not just a material object in a material world, but a conscious and self-conscious subject for whom there is a world.
The personalist approach I take does not sit well within an Aristotelian naturalism.
Is Life the Ultimate Principle of Evaluation?
C. For Foot, as for Nietzsche, life is the ultimate principle of evaluation, physical life, natural life, the life of material beings in space and time, mortal life, life that inevitably loses in the battle against death. So the goodness of a human action or disposition is "simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing." (5) Badness, then, is natural defect and this goes for humans too: "moral defect is a form of natural defect." (27) Dwell on that for a moment: MORAL defect is a form of natural defect. A morally bad man, however, is not morally bad qua animal, but qua person where personhood includes free agency. How then can moral defect be a form of natural defect? If I am wholly natural, just a highly evolved animal, then I am subject to nature's determinism which is arguably incompatible with moral responsibility and freedom of the will.
If Foot is right, then a moral defect in a person is never a spiritual defect, but in every case a natural defect. The good man is the healthy man, the well-functioning man, where moral health is just a kind of natural health. But the health of a healthy specimen derives from its exercise of its proper function which is dictated by its species. A healthy specimen is one that serves its species. A good tiger is a good predator, and woe unto you if you a member of a species that is prey to such a predator. The tiger's job is to eat you and to be a good tiger he must do his job well. And so it seems that a good Aryan man would then be a man who serves the Aryan race by developing all his faculties so that he can most effectively secure the Lebensraum and such that he needs, not just to survive, but to flourish, and above all to procreate and propagate, and woe unto you if you are a member of weaker race, a Slavic race, say, fit to be slaves of a master race. As a member of a race incapable of exercising to the full the virtues (powers) of a characteristic member of a master race, one is then, naturally, sub-human, an Untermensch. A Mensch, to be sure, but a defective Mensch, and because naturally defective, or at least naturally inferior, then naturally bad and thus morally bad.
This appears to be a consequence of taking life to the the ultimate principle of evaluation.
At this point the fans of Foot are beginning to scream in protest. But my point here is not to smear Foot, but to explore her kind of meta-ethical naturalism. Actually, I am just trying to understand it. But to understand a position you have to understand what it entails. There is philosophy-as-worldview and philosophy-as-inquiry. This is the latter. My intent is not polemical.
Anti-Individualist and Anti-Personalist?
Foot's naturalism seems to imply a sort of anti-individualism and anti-personalism. Foot views the individual human being as an organism in nature, objectivistically, biologically, from an external, third-person point of view. She sees a man, not as a person, a subject, but as a specimen of a species, an instance of a type, whose value it tied necessarily to fulfilling the demands of the type. She also seems to be suggesting that one's fulfillment as a human being necessarily involves living in and through and for the species, like a good Gattungswesen.
So even if a position like Foot's has the resources to prevent a slide into eugenics, or into the sort of racism that would justify slavery and the exploitation of the naturally inferior, there is still the troubling anti-personalism of it.
A Denial of Transcendence?
How then could a monk's choice of celibacy for himself be a morally good choice? Presumably only if it contributes to the flourishing of the human species. But suppose our monk is not a scientist, or any other benefactor of humanity, but a hermit wholly devoted to seeking union with God. Could Foot's framework accommodate the goodness of such a life choice? It is not clear to me how. It would seem that the choice to become a celibate monk or nun who lives solely for union with God would have to be evaluated on a Footian meta-ethics as morally bad, as a defective life choice. The implication would seem to be that such a person has thrown his life away.
Now of course that would be the case if there is no God. But suppose that God and the soul are real. Could a Footian stance accommodate the moral choiceworthiness of the eremitic monk's choice on that assumption? It is not clear to me how.
If you value the rule of law, you absolutely must oppose the hard-Left Democrat Party. Andrew Klavan:
In general, the leftist minority on the [Supreme] court has shown itself no friend to the law. It really is disturbing. In Hawaii, only the five conservatives agreed that the president had the legal power to bar travel from certain countries he deemed dangerous. Really? This is what the law says:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
You don't have to be a lawyer to find that crystal clear. And you don't have to like Trump's so-called "travel ban" to see he has the legal power to implement it. And yet, in a dissent, leftist Sonia Sotomayor claimed that Trump's anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric somehow overrode the facts of the case. In other words, what would have been legal for a president she liked was not legal because . . . Trump.
If the rule of law can be overridden by the emotions of the people, the machinations of officials or the prejudices of courts, we can no longer depend on equal treatment or representative government. Given the fact that most of the above cases were decided by only one vote, news of Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement from the court comes as something of a relief. Kennedy has been an unreliable vote for liberty and if Trump can put another Gorsuch-like constitutionalist in there, all of our freedoms will be safer.
It is not too much to ask the Supreme Court to support the rule of law.
For a leftist like Sotomayor, the U. S. Constitution is a tabula rasa upon which 'justices' of her ilk feel entitled to write any leftist rubbish they like.
But we got lucky and Trump won. We are now poised to get a second originalist (after Gorsuch) on the high court. Brace yourself for the barking and borking that is about to begin.
And then there is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, at age 85, cannot be long for this earth. Do I wish her dead? No, I wish her off the high court.
I am reminded of the doctrine of double effect. If I meet your lethal attack with lethal force, my intention is not to kill you, but to stop your attack. And this despite the fact that my defense, to be effective, may reasonably be supposed to issue in your death. I cannot stop you without killing you, but my intention is not to kill you but to stop you.
Is that sophistry? I don't think so.
The analogy to Ginsburg to straightforward: I don't want her dead, I want her off the court, even if her dying is the only eventuality that will lead to the desired result.
Details on double effect here.
Maybe not. (HT: V. Vohanka)
Related: Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?
My post concludes as follows:
But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.
Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring?
Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.
What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."
"The GOP has an effective campaign ad using Democrats' own words and actions against them." A bit longer than a minute.
My hope is that the Dems, now a full-tilt hard-Left party, will get clobbered in the mid-terms. If they don't, then we are on the way to civil war.
Never underestimate the value of civil order. We take it for granted, but it is very fragile, and the skills necessary for survival in a war zone are not quickly acquired. The prospect of a 'new normal' in which every couple of weeks there is an assassination or bombing is not a cheerful one.
He who sows the wind may reap the whirlwind. (Hosea 8:7) Somebody ought to get that message to Maxine Waters, the black woman in the video. Conservative patience with leftist tantrums can be expected eventually to run out. The backlash will not be pretty.
Among Hillary's 'deplorables' are a lot of 'hard boys,' bikers, ex-military and ex- law enforcement who are prepared to break heads should push come to shove, and shove come to shoot. They may prove hard to control if all hell breaks loose.
So be careful, 'liberals.' You may trigger the very fascism that you falsely accuse conservatives of espousing.
For when civil order collapses the people will demand its replacement.
The wise hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
……………………………..
UPDATE: I just listened to the ad again. Was that "feckless cunts" I heard at .38? Being black or female won't save you from the wrath of the Left if you stray from the politically correct reservation.
UPDATE (2 July). Chris Cathcart writes,
Maybe you were unplugged at the time so you're now just hearing about this one. Here's the fuller quote from Samantha Bee; somehow the furor was only over the c-word and not also what she said after that:
“Ivanka Trump, who works at the White House, chose to post the second most oblivious tweet we’ve seen this week,” Bee said. “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless cunt!”“He listens to you,” she continued. “Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to fucking stop it. Tell him it was an Obama thing and see how it goes, OK?”
Never-Trumper David French writes a good column. But if he had his way Hillary would now be in office and SCOTUS would be lost to conservatives for a generation or more. (Do you really think Jeb! could have beaten Hillary? Be serious.)
But like I said, French writes a good game:
After all, for an immense number of base GOP voters, judges aren’t just an issue. They’re the issue that drives them to the polls. Republicans are all over the place on immigration policy, trade policy, and foreign policy. Divisions in the party are deep and real. Those divisions disappear when judges are on the line. We can debate all we want about Russian influence on the 2016 election (or about the effect of the Comey letter), but one thing is certain — if Evangelicals and other conservatives weren’t afraid of the impact of a progressive Supreme Court on their fundamental liberties, Donald Trump doesn’t win. A new Supreme Court pick will galvanize the entire base for months.
And let’s not forget that this pick is landing in the middle of one of the most toxic political environments in generations. Progressives believe that Justice Gorsuch sits in a “stolen” seat. Many of them see Trump as an illegitimate president — for reasons that range from Russian interference to disgust at his popular-vote loss — and find it unbearable that he could not just win the presidency but also select the man who could swing the Supreme Court. Expect increasing rage. Expect more personal confrontations of senators and Trump officials. Expect the political environment to get even more toxic, perhaps dangerously so.
It would have been nice if French gave us some advice on how to counter that boiling rage and its vicious expressions. (E. g., the outrageous treatment of Nielsen, Bondi, S. H. Sanders) Should we reply in kind? Should we speak softly and carry a big stick? Should we egg on the likes of the vicious and vile Maxine Waters? What is to be done?
Michael Anton (Publius Decius Mus), in a review of Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding speaks of an "error,"
. . . from a certain quarter of the contemporary Right, which holds that any appeal to equal natural rights amounts to “propositionism”—as in, the “proposition that all men are created equal”—which in turn inevitably leads to the twin evils of statist leveling and the explicit or tacit denial that there is anything distinct[ive] about the American nation. In this telling, “all men are created equal” is dangerous nonsense that means “all men are exactly the same.” Among other dismal policies we are allegedly compelled to enact if we recognize the existence of equal natural rights are redistribution, racial quotas, and open borders.
Refuting this is easy, and well-trodden, ground.
[. . .]
West does so, in perhaps the clearest articulation of natural human equality penned since the founding itself. The idea is elegantly simple: all men are by nature equally free and independent. Nature has not—as she has, for example, in the case of certain social insects— delineated some members of the human species as natural rulers and others as natural workers or slaves. (If you doubt this, ask yourself why—unlike in the case of, say, bees—workers and rulers are not clearly delineated in ways that both groups acknowledge and accept. Why is it that no man—even of the meanest capacities—ever consents to slavery, which can be maintained only with frequent recourse to the lash?) No man may therefore justly rule any other without that other’s consent. And no man may injure any other or infringe on his rights, except in the just defense of his own rights. The existence of equal natural rights requires an equally natural and obligatory duty of all men to respect the identical rights of others.
I find this articulation of human equality far from clear. What bothers me is the sudden inferential move in the passage quoted from the factual to the normative. I agree arguendo that it is a fact about human beings that
1) No man ever consents to slavery
but I don't see how we can validly infer from (1) the normative claim that
2) No man may justly rule any other without that other's consent.
I maintain that slavery is a grave moral evil and a violation of a basic human right, one possessed by all humans and possessed by all equally. My point, however, is that the moral impermissibility of slavery does not immediately follow from the fact, if it is a fact, that no human ever consents to be enslaved. If I don't consent to your enslaving me, how does that make it morally wrong for you to enslave me?
The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don't have rights to life, liberty, and property because some body of men has decided to grant them to us. We have them inherently or intrinsically. We don't get them from the State; we have them whether or not any state exists to secure them as a good state must, or to deprive us of them as a bad state will.
Rights are logically antecedent to contingent social and political arrangements, and thus logically antecedent to the positive law (the law enacted by a legislature). One can express this by saying that rights are not conventional but natural. But then 'natural' just means 'not conventional.'
Suppose our rights as individual persons come not from nature but from God. Then their non-conventionality would be secured. Now it would be good if we could proceed in political philosophy without bringing God into it. But then we face the problem of explaining how norms could be ingredient in nature.
Perhaps someone can explain to me how my right not to be enslaved could be grounded in my being an animal in the material world. How could any of my rights as an individual person be grounded in my being an animal in nature? I am open for instruction.
One could just insist that rights and norms are grounded in nature herself. But that would be metaphysical bluster and not an explanation.
To put it another way, I would like someone to explain how 'natural right' is not a contradictio in adiecto, provided, of course, that by a natural right we mean more than a non-conventional right, but a right that is non-conventional and somehow ingredient in or grounded in nature.
And let's never forget the obvious: as natural beings, as part of the fauna of the space-time system, we are manifestly not equal either as individuals or as groups.
So I say that if you want to uphold intrinsic and unalienable rights, rights that do not have their origin in human decisions and conventions, and if you want to uphold rights for all humans regardless of their empirical strengths and weaknesses, and the same rights for all, then you must move beyond nature to nature's God who is the source of the personhood of each one of us human animals, and the ground of equality of persons. No God, no equality of persons and no equality of rights.
It seems clear that something like this is what the second paragraph of the Declaration means with its talk of men being CREATED equal and being ENDOWED by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights. The rights come from above (God) and not from below (nature).
This is why it is either stupid or highly uncharitable when neo-reactionary conservatives read the plain words of the Declaration as meaning that all humans are empirically equal as animals in nature. It can't mean that for the simple reason that no one in his right mind, and certainly not the great men of the Founding, could believe that all humans are empirically equal either actually or potentially.
Suppose there is no God. Then talk of equal rights is empty. We may continue to talk in those vacuous terms, somehow hiding the vacuity from ourselves, but then we would be 'running on fumes.' People may continue to believe in equal rights, but their belief would be groundless.
The trouble with the view I am recommending is that it requires a lot of heavy-duty metaphysics of God and Man. This metaphysics is widely contested and certainly not obvious. But the same goes for the naturalism that denies God and puts man back among the animals. It too is widely and very reasonably contested and certainly not obvious.
Welcome to the doxastic-epistemic side of the human predicament.
Now I would like you to surf on over to Malcolm Pollack's place and read this and the posts immediately subsequent to it, i. e., scroll up.
P. S. I didn't get around to propositionism/propositionalism. This discussion of Paul Gottfried will have to do for now.
Yet another victory for President Trump and for common sense. And yet another embarrassment for the Never-Trumpers who refused to support Trump and who, by their refusal, indirectly supported Hillary who would never have supported any such travel ban.
And of course, if the Never-Trumpers had their way, the composition of the Court would not have been favorable to conservative rulings.
(Once more: a Never-Trumper is a conservative of some sort or other who opposes Trump. Bill Kristol for example. Remember him? Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely. Is this just an arbitrary stipulation on my part? No. This is the way the terms are used by those in the know who value clarity of thought and the distinctions that support it.)
Predictably, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that is rather less than intelligent:
“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”
On the contrary, a reasonable observer would conclude that Sotomayor should not be sitting on the Supreme Court. I'll give her this, though: she has a beautiful name.
Imagine the composition of the Court after eight years of Hillarity.
Seeing as how we are in the vicinity of Islamist issues, I now refer you to William Kilpatrick's latest, Islamization in the Schools.
Victor Davis Hanson brings his classical erudition to bear upon the instructive tale of the fall of Hillary:
When Nemesis finally hit Clinton on November 8, 2016, she was stunned, unable to even extend a simple public gesture of concession on election night. From there, Nemesis took her on a downward spiral. Clinton descended from once polling as the most popular woman in the U.S. to a rather sad figure, scapegoating, weaving conspiracy theories, blame-gaming, and endlessly replaying the disaster of 2016—a sort of poor, blinded and dethroned Oedipus wandering in exile in the fashion of peripatetic former FBI Director James Comey, whose character and fate in some ways are similar to Clinton’s.
In sum, Clinton made a series of nearly inexplicable, but clearly disastrous decisions—assuming that she could set up an unlawful private server as Secretary of State, that her 2016 victory was foreordained, and that she would deny and seek to overturn rather than accept her defeat. At any time, easy and obvious choices would have spared her a great deal of humiliation and her associates and supporters disaster.
But then again, according to the classical belief in fate and necessity, Clinton may have had little choice after all—given that her innate flaws were a sort of bomb that was always ticking until blowing up at the most appropriately tragic time.
His piece concludes:
Trump and the European populists are picking up political assets at a bargain. Glenn Reynolds observed:
[T]he press has three main kinds of power. One is to motivate the left. Another is to swing the middle. And the third is to demoralize the right. It’s pretty much lost the last of these, and I suspect the second one is fading too.
A status quo that used to be able to buy on the margin has let its account fall below the minimum level, and perhaps for the first time has nothing more it can deposit. The media is shrill in the way a customer whose credit is bad must shout at the waiter to get service. But it was grand while it lasted — the idea we could live without borders, without defense, or even without civilization. Money for nothing and your checks for free. The music played for so long that even now no one can even imagine it could stop. How many will really prefer reality to illusion?
Reynolds is right: far from demoralizing the Right, the mainstream lamestreamers are energizing the Right. Why are the progs behaving so stupidly? Do they have a death wish?
Things should prove 'interesting' come November.
. . . the Raging Bull of the HollyWeird Left, Robert De Niro, would be in a concentration camp along with Sleazy Rider Peter Fonda and the sick comedienne Kathy Griffith.
And if Trump were a Nazi, would he be tight with the NRA, defender of Second Amendment rights?
But of course for the Left the smear is everything and it doesn't matter whether one is actually talking sense.
Related:
The Contribution of Hollywood Cultural Polluters to Violence
The Canadian has been serving up excellent commentary. Here is a sample.
Immigration is proving to be a major issue of our time. It is important that we think as clearly as we can about it.
1) First of all, we must insist on a distinction that many on the Left ignore, that between legal and illegal immigration. Libertarians also often elide the distinction. The elision is aided and abetted by the use of the obfuscatory term 'migrant' which manages to conflate two distinctions at once: that between immigrants and emigrants, and that between legal and illegal immigrants.
Language matters here as elsewhere and one must oppose the linguistic mischief of those who speak of 'undocumented workers' to hide the fact that the law is being broken. It is also important to say, once again, that illegal entry is a violation of the criminal code. It is not a mere civil violation.
Legal and illegal immigration are separate, logically independent, issues. To oppose illegal immigration is not to oppose legal immigration. We assume, then, that no one should be allowed to enter illegally. But why exactly? What's wrong with illegal immigration? Aren't those who oppose it racists and xenophobes and nativists whose opinions are nothing but expressions of bigotry and hate? Aren't they deplorable people who cling to religion and guns? Doesn't everyone have a right to migrate wherever he wants?
2) The most general reason for not allowing illegal immigration is precisely because it is illegal. If the rule of law is to be upheld, then reasonable laws cannot be allowed to be violated with impunity simply because they are difficult to enforce or are being violated by huge numbers of people. Someone who questions the value of the rule of law is not someone it is wise to waste time debating.
But of course a practice's being illegal does not entail its being unjust or wrong or reasonably opposed. So we need to consider reasons why immigration controls are reasonable.
Reasons for opposing illegal immigration
3) There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.
There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. How likely is it that illegals will assimilate if allowed to come in in great numbers, and how likely is social harmony among citizens and unassimilated illegals? There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. Is it fair that they should be put through a lengthy process when others are allowed in illegally?
There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to to do with the sex trade and human trafficking generally. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, tuberculosis, ebola, and all sorts of tropical diseases, we have all the more reason to demand border control.
Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.
You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like G. W. Bush and John McCain are just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.
Illegal aliens do not constitute a race or ethnic group
4) Many liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.
A salient feature of liberals and leftists — there isn't much difference nowadays — is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'illegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist. Suppose England were to the south of the U. S. and Englishmen were streaming north. Would they be opposed because they are white? No, because they are illegal aliens.
"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons. Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration. To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy.
5) The rule of law is a precious thing. It is one of the supports of a civilized life. The toleration of mass breaking of reasonable and just laws undermines the rule of law.
6) Part of the problem is that we let liberals get away with obfuscatory rhetoric, such as 'undocumented worker.' The term does not have the same extension as 'illegal alien.' I discuss this in a separate post.
7) How long can a welfare state survive with open borders? Think about it. The trend in the USA for a long time now has been towards bigger and bigger government, more and more 'entitlements.' It is obviously impossible for purely fiscal reasons to provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone who wants to come here. So something has to give. Either you strip the government down to its essential functions or you control the borders. The first has no real chance of happening. Quixotic is the quest of strict constructionists and libertarians who call for it. Rather than tilting at windmills, they should work with reasonable conservatives to limit and eventually stop the expansion of government. Think of what a roll-back to a government in accordance with a strictly construed constitution would look like. For one thing, the social security system would have to be eliminated. That won't happen. Libertarians are 'losertarian' dreamers. They should wake up and realize that politics is a practical business and should aim at the possible. By the way, the pursuit of impossible dreams is common to both libertarians and leftists.
'Liberal' arguments for border control
8) Even though contemporary liberals show little or no understanding for the above arguments, there are actually what might be called 'liberal' arguments for controlling the borders:
A. The Labor Argument. To give credit where credit is due, it was not the conservatives of old who championed the working man, agitated for the 40 hour work week, demanded safe working conditions, etc., but the liberals of those days. They can be proud of this. But it is not only consistent with their concern for workers that they oppose illegal immigration, but demanded by their concern. For when the labor market is flooded with people who will work for low wages, the bargaining power of the U.S. worker is diminished. Liberals should therefore oppose the unregulated influx of cheap labor, and they should oppose it precisely because of their concern for U. S. workers.
By the way, it is simply false to say, as Bush, McCain and other pandering politicians have said, that U.S. workers will not pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and the like. Of course they will if they are paid a decent wage. People who won't work for $5 an hour will work for $20. But they won't be able to command $20 if there is a limitless supply of indigentes who will accept $5-10.
B. The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.
C. The Population Argument. This is closely related to, but distinct from, the Environmental Argument. To the extent that liberals are concerned about the negative effects of explosive population increase, they should worry about an unchecked influx of people whose women have a high birth-rate.
D. The Social Services Argument. Liberals believe in a vast panoply of social services provided by government and thus funded by taxation. But the quality of these services must degrade as the number of people who demand them rises. To take but one example, laws requiring hospitals to treat those in dire need whether or not they have a means of paying are reasonable and humane — or at least that can be argued with some show of plausibility. But such laws are reasonably enacted and reasonably enforced only in a context of social order. Without border control, not only will the burden placed on hospitals become unbearable, but the justification for the federal government's imposition of these laws on hospitals will evaporate. According to one source, California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies" born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.
The point is that you can be a good liberal and oppose illegal immigration. You can oppose it even if you don't care about increased crime, terrorism, drug smuggling, human trafficking, disease, national identity, national sovereignty, assimilation, the rule of law, or fairness to those who have immigrated legally. But a 'good liberal' who is not concerned with these things is a sorry human being.
