Liberal loons continue to whine about 'voter suppression' with the demand for photo identification at polling places being an example of 'voter suppression.'
This view is so contemptibly stupid, and so obviously motivated by the lust for partisan advantage, that it is beneath refutation. You may as well argue that traffic laws amount to 'driver suppression' inasmuch as they suppress creative automotive maneuvers.
Here as elsewhere mockery is the best way to counter liberal insanity.
A while back on C-SPAN I heard one Steve Cobble claim that long lines at polls are 'voter suppression.' Only a leftie could come up with a loony line like that. Suppression requires a suppressor. Who, pray tell, is the suppressive agent behind the long lines?
I am trying to come to grips with Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).
For Foot, 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 themselves 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 dichotomy. (You could say she will not stand for it.) Values and norms are neither ideal or abstract objects in a Platonic realm apart, as Continental axiologists such as Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann maintained, nor are they psychological projections. They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts. How does the resistance 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.
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.
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. 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. Of course, 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 being 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.
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. No dichotomy, split, dualism — leastways, not in reality outside the mind. The health of the roots and their goodness are somehow the same. This sameness, like the notion of a species, is not entirely pellucid.
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, or 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.
In sum, the sameness or 'monism' of normative and factual properties presupposes the dualism of species and specimen.
A Tenable View?
One problem I mentioned earlier: the notion of a species is exceedingly murky. But at the moment something else makes me nervous.
For Foot 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) It follows that 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 to 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 to 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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.
[. . .]
I was also quite profoundly influenced by [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. People say that real Marxism has never been tried – not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasn’t real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
You’ve painted a pretty bleak picture for the future.
There are bleak things going on. To start with, Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. It’s also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next.
She lost for many reasons, despite the incredibly powerful, ruthless, and well-funded machine behind her, not to mention all the illegal and 'dead' votes she got. And despite the fact that it was 'her turn.' One reason was her voice. (Via Burgess-Jackson.)
Do you doubt that significant numbers of illegals and 'dead people' vote? Then read this.
Suppose you are father of a daughter who has been brutally raped. The rapist is apprehended, tried, and found guilty. Suppose further than the man convicted really is guilty as charged and pays the penalty prescribed by the law, and that the penalty is a just one (the penalty that justice demands, as I would put it). The man serves his time, is released from prison, and yet you still harbor strong negative feelings toward him. You are assailed by murderous thoughts. You fantasize about killing him. After all, he violated your sensitive daughter in the most demeaning way and scarred her psychologically for life, snuffing out her vibrancy and souring her on life and men. What the miscreant did cannot be undone no matter what punishment he endures. But despite the negative feelings, you decide to forgive the man. And let us further suppose that you forgive him not just for your own peace of mind, but to restore good relations with him. (Suppose he is an acquaintance or co-worker of yours.)
Now if I understood what my young friend Steven was arguing a while back, his point was that this is not a genuine case of forgiveness: because the miscreant has paid his debt, there is nothing to forgive him for. Even if you forgive him before he serves his sentence, knowing that he will serve it, you have not truly forgiven him. Steven's thought, which he takes to be an explication of Christian forgiveness, is that true forgiveness exonerates the person forgiven: it removes the guilt and moral responsibility and with them the need for restitution and punishment. One cannot both truly forgive and demand that justice be served. True forgiveness is such that it cannot be made conditional upon the satisfaction of the demands of justice.
I think only God could forgive in this sense. So if this is Christian forgiveness, then I wonder whether it has any relevance to human action in this world.
That's one concern. Here is another, which may well rest on theological misunderstanding.
Curiously, in orthodox Christianity, God does not forgive man in the above sense: he 'holds his feet to the fire' for the 'infinite' offense of disobeying the infinitely perfect and good God. Is God not a Christian? Because the guilt man incurs by the primal disobedience of the first parents is infinite, there is nothing finite man can do to set things right either individually or collectively. Only God can restore right relations between God and man. So the triune God sends his Son into the world to assume human nature. This God-man is sacrificed in expiation of the infinite guilt incurred by Adam and Eve. Only God can atone, by substitution, for man's infinite sin.
Don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism. Although happiness involves activity as Aristotle observed, it also involves rest, appreciation, enjoyment, gratitude, contentment, and contemplation. These, especially the last five, are deeply conservative. And they lie beyond the political.
We conservatives should be politically active only to the extent that it is necessary to beat back the totalitarians for whom the political is all.
David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, quotes Marguerite Duras:"I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." (Swimming in a Sea of Death, p. 167).
The unbeliever is in a tough predicament. He knows that he is not his own foundation, and that his ego must burst like an over-inflated balloon. And then nothing for all eternity.
Does it make sense to ask how probable God's existence is? I don't think so. God is more like truth than like a truth. One can sensibly ask after the probability of, say, The Dems will take back the House in 2018. It would make sense to say that this is likely, unlikely, more likely than not; that it has a 40-50% chance, etc.
But to ask after the probability of there being truths at all is to ask an incoherent question. Suppose someone were to say: it is more likely than not that there are truths, or: the likelihood of there being some truths is 27.5%
You can see that this is nonsense.
What I write on this blog and elsewhere implies that this is also nonsense with respect to God. God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Would it makes sense to say that the probability of there being Being itself is 27.5%?
This old phrase, coined by Patrick J. Buchanan and deployed by Spiro T. Agnew, needs to be dusted off and re-deployed against the petty leftist crapweasels who will pick at everything Trump does or says.What a sorry lot of sore losers!
I coined 'higher infantilization' recently to cover what is going on in so-called institutions of higher learning. (The STEM disciplines excepted.) The New Criterion provides a good explanation of this infantilization which is also a feminization:
“Perpetual childhood.” Is there a better illustration of this enforced immaturity than the regime of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions,” and “trigger warnings” on campus? Increasingly, today’s students—and their tutelary overseers—are bred without intellectual or moral vertebrae. They exist in an amniotic fluid of shared prejudice that admits no challenging ideas from the world outside. The last few years have provided a series of high-profile and pathetic examples of what happens when these embryonic snowflakes collide with an opposing thought. Wailing. Protests. Excoriation. Disinvitation. Repudiation. The election of Donald Trump was the most serious violation of their safe space yet. There were no trigger warnings, for everyone they encountered assured them it was impossible. This was not a microaggression but a frontal assault. They responded accordingly, and with a unanimity that would make a murmuration of starlings seem haphazard.
Read it all, especially you girly girls, girly men, pajama boys, cry bullies and especially the lowest of the low, the cowardly and supine university administrators who by all appearances did their graduate studies in the Department of the Abdication of Authority.
It would be pleasant to think that when one is dead one will be wholly out of harm's way. But is that true? Here is some Epicurean reasoning:
1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption) 2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm. (Conceptual truth) 3. Nothing is a subject of a harm at a time at which it does not exist. (Plausible principle) Therefore 4. No dead person is a subject of harm. Therefore 5. Death (being dead) cannot be a harm to one who is dead.
Assuming that (1) is accepted, the only way of resisting this argument is by rejecting (3). And it must be admitted that (3), though plausible, can be reasonably rejected. Suppose I promise a dying man that I will take good care of his young and healthy dog after he dies. But I renege on my promise in order to save myself the hassle by having the dog euthanized. Epicurus in hand, I reason, "There is no harm to my friend since he no longer exists, and there is no harm to the dog because its transition to nonexistence will be quick and painless. Caring for the mangy mutt, however, is a harm to me for years to come."
Thomas Nagel would disagree and call my reneging "an injury to the dead man." ("Death" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 6) For Nagel, "There are goods and evils which are irreducibly relational; they are features of the relations between a person, with spatial and temporal boundaries of the usual sort, and circumstances which may not coincide with him either in space or in time." (p. 6)
Failing to do what I promised a man I would do after his demise is such an evil to the man. Being dead is a circumstance that does not temporally coincide with the life span of the one who will die. In general, a thing can have properties at times at which it does not exist provided it once existed. Frege's posthumous fame is a property he now possesses even though he no longer exists.
A Nagelian rejection of (3) is respectable and plausible as a means of turning aside the Epicurean argument. But it is scarcely compelling. For the Epicurean can simply insist that there are no relational harms. After all, there is something metaphysically murky about maintaining that a person who is nothing is yet the subject of a harm or injury simply on the strength of his having once existed. If you are now nothing, then you are now nothing: why should your once having been something be relevant?
So it looks like a stand-off, an aporetic impasse. The considerations for and against (3) seem to cancel each other.
One consideration in favor of (3) is presentism, the doctrine that the present time and its contents alone exist. If the present alone exists, then past individuals do not exist at all. If so, they cannot be subject to harms. A consideration contrary to (3) is our strong intuition that harms and injuries can indeed be inflicted upon the dead. The dead, if nonexistent, do not have desires, but we are strongly inclined to say that they have interests, interests subject to violation. (The literary executor who burns the manuscripts entrusted to him; the agent of Stalin who deletes references to Trotsky from historical documents, etc.)
But suppose the dead are subject to harms. If so, then they are presumably also subject to missing out on various goods that they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20-year-old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident. Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral. It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else. It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.
This suggests that, contra Epicurus, one can rationally fear being dead. What one rationally fears when one fears one's being dead is a future state of affairs in which one cannot enjoy goods that one would have enjoyed had one lived longer.
This makes sense but is also raises thorny questions. One concerns the oddness of this state of affairs. Not only does it involve a counterfactual; who or what is the subject of this future state of affairs? There won't be one!
A second question concerns whether or not states of affairs can be said to be good or bad if they do not involve living beings. If I understand Philippa Foot, her view is that good and bad are grounded in living organisms and in nothing else where, roughly, goodness is proper functioning, and evil a natural defect or lack of proper functioning. If so, there cannot be any good or bad states of affairs whose subject is a dead animal.
Here is one way to construe the Epicurean argument:
A. No person P can rationally fear any state S such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences. B. A dead person is in a state, being dead, such that he is not having any experiences. Ergo C. No person P can rationally fear being dead.
A correspondent suggests that this is indeed the Epicurean argument, but goes on to question (A).
I too question (A). Suppose a man makes sure that his wife and children will be provided for should he die by doing such things as eliminating debts, taking out a life insurance policy, etc. He rationally fears a future state in which he won't be having any experiences, namely, the state in which his wife and children survive his demise but lack the wherewithal to live in the style to which they have become accustomed.
It thus appears that (A) is false. If so, the above argument is unsound. But is the above argument the only or best construal of the Epicurean reasoning?
I take the major premise to be, not (A), but
A*. No person P can rationally fear any state S of P such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences.
Now isn't (A*) self-evidently true?
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
This is good poetry but bad philosophy. Larkin seems not to grasp that the question is not whether we fear "The anaesthetic from which none come round," but whether it is rational to fear it.
UPDATE (2 December):
Daniel M. writes,
(A*) isn't self-evident to me. Suppose you're told there's a 1/10 chance you'll die in your sleep tonight. Supposing you desire to keep living, wouldn't you fear ending up in the state of death tonight? And given your desires, wouldn't the fear be rational?
BV: I would say that the object of your rational fear is not being dead, but the transition to being dead which I described in my original post as ego loss, the sensation of your self irrevocably dissolving. The hour of death is a living dying, not a being dead. It is that living dying, or conscious dying, that reasonably horrifies us, and for which there is no Epicurean, but there is a Christian, cure. (See my original post.)
D. M. goes on to point that there are intrinsic and extrinsic aspects to one's being dead that affect the overall Epicurean argument. Discussing them would require a separate post.
