Value-Free Government?

Libertarians sometimes speak as if government could and ought to be value-free.  But value-free government is as impossible as value-free education.

Education cannot be value-free for the simple reason that all education, assuming it is not confused with indoctrination, presupposes that knowledge is a value and ignorance a disvalue.  If knowledge is a value then so is the pursuit of truth.  And if the pursuit of truth is a value, then the habits of mind and character the cultivation of which are conducive to the pursuit of truth are values as well.  Among these are truthfulness and intellectual honesty.  But truthfulness and intellectual honesty cannot be brought to bear in the quest for truth without diligence and self-control and respect for those who know better.  We could continue with this reflection but we have gone far enough to see that the notion of value-free education is nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the notion of value-free government.  One would not be much of a libertarian if one did not hold liberty to be a value and (material) equality to be, if not a disvalue, then at least subordinate in the axiological hierarchy to liberty.  So libertarians have at least one value, liberty.  They advocate a government that allows its richest expression.  Anarchists, conservatives, liberals, fascists — they too have their characteristic values which they hope to promote when and if they gain power.

What I have said suffices to show that the notion of value-free government is nonsense.  The question is not whether values but which values.

Music = Dylan?

Jan cover Purdue  philosopher Jan Cover appears to maintain a Music = Dylan Identity Thesis. I wouldn't have gone that far even in the '60s. (Though I was a bit of a fanatic. I wrote for a high school 'underground' newspaper under the pen name 'Dylan's Disciple.') Cover's Dylan page is short but well worth a look.

Capital Punishment and Deterrence

Bill Keezer e-mails:

With respect to capital punishment: When I was a lab-tech at Ball State University, one of the professors was telling me about a demonstration of static electricity he did at the state prison in Pendleton, IN. He was using a Van de Graaff generator to create long, spectacular sparks and light neon tubes off the fingers of volunteers. The key thing in what he told me was a con asked him, “Can you fix the chair?” meaning of course could he prevent the electric chair from killing a person.

If the death penalty is not a deterrent, then the question is meaningless.

Right.  Of course the death penalty is a deterrent.  The only interesting question is why liberals don't or won't admit it.  Part of the explanation is that liberals won't admit that criminals are for the most part rational, not insane, and that there is such a thing as evil, and what it presupposes, freedom of the will.  It is characteristic of liberals to speak of murders as senseless, as in the case of the mother of one of the Long Island pharmacy shooting victims.

But the murders made all the sense in the world.  Dead men tell no tales.  That piece of folk wisdom supplies an excellent reason to kill witnesses in the absence of any strong incentive not to do so.   In one sense of 'rational,' a rational agent is one who chooses means conducive to the end in view.  If the end in view is to score some swag and not get caught, then it is perfectly reasonable to kill all witnesses to the crime especially given the laxity of a criminal justice system in which the likelihood of severe punishment is low. 

Liberals are  promiscuous in their use of the 'disease model.'  For example, they typically believe that alcoholism is a disease, a view refuted by Herbert Fingarette in Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).  They also misuse the word 'addiction' in connection with nictoine use, as if one could be addicted to smoking.  Suppose you smoke a couple packs a day and I offer you a million dollars if you go one month without smoking.  Will you be able to do it?  Of course.  End of discussion. For more on the noble weed, see Alcohol,Tobacco, and Firearms.  It is the same on Planet Liberal with criminals: they must be 'sick,' or 'insane.' Nonsense.  Most are eminently sane, just evil. 

And because criminals are most of them sane and love life, the death penalty is a deterrent.  That is just common sense and there is a strong, albeit defeasible, presumption in favor of common sense views, a presumption that places the burden of proof on those who would deny it.  I will be told that we need empirical studies.  Supposing I grant that, who will undertake them?  Liberal sociologists and criminologists?  Do you think there just might be a good reason to suspect their objectivity?   In any case, here are references to studies which show that CP is a deterrent.

But whether CP is a deterrent is not the logically prior question, which is:  what does justice demand?  Deterrent or not, certain crimes demand the death penalty.  Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.

The Drawn Game in Chess with Special Attention to Three-Fold Repetition of Position

(Written November 2002 for the sake of some local  patzers who proved to be largely unteachable.)

"How shall I draw thee? Let me count the ways."  (Anon.)

There are exactly seven ways to draw a chess game.

1. STALEMATE. "The game is drawn when the king of the player who has the move is not in check and the player cannot make any legal move." (USCF Official Rules of Chess, 1987, p. 12.)

2. AGREEMENT. If the players agree to a draw during the game, then it is a draw. (p. 12)

3. SUDDEN DEATH FLAG FALL. In a game played according to a ‘sudden death’ time control, if both flags are down before a win is claimed, then the game is a draw. (p. 103)

4. THREE-FOLD REPETITION OF POSITION (TFRP). "The game is drawn upon a claim by the player having the move, when the same position (a) is about to appear, or (b) has just appeared for the third time, the same player having the move each time. The position is considered the same if pieces of the same kind and color occupy the same squares and if the possible moves of all the pieces are the same, including the right to castle or to take a pawn en passant." (p. 13)

This is the rule that a great many players do not understand. By my count, there are five typical mistakes that players make with respect to this rule.

Continue reading “The Drawn Game in Chess with Special Attention to Three-Fold Repetition of Position”

The Absurdity of Gender Feminism

Christina Hoff Sommers usefully distinguishes between equity feminism and gender feminism.  I am all for the former, but I find the the latter preposterous.  In his chapter on gender in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin 2002, Steven Pinker explains the distinction:

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.  Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature.  The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety.  The second is that humans possess a single social motive — power — and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised.  The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups — in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender. (p. 341, bolding added)

Do these risible claims need refutation, or are they beneath refutation?  I say the latter, but if you think they are worth refuting, Pinker does the job in detail.

Nonsense, if believed by policy makers, has dire consequences some of which are in evidence in The End of Gender?  (HT: Spencer Case)  Loons, agitating for their 'reforms,' exercise the tyranny of the minority. 

Addendum (6/26):  The dark and ugly side of feminism is revealed by Rebecca Walker in How My Mother's Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart. ( HT: Horace Jeffery Hodges. )

You Touch It, You Move It

One should always insist on the touch-move  rule with every opponent in every (non-blitz) chess game whether serious or casual, rated or unrated. You will save yourself a lot of unnecessary vexation if you do. Now you might  think you knew all there was to know about the touch-move rule; but if you are like me, you would have been wrong.

The rule no doubt applies to pieces on the board, but what about those off the board?

Suppose you have just promoted a pawn to the eighth rank. Some people wrongly refer to this as 'queening' a pawn thereby confusing the species with the genus. Promotion to queen is only one way to promote: there is also underpromotion to either a rook, bishop, or knight. There is no promotion to king since the 'dignity' of his majesty assures his uniqueness, and the 'ambition' of the pawn prevents his remaining in the lower orders.

Suppose you are in a position in which promotion to a knight will enforce immediate mate. But the time pressure is befuddling you and  you reflexively grab a queen by the side of the board and replace the pawn with it. You do not, however, punch your clock. So technically,  the move has not been completed.

Here is the question: Having touched the queen, and moved it onto the board, while leaving your clock running, may you change your mind and substitute a knight? Grandmaster Larry Evans, asked a similar question by Jude Acers, he of the red beret and the N.O. French Quarter, answers, "White must play 1 e8 = Q, since he touched the queen first, even if it was off the board." (Chess Life, November 2005, p. 45)

So here is a case in which touch-move applies to a piece that is OFF the board. Or at least that is the judgment of GM Evans.

The position described by Acers was one in which promotion to queen would have led to a draw, while promotion to a rook would have won.  

Such are Caissa's charming subtleties.

Farrell, “Tookie,” Hannity and Colmes, and Bad Arguments

My last post ended with a reference to "Tookie" Williams.  Here is a post from the old Powerblogs site dated 29 November 2005:

I just viewed the Stanley "Tookie" Williams segment on Hannity and Colmes. Williams, co-founder of the L.A. Crips gang, and convicted of four brutal murders, faces execution on December 13th in   California.  Here is a description of one of his crimes. 

What struck me was the low level of the debate. Actor Mike Farrell, as part of his defense of Williams, and in opposition to the death  penalty in general, remarked that "we shouldn't lower ourselves to the level of the perpetrators of violent crime." The implied argument, endlessly repeated by death penalty opponents, is something like this: Since killing people is wrong, the state's killing of people is also wrong; so when the state executes people, it lowers itself to the level of the perpetrators of violent crime.

Now this argument is quite worthless. If it were any good, then, since incarcerating people is also wrong, the state's incarceration of people is wrong. And so on for any penalty the state inflicts as
punishment for crime.

The trouble with the argument is that it proves too much.  If the argument were sound, it would show that every type of punishment is impermissible, since every type of punishment involves doing to a person what otherwise would be deemed morally wrong. For example, if I, an ordinary citizen, demand money from you under threat of dire consequences if you fail to pay, then I am committing extortion; but  there are situations in which the state can do this legitimately as when a state agency such as the Internal Revenue Service assesses a fine for late payment of taxes. (Of course, I am assuming the moral  legitimacy of the state, something anarchists deny; but the people who give the sort of argument I am criticizing are typically liberals who believe in a much larger state than I do.)

So the 'argument' Farrell gave is quite worthless. But Hannity let him escape, apparently not discerning the fallacy involved. Farrell and Hannity reminded me of a couple of chess patzers. One guy blunders, and the other fails to exploit it.

But that's not all. Alan Colmes jumped in with the canard that people who are pro-life should also be opposed to the death penalty, as if there is some logical inconsistency in being pro-life (on the abortion issue)  and in favor of capital punishment for some crimes. I refute this silly 'argument' here.

Even more surprising, however, is that Sean Hannity then committed the same mistake in reverse, in effect charging Farrell with being inconsistent for being pro-choice (which he grudgingly admitted to being after some initial prevarication) and anti-capital punishment.

What people need to understand is that the two issues are logically independent. There is nothing inconsistent in Farrell's position. He could argue that the fetus simply lacks the right to life while   "Tookie" and his ilk possess the right to life regardless of what they have done. Nor is there anything inconsistent in Hannity's position. He could argue that the fetus has the right to life while a miscreant like "Tookie" has forfeited his right to life by his commission of heinous crimes.

So the logical level is low out there in the Land of Talk and I repeat my call for logico-philosophical umpires for the shout shows. But I  suspect I am fated to remain a vox clamantis in deserto.

Capital Punishment Again

Philoponus e-mails:
  
On this issue, we are on the same page–I think we should celebrate our agreements! In fact, I probably support a broader use of CP than you do. I think CP a condign punishment for things like aggravated sexual assault on a minor, aggravated assault with torture, etc.
 
I know people who are Amnesty International members. When they start on this stuff about wrongful executions, I stop them and demand a list of the people whom they think wrongfully executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Some facts please! They come up with NO credible cases. They talk about a somewhat mentally impaired killer executed in Texas and another in Florida, but these people admitted their killings and juries considered their impairment at trial. It is clear that  in the cases they point to what they disagree with is law which allows CP rather than a flawed trial process. The verdicts were good verdicts. I personally see absolutely no reason to consider lower than normal IQ an excuse or mitigation for egregious crimes.
  
Some people are just opposed to CP whatever the facts and arguments. Fortunately they are minority in most US states. The argument that CP in the US is killing the wrongfully convicted is getting very hard to sustain. 30 years ago when I took my first course in criminalistics, it was a much more persuasive argument, but the advances in the last 30 years have been huge. The scientific evidence that can be extracted from a crime scene is amazing. O. J. Simpson was very lucky!
  
The average U.S. Death Row innate gets 14 years to appeal his sentence. Project Innocence helps prisoners with any sort of reasonable appeal, and appellate courts even in TX, VA and FL are very generous in considering credible appeals. The standard in these courts is really "above and beyond a resonable doubt" if there is any grounds for doubt. No human institution can be perfect. Nothing can guarantee that a wrongfully convicted person won't be executed, but I think this result is VERY unlikely in the US these days. When someone tells me no one deserves to be executed, I feel obliged to treat them to a graphic murder-by-murder tour of the careers of Bundy, Gacy, and Mike Ross. People need to know exactly what these murderers did to women and boys. This inevitably ends the debate–they have no stomach for the facts.
 
Clarity will be served if we distinguish two claims that the CP-opponent could be making:
 
1. Even if there were no actual or possible cases of a wrongfully convicted person being executed, CP would still be an unjust penalty and should be banned.
 
2. Because there is the possibility of wrongful convictions, CP should be banned.
 
Like you, I cannot fathom how any rational and morally percipient person could embrace (1).  But I find (2) less objectionable, though I reject it as well.  I think the conservative must simply accept the possibility of wrongful executions and then argue that this possibility does not by a long shot outweigh the gross injustice of allowing the most vicious murderers to live on in comfort at tax payer expense for years. 
 
But I now want to point out that you seem to be contradicting something implied by what you were maintaining earlier.  Earlier, you denied that there is a difference between being found guilty and being guilty, even when all the procedural rules in a trial have been scrupulously followed.  That implies, however, that there cannot be a wrongful conviction.  But above you speak as if there can be wrongful convictions for capital crimes, adding that this is very unlikely. 
 
If you maintain against the CP-opponents that wrongful convictions are nowadays extremely rare, then by maintaining that you concede that wrongful convictions are possible (and not just in an anemic logical sense) and that therefore the property of being found guilty in a properly conducted trial of such-and-such charge is not identical to the property of being guilty of said charge. 
 
As for the broadened use of CP mentioned in your opening paragraph, consider arson.  A  man deliberately and maliciously sets a forest ablaze.  In the course of combating it, several firefighters lose their lives.  In addition, countless animals are either killed or deprived of habitat.  And there is property damage in the millions.  Doesn't CP at some point become a condign punishment?  I say yes.  What rational objection could one have to that?
 
It is indeed a strange world.  We in the West coddle the most vicious criminals.  In the Islamic lands hands are cut off for theft.  Both sides have lost their collective minds, though they are far, far worse.   They stone to death the woman caught in adultery and we wring our hands over the execution of a scumbag like 'Tookie' Williams.