So, what exactly do Stand Your Ground laws have to do with Zimmerman and Martin? Absolutely nothing, of course. Outside your own home, common principles of self-defense dictate that unless you have reasonable fear of deadly force or harm, you must flee if possible rather than use deadly force. But a “duty to retreat” rests on the ability to retreat. And “duty to retreat” was irrelevant in Zimmerman’s case because — pinned to the ground with Martin on top of him, bashing his head on the concrete — he was unable to retreat.
Retortion is the philosophical procedure whereby one seeks to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who attempts to deny it. If, for example, I were to assert that there are no assertions, the very act of making this assertion would show it to be false: the performance of assertion is 'inconsistent' with the truth of the content asserted. (The scare quotes signal that this 'inconsistency' is not strictly logical since strictly logical inconsistency is a relation that holds between or among propositions. A speech act, however, is not a proposition, though its content is.)
Can a similar retorsive argument be mounted against Zeno's denials of motion and plurality?
The retorsive argument might proceed as follows. For Zeno to convey his Parmenidean thoughts to us he must wag his tongue and draw diagrams in the Eleatic sand. Does he thereby prove the actuality and thus the possibility of motion and fall into performative inconsistency? The answer depends on how we understand the purport of the Zenonian argumentation.
A. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion conceived in a certain way does not exist, then the wagging of the tongue, etc. is 'consistent' with the proposition that motion conceived in that way does not exist, and the retorsive argument fails. For example, suppose one maintains that for a particle P to be in motion (relative to a reference-frame) is for P to occupy continuum-many different positions at continuum-many different times (relative to that reference-frame). This popular 'At-At' theory of motion requires the denseness of physical time and physical space. Now if it turns out that motion so conceived does not exist, it may still be the case that motion conceived in some other way does exist, and that Zeno's tongue-wagging and diagram-drawing is motion under that competing conception. The competing conception might, for example, deny the denseness of space or of time, or both.
B. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion no matter how it is conceived does not exist, and is a mere illusion bare of all reality, then the retorsive argument refutes him. For then the moving of his tongue is 'inconsistent' with the truth of 'Nothing moves.' By moving his tongue, pulling his beard, flaring his nostrils, adjusting his toga, and pounding the lectern, he demonstrates the empirical reality of motion, a reality that is prior to, and neutral in respect of, all conceptions of this reality.
Although the retorsive argument works against a Zeno so interpreted, this interpretation is uncharitable in the extreme. Read charitably, Zeno is not claiming that motion and plurality are mere subjective illusions, but rather that they are something like Leibnizian well-founded phenomena (phaenomena bene fundata) or intersubjectively valid Kantian Erscheinungen. They are not mere illusions, but they are not ultimately real either.
C. If Zeno's arguments are taken to show that motion and plurality are intersubjectively valid appearances, but not ultimately real, then they are being taken to show that motion conceived in a certain way, as belonging to ultimate reality, does not exist. This view of motion seems 'consistent' with the motions required to convey Zenonian argument.
My verdict, then, is that retortion does not refute a Zeno charitably interpreted.
This is good. By Peter Machera, former professor of English at New Mexico State University. The 'former' comports well with the intelligence and honesty of the piece which ends thusly:
It’s almost startling to see individuals on television who are intelligent, articulate and fight for a worthy cause. We have plenty of smart people deceiving the public, but not much of the sort who actually speak truth to power, and this is what the O’Mara-West defense team represents, considering the power structures they were up against.
In the end, the jury made the only sensible decision. However, speaking on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Al Sharpton reminds us ominously that the advocates for Trayvon have not “exhausted their legal options.” One can just hope that Mr. O'Mara and Mr. West will continue to play the virtuous lawyers against the cynical — and significant — political forces that oppose them.
Here is what I said about O'Mara a few days ago:
The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses. Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara. He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free. A patient, relentless, digger for the truth. Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.
Hats off to Hentoff for a fine explanation in this 5:56 minute YouTube video of what is so wrong and dangerous and unconstitutional about 'hate crime' legislation. (via Malcolm Pollack)
One of my persistent themes is that conservatives must not talk like liberals, thereby acquiescing in the linguistic hijacking that liberals routinely practice, and putting themselves at a disadvantage in the process. Conservatives must insist on standard English and refuse to validate the Left's question-begging epithets. Only the foolish conservative repeats such words and phrases as 'homophobe,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'social justice.'
For example, if you employ 'homophobe' and cognates, then you are acquiescing in the false notion that opposition to homosexual practices (which is consistent with respecting homosexual people) is grounded in an irrational fear, when the opposition is not based in fear, let alone in an irrational fear.
So I was slightly annoyed to see that Peter Wehner in a recent otherwise excellent Commentary piece used 'racial profiling.' I've heard other conservatives use it as well.
As I argued yesterday, there is no such thing as racial profiling. Now I add the following.
Why say that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled by Zimmerman when you could just as well say that he was gender profiled or age profiled or behavior profiled? Old black females walking down the street are not a problem. But young black males cutting across yards peering into windows can be a big problem.
Zimmerman profiled Martin for sure, and he was justified in doing so. We all profile all the time. But he didn't racially profile him any more than he age or gender or behaviorally or sartorially profiled him. (Martin wore a 'hoodie' and he had the hood pulled up thereby hiding part of his face.)
As I said yesterday,
Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
[. . .]
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
I saw Mr. Blow and his lovely wife on TV last night. A charming couple. I mean that sincerely. But when I read his columns I am reminded that we live in the Age of Feeling, as Dennis Prager calls it. There is no thinking in Blow's op-ed pieces for The New York Times, only emoting. Add 'Blow' to the list of aptronyms. His latest is The Whole System Failed Trayvon Martin. I was tempted to sort through the nonsense it contains, but thought better of it. Time is short and some writings are beneath refutation.
Blow has a skull full of mush, but at least he is articulate. The real problems of the black community lie much deeper, not in any systemic or institutional racism — the imputation of which to our great country is just slanderous nonsense — but in a culture that produces people like Rachel Jeantel who belong to a seemingly unassimilable indigenous subculture. A fellow blogger points to the genetic factors involved, remarking that the culture that produces a Jeantel is itself produced by Jeantels. I responded that the genetics are given, while the social and cultural factors are malleable. I don't want to believe that a person like her cannot be taught to read, write, and speak basic English.
And while we are on the topic of Ms. Jeantel, she explains here that Zimmi simply failed to appreciate the cultural context in which he was being "whoop-assed." How insensitive of him! Had he been able properly to contextualize the beat-down, he surely would not have 'smoked' the poor boy.
One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Racial profiling' is an example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.
Let's think about this.
I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:
1. Race: black 2. Age: 16-21 years 3. Sex: male 4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head 5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated 6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.' 7. Physical condition: robust, muscular 8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black 9. Resident status: not a resident.
Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.
There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.
Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.
Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]
"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."
Professor Campos is a very intelligent man, and morally decent to boot, an inference I draw from having read most of the posts on his now-defunct Inside the Law School Scam. I'll leave it to you to speculate about how such a person could write his Salon dreck column.
The significance of the Zimmerman trial is that it is emblematic of the deep and ever-deepening racial divide in this country despite the successes of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s and the increasing participation of blacks in all institutions of our society, a participation culminating in the election of a black president in 2008 and his re-election in 2012. Deeper than the racial divide, however, is the left-right divide with the latter fueling the former. I call it 'planetary' because it is as if conservatives and leftists have no common ground and inhabit different planets.
Let's look at two examples.
On Sunday morning, in a short post entitled Justice Denied, Robert Paul Wolff writes, "I awoke this morning to learn that the Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman. Is there anyone on the face of the earth who believes that, had the race of Zimmerman and Martin been reversed, the verdict would have been the same?"
Despite the foolishness of what he posted on Sunday morning, Professor Wolff is not some two-bit cyberpunk with a blog. I used to have a high opinion of him, on the basis of two books of his I read. One of them is The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Harper & Row, 1973). The flyleaf of my copy bears the annotation, "I first read this book in the fall of 1980. It is an excellent study!" I was teaching a graduate seminar on Kant and found Wolff's book extremely useful. The other book I have read is his In Defense of Anarchism which I also found impressive. In November of 2009 I wrote three long entries about the anarchism book. They can be found in my Anarchism category.
Now in what sense was justice denied? The state's case against Zimmerman was so weak as to be nonexistent. So justice was served by his acquittal. Had Zimmerman been found guilty of second-degree murder, that would have been the height of injustice. That ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone who followed the trial. So justice was not denied to Zimmerman. He was justly treated.
If Wolff means anything, he means that justice was denied to Trayvon Martin. But if that is what he means, then he doesn't understand the purpose of a criminal trial. The purpose of a criminal proceeding is not to secure justice for the victim. If that were the purpose, then every defendant would have to be found guilty. For in every acquittal there is no justice for the victim, or victims as in the O. J. Simpson case.
A criminal trial can issue in the correct result whether or not justice is achieved for the victim. If the correct result is an acquittal, then of course there is no justice for the victim in that trial. But if the correct result is a conviction, then there is, per accidens, justice for the victim in that trial. The main point, however, is that a criminal trial is not about seeking justice for the victim, but about making sure that the accused is not wrongly convicted.
The glory of our system of justice is the (defeasible) presumption of innocence: the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. This presumption of innocence puts the burden of proof in a criminal trial where it belongs, on the state. The prosecution must prove that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; the defense is under no obligation to prove that the defendant is innocent. In a criminal proceeding all the defense has to do is raise a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the accused.
It is of course deeply unfortunate that Trayvon Martin died young of a gunshot wound. But he brought about that result himself by recklessly attacking a man who then, naturally, defended himself against Martin's deadly attack using deadly force. Zimmerman did nothing legally impermissible.
I wonder if Wolff thinks that Martin would have received justice if Zimmerman had been wrongly convicted. I hope not. Again, the crucial point here is that the purpose of a murder trial is not to secure justice for the victim, but to see if the accused is first of all a killer, and then whether he is a murderer. There is no doubt that Zimmerman killed Martin. The question is whether or not the killing was legally justifiable. And indeed it was found to be legally justifiable.
If Zimmerman had been black and Martin Hispanic would the verdict have been the same? Yes. Why not? O. J. Simpson is black and the two people he slaughtered (Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson) were white, and yet O. J. was acquitted.
My second example is Roger L. Simon. He thinks, as I do, that Zimmerman should never have been charged. But he goes a step further when he writes:
Congratulations to the jury for not acceding to this tremendous pressure and delivering the only conceivable honest verdict. This case should never have been brought to trial. It was, quite literally, the first American Stalinist “show trial.” There was, virtually, no evidence to convict George Zimmerman. It was a great day for justice that this travesty was finally brought to a halt.
We all know Al Sharpton, the execrable race baiter of Tawana Brawley and Crown Heights, agitated publicly for this trial more than anyone else. But he most likely would not have succeeded had it not been for Obama’s tacit support. As far as I know this is unprecedented in our history (a president involving himself in a trial of this nature).
Looks like we have a nice little 'conversation' about race going here. Too bad the conversants live on different planets.
I know you've been following this case. I must say I'm impressed by the outcome. Even though I believed that Z's account of the events was consistent and that the prosecution's case was incredibly weak, I was expecting the all-female jury to cave in to the pressure and declare him guilty or, at least, to come back with a lesser charge.
MavPhil: That's what I was expecting: a cave-in by the female jurors and a manslaughter conviction. So I was extremely pleased that justice was done. The state had no case whatsoever as became very clear early on from the testimony of the state's own witnesses. Objectively speaking, it was all over after John Good's cross-examination by the magnificent Mark O'Mara. He impressed the hell out of me: calm, clear, respectful, logical, thorough, low-keyed, bluster-free. A patient, relentless, digger for the truth. Good was impressive as well. That segment of the trial made me very proud of our system.
Zimmerman should not have been charged in the first place, and initially he wasn't. It was only after the race-baiters got wind of the story that local law enforcement buckled under national pressure. Among the race-baiters was our very own hopelessly inept president, Barack Obama, with his irresponsible remark to the effect that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. Here again we have Obama meddling in a local matter just as he did before about four summers ago in the Henry Gates affair.
So was the trial about race or not?
Objectively, the case had nothing to do with race. Objectively, the case was about the use of deadly force to repel an attack of deadly force. A very fit young man physically assaults an obese, out-of-shape older man. The older guy ends up on the ground with the younger guy on top of him doing the 'pound and ground,' slamming the older man's head into the pavement and telling him that tonight he will die. Now is it legally permissible to use deadly force in a situation like this, a situation in which one is about to be killed or suffer grave bodily harm? Yes, the law allows the use of deadly force in such a situation. Note that we are not talking about morality here, but about legality. Whatever one's moral intuitions or moral theories, there is a hard fact about what the law permits, and that is not in dispute. The only question is whether on that particular evening George Zimmerman was indeed fighting for his life.
The defense team made a very strong case that he was on the bottom fighting for his life against the strapping youth who thought of him as a "creepy-ass cracker." The defense didn't have to make that strong case; all it had to do was show that the above was a likely scenario in order to raise a reasonable doubt about Zimmerman's guilt. In a criminal proceeding the probative standard is set very high, and rightly so. The accused is presumed innocent and the burden of proof rests on the prosecution to show that the accused is guilty of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt. But the defense succeeded in doing both: it showed that Zimmerman was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and, as O'Mara remarked after the trial, it proved that he was innocent.
So, objectively, the case had nothing to do with race. The racial veneer was superadded by the race-baiters of the Left so that they could use this trial to further their own political agenda. Among the race-baiters are the editors at the New York Times who decided that Zimmerman was a 'white Hispanic.' They would never refer to Obama as a white black even though he is half-white and half-black. They applied the 'white Hispanic' appellation in order to inject race into a non-racial case. If both parties to the dispute were black or both Hispanic we wouldn't have heard about it. Meanwhile, blacks are killing blacks in record numbers in Chicago and other places.
The Left is raging at the moment. They say young blacks aren't safe anymore. But, were they before this single incident? I haven't heard a single word about the dozens of young blacks who are murdered by other blacks every year. All I hear is a lot of moralizing about poverty, racism and gun legislation from upper-middle class people who live in 95% white communities and have never seen a gun in their lives.
I think it's something else. Maybe it's the realization that they're not so powerful. That their enormous govt.-approved media campaign to portray this as a racially motivated murder of a kid was not enough convince a jury of six women (which, by the way, included a black hispanic lady). That they could not only notice the absence of racist armed vigilantes on the hunt and young harmless children walking home, but also act accordingly. Maybe it's too much for them, even after six years of getting everything they wanted.
MavPhil: I basically agree with you. Let the leftist loons rage. It is music to my ears and blog-fodder for my blog. We conservatives are going to have a lot of fun exposing their contemptible lies and inanities.
Gene Pitney was born 17 February 1940 and died 5 April 2006. Biography here.
Pitney was something of a melodramatic crooner in such hits as Town Without Pity, but he also penned upbeat chartbusters like Hello Mary Lou for Rick Nelson when he was called Ricky and He's a Rebel for the Crystals. The latter, featuring Phil Spector's wall-of-sound production job, has that oddly stirring quality common to many of Spector's productions.
Or dissolved? Logically prior to the title question is this: What would it be to solve a philosophical problem? Four approaches to the logically prior question come to mind. I'll call them Pluralism, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Optimism.
A. Pluralism. Solutions and dissolutions are relative to theories and background assumptions such that there is a plurality of solutions and no one absolute and definitive solution or dissolution per problem. If we take this tack, then many problems have been solved and dissolved. The problem of universals, for example has been solved: in one way by Platonists, in another way by Thomists, in a third way by nominalists, and in a fourth way by Kantians. Different schools of thought, different solutions. It is the same with the problem of the meaning of life. Some solve it one way, others another way, and some dismiss it as a pseudo-problem.
On the first approach, then, philosophical problems have solutions but they are theory-relative.
B. Dogmatism. The second approach rejects the relativism of the first by maintaining that philosophical problems have solutions only if the solutions are not relative to theories or background assumptions or schools of thought but are instead absolute and definitive. The second approach also maintains that some problems have been definitively solved, and this despite a lack of consensus among competent practioners as to whether or not definitive solutions have been achieved. Thus a Thomist might insist that Thomism has definitely solved the problem of universals despite the fact that the Thomist solution is rejected by many competent practitioners.
This second approach includes the following claims:
1. There are perennial problems that are essentially time- and system-invariant. Thus there is something called the problem of universals that different thinkers in different epochs and lands wrestled with. This is not obvious inasmuch as one could argue that, for example, the mind-body problem in Descartes is merely an artifact of his system and not identical to any problem addressed by thinkers before or since. (It also goes without saying that 'mind-body problem' is an umbrella term covering a number of distinct but interrelated subproblems.)
2. Some of the perennial problems have solutions. (They are not insoluble by us.)
3. Only a non-relative solution counts as a solution.
4. Some of the problems have been solved.
5. The dissent of competent practitioners is not evidence that a claimed solution is not a solution. Thus dissensus does not give our Thomist a good reason to doubt that his solution to the problem of universals is correct. He can say to the dissenters: "We have solved the problem and if you disdagree, then you are wrong. What's more, our solution is logically incompatible with yours, whence it follows that your solutions are all mistaken."
C. Skepticism. The third approach agrees with the second on points (1) and (3), but diasagrees on the remaining points. Thus on the third approach there are perennial problems and they are soluble only if absolutely soluble. But none of the central classical problems have been solved and it is reasonable to hold that they are insoluble by us. (As a matter of fact, they have not been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners, and the best explanation of this fact is that they are insoluble by us. Why they should be insoluble by us is a further question.) The dissent of competent practioners is very good evidence that a claimed solution is not a solution. A competent practioner is one who is logically astute, apprised of all relevant empirical facts and theories, thoroughly understands the problems, their history, their interrelation to surrounding problems, including all of the relevant arguments and counterarguments, and exemplifies the full range of intellectual virtues, e.g., is intellectually honest, a sincere truth-seeker, etc.
D. Optimism. Optimism is Dogmatism minus (4), the claim that some problems have been solved. The optimist appreciates the force of the skeptic's argument, but refuses to take the fact of intractable philosophical disagreement as warranting an inference to the insolubility (by us) of philosophical propblems. He pins his hopes on future philosophy. And so the optimist replaces (4) with the claim that some problems are soluble in the fullness of time.
None of these approaches is wholly satisfactory. Pluralism seems a cheap way out of the difficulty. If among our background assumptions is the assumption that all meaning is linguistic, then we can dissolve the problem of the meaning of life straightaway by simply pointing out that a life is not something linguistic and so cannot have or lack meaning. But why accept the background assumption?
The problem with Dogmatism is, of course, that it is dogmatic. One can always insist that one is right and the other guy wrong, but claiming such epistemic privilege for oneself ought to bother one's intellectual conscience assuming that the other guy is as competent a practioner as oneself.
In LIFE, one must insist, stand one's ground, not back down, because in life "there ain't no easy way out." But in THOUGHT, insistence is churlish since the impersonal truth is the goal, truth which is not mine or yours, but everyman's. In life egoism and self-privileging has its place, assuming you want to continue in existence; you shoot the thug who is doing the 'pound and ground' on your sorry head, leaving the philosophizing for later. But egoism has no place in the pursuit of the truth, nor does the 'pound and ground.'
If A and B are competent practioners by my definition and B dissents from A, it does not follow that A is wrong . But B's dissent ought to cause A to question whether he is right. For if he is right, what explains B's dissent? And if A has good reason to doubt that he has indeed solved the problem of universals, say, then he has not solved the problem. For a solution, to be one, must reveal itself as indubitably a solution. To solve a philosophical problem is to know that one has solved it, not merely believe that one has solved it. (I admit that this thesis needs defense.)
The weakness of skepticism is that the inference from the fact of protracted diasagreement to insolubuility is inductive and hence shaky. But is it less reasonable than the hope that future philosophy will solve some of philosophy's problems? For that hope seems to rest on nothing more than the mere possibility that problems hitherto unsolved will someday be solved.
