From jk Sun Jul 21 21:35:21 1996
Subject: Three Plans for the Future?
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 21:35:21 -0400 (EDT)
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Ed Kent:
>Call it what you will, fewer and fewer people are and will be needed to
>produce the goods and services for what ought to be a prosperous global
>economy.
This seems unlikely to me. The trend I think is toward economic
efficiency, due mostly to vastly improved information and communications
technologies, and efficient economies tend to find a use for all
available resources. Everything (including the ability to perform
labor) becomes more readily convertible into money because everything
can continuously be offered for sale to every enterprise in the world
for use in increasingly flexible and constantly reconfigured productive
processes. That situation has many, many drawbacks, but I don't see why
increased global unemployment or for that matter reduced average global
standard of living would be among them.
Here in America total employment has grown greatly in recent decades and
the enormous growth of cities in the Third World (as well as the labels
on almost anything you buy these days) suggests that far more people
there are participating in the global economy as well.
>Third World countries such as Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan are
>pursuing devil-take-the-hind-most laissez-faire capitalism.
Most third world countries that I know of are very far from laissez-
faire capitalism. Laissez-faire capitalism isn't despotism mitigated by
inefficiency and corruption, government by rich and influential families
who don't like competition, or government in the interests of men with
power (guns or the ability to deny permission to do things) who like to
squeeze as much as possible for themselves out of every situation.
Laissez-faire capitalism is a regime of limited government and strict
and enforceable rights. You might not like it, but it's not what they
have in Mexico. Try Hong Kong.
>The Western European countries are facing some tough alternatives.
>Germany has the world's highest per capita standard of living; it
>provides excellent social services, not only for its natives, but for a
>good number of refugees and immigrant workers now stranded by declining
>job demand.
My impression was that adjusted for cost of living per capita income was
still higher in America. That may have changed since the last time I
looked, of course.
More to the point, the situation in Western Europe seems somewhat
ominous -- stubbornly high unemployment (over 10% in most countries,
with special problems for young people trying to get a foothold in the
job market), worse government deficits than we have, and extreme
political difficulty in cutting back on the social and job benefits
that make it impossible to deal with the other problems. Also growing
social problems -- in many respects the Europeans have been socially
more cohesive and orderly than we have been, but crime rates and
illegitimacy for example have grown tremendously in recent decades. I
would speculate that such things, combined with immigration and decline
of national cohesion due to the European Union, will make it difficult
for the Europeans to pull together, make common sacrifices, get by with
reduced benefits, etc.
>Where the leveling off will settle is to be seen, but the Germans in
>their as usual industrious fashion are at work on their problems and
>most likely will achieve a decent standard of living for all.
I admire the Germans and the other Europeans greatly, but they don't
always manage to solve their problems in a "levelling off" kind of way.
The German system seems to attend to all the details, but some say the
only mistakes they make are the big ones.
>While the other post-industrial societies have been educating and
>training their workers, the US has been expanding its prison system.
>The US still seems determined to devote an inordinate proportion of its
>budget -- 40% of the world's total military expenditures -- to fighting
>phantom enemies. As its incarcertation rate increases (now in excess
>of 500 per 100,000 and the world's highest), American education and job
>training deteriorate. Aging school structures are falling apart;
>classrooms are over crowded; we are cutting back on the education
>programs at all levels -- nursery school to higher education -- that
>would produce an efficient future work force.
This is an odd account. U.S. expenditures on education are high
compared with other countries, and they've grown quite a lot in recent
decades. Military expeditures have been declining for decades as a
percentage of national income, and more recently they've declined
substantially in absolute terms. Prisons don't compare in expense to
either.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Tue Jul 23 17:01:12 1996
Subject: as ordered
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 17:01:12 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7886.3C8DD720@eb1ppp26.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 23, 96 11:00:12 am
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You asked:
>What is the purpose of that order, i.e. what is the good that order is
>intended to serve (and perhaps, what is it that makes that "good"
>good?)
The purpose of that order is not any good beyond itself but the good as
such, which is the same as the will of God.
The alternative to accepting an order that is innate in the world, I
think, is moral arbitrariness -- either making one's own will the
standard, which would reduce moral language to manipulative rhetoric, or
choosing an arbitrary standard, which seems to come down to the same
thing.
>Are you saying that this order, like the order sought by the left,
>works to arrange things so that the desires of our hearts will be best
>fulfilled, given reality, over the long haul, and that its superiority
>lies in its being really a better arrangement for fulfilling those
>desires than we come up with out of allowing those desires to dictate
>to us, or than following what we can come up with by our reason? Or,
>are you saying that this order has some other purpose altogether? And
>if so, I'd like to know what that purpose is and why we should
>subordinate ourselves to it.
The order fulfills our good, which is what the desire of our hearts
would be if we understood truly, reasoned correctly, and accepted the
moral order that transcends us. We should accept the order because the
word "should" makes sense only if we do (see above). Therefore it
makes sense to say "we should accept it" but not to say "we shouldn't
accept it". Also, we are constructed so unless we are deadened or
intoxicated we won't be satisfied until we accept it.
>You write: "With the death of the American constitutional order people
>either live day-to-day taking very short views or try to bring their
>lives in order by adhering to a view or way of life that makes up for
>social marginality by coherence."
>
>Not much in this I understand: how as the American constitutional
>order "died"? Why would this death lead to people living day-to-day?
>And what do you mean by coherence?
I had said:
I think we've historically had a compound of the two here that
limited the logic of each based on a political tradition of
inalienable rights, limited government and federalism and an
implicit Protestant establishment.
That compound is dead now, I think, although a large group of
American conservatives dreams of restoring it. What killed it was
the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of American
life and the clarification of left-wing thought that those trends
made possible and necessary. With the death of the American
constitutional order
The "American constitutional order" is the same as the "compound"
described in the previous paragraph. If you think part of that
compound is still alive I'll explain why I think it's dead. The death
of that order is the death of what once joined us together as a people
and so enabled us to make collective sense of our common life. If our
common life has no implicit moral sense then people who take part in it
will with respect to that participation either drift (i.e., live
day-to-day), drop out, or attempt to impose a self-interested or
sectarian interpretation.
"Coherent" means "principled and rational, at least implicitly".
>Also, in what way has left-wing thought achieved "clarification"?
It's come more clearly to understand that from its point of view
good order is something men construct from human desires which set
the goals and from human reason and actions which put things in
order so that the goals can be realized.
So for example the current equivalents of William O. Douglas and Earl
Warren would (unlike WOD and EW in the early '50s) not give public talks
and write Supreme Court opinions that say that American institutions are
based on a Supreme Being in general and on Christianity in particular.
Moving from the theoretical to the institutional, since constructing
order for a purpose is evidently a job for experts American left-wing
thought has become more clearly committed to rule by a small elite.
An aside: some people like to read what I write so I make my recent
public posts available on my web page. Someone asked me to add private
exchanges when they are of general interest. Could I make public my
contributions to our exchanges? Since the exchanges are private I
would eliminate proper names and the like so you couldn't be identified
unless you told me you didn't care. (I won't be upset if you say no.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Wed Jul 24 07:06:50 1996
Subject: order, order
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 07:06:50 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB78CD.862326A0@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 23, 96 07:24:43 pm
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Back to theology:
>This is a point you and I have reached before, when I asked, what if
>God were like Saddam Hussein. You didn't seem to think that issue
>needed to be dealt with, as if it must necessarily follow that if He
>created the whole shebang, his interests and purposes must inevitably
>be in harmony with the good of His creatures.
I said before:
The point is not that power solves the problem but that when we
think about what a solution to the problem could be like it seems
that power would be part of it. "Objective good" seems to suggest
that purpose is an essential part of the way things are, and
supposing a creator helps us understand how that could be.
If I say "Pan Am 800 went down because of a bomb" it's not an objection
to point out that some bomb designs wouldn't have done the job. While
a creator who's just like Saddam Hussein wouldn't help us make sense of
objective good, some other sort of creator might. The point was not
that every imaginable conception of a creator helps us make sense of
things, but that what best helps us make sense of things is a
conception of a creator. (As an aside, there does seem to me something
very odd about the notion of an evil creator, but that's not what I'm
relying on.)
>(Have you seen Jack Miles' book of a bit more than a year ago, GOD: A
>BIOGRAPHY --or something like that?)
I haven't read it.
>But I would say that what makes a good order good is that it does serve
>the good of the creatures who live in that order, and that if it did
>not serve their good, the order would not be good. Even if there were
>a God who'd dictated that order. Would you quarrel with that?
I quarrel with everything at all times. In this particular case, my
basic problem is that your statement assumes that God can somehow be
peeled off the moral order, and the moral order peeled off particular
goods, in each case leaving what remains as it was. Your question then
becomes "why bother with the higher levels since all we experience
concretely is the lower levels?"
My problem is that in order to make sense of the lower levels I need
the higher levels. For example, I don't understand how the good of
creatures could be their good without reference to a moral order
independent of them. Also, once we assume that a moral order
independent of every creature exists we have the problem of
understanding what it is, where it comes from and so on. Saying it's
the will of God makes it a lot more comprehensible than thinking of it
as some sort of system of necessarily valid purposes with no mind for
which they are purposes. Again, the higher level is helpful when one
tries to understand the whole system.
>If we assume that there is an order "innate" in the world, rather than
>calling the alternative to following it "moral arbitrariness," would it
>not make sense to call it a mistake, a foolish course of action,
>something like that? In the sense, that is, that things will not work
>well if they go against the grain. Your Darwin remark, of course, does
>seem to say that it is a misjudgment of that sort. But I don't see the
>point of speaking in terms of moral arbitrariness.
I don't quite understand what's at issue here. You may be trying to
assimilate moral to nonmoral considerations, for example to means/end
rationality with a common goal simply assumed.
The point of speaking of moral arbitrariness is that there are some
things whose functioning we should promote and some whose functioning we
should inhibit. It's true for example that because of the nature of the
world the reproduction mechanism of the smallpox virus won't work well
if everyone is vaccinated, so it would be a foolish course of action and
go against the grain to vaccinate everyone if you want the smallpox
virus to thrive, but it would not therefore be morally arbitrary.
The Darwin remark was meant half-humorously. Prevailing is no doubt
evidence of truth, but it doesn't constitute truth.
>unless one acknowledges a transcendent God behind such an order, one is
>condemned to a moral arbitrariness.
What I said is that unless one acknowledges a transcendent moral order
one is condemned to moral arbitrariness, and that God is the best
explanation of transcendent moral order. In the long run maybe that's
the same as the version you present, but I'm quite conscious of the
separate steps.
>I do believe that there is an order to things that one --or, more to
>the point, THE MANY (e.g. humankind, a society)-- ignores only at its
>great peril.
My view is that you can't know what "peril" means in the relevant sense
(as something that "should" be avoided) unless you know what "good"
means, and to understand the good you need a transcendent moral order.
Does it seem to you I'm going around in circles? I've nonetheless
found the discussion illuminating. My impression is that you think
there's a natural human functioning that could be defined wholly by
reference to the modern natural sciences that is sufficient to ground
morality, and everything else is dispensible. Is that right?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Wed Jul 24 22:45:46 1996
Subject: retro order
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 22:45:46 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7980.370D1680@eb3ppp17.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 24, 96 04:48:54 pm
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>Maybe this one will be "Back order."
I prefer *my* title. Not quite a palindrome, it's true, but you can't
have everything.
>I'd say, one has to start with the question, "What makes something
>good?" To me, the anwer has to be somehow connected with the meeting
>of the needs of sentient creatures.
"Somehow connected" leaves a lot open. Morality can't be based wholly
on needs because to say something is a "need" in the required sense is
to confer on it a moral necessity. So before something can qualify as
a need there already has to be a system of morality in effect.
>Now you like to posit a God that is good. Fine. But in order to do
>that, you already had to have a concept of what good was.
You have to have at least an inchoate concept of what good is. The
issue to my mind is how to develop that inchoate concept and other
inklings and hints into a clearer and more satisfactory system of
understanding. What must that system include and what must those
components be like?
You seem to speak as if it could all be put into a deductive system, and
if you can't do that, so that everything ends up depending on everything
else, it's turtles in a circle if not some ruder expression. Our
knowledge of realities other than maybe pure mathematics can't be set up
that way though.
I'm not sure how best to clarify my views for you. What I will do is
comment on some of your statements in the hope of illuminating the
differences between us.
>The moral order --the objective right and wrong, not just some cultural
>notion of it-- might be defined as the way to order human life so that
>the genuine needs of those within the system are best met.
Morality can't be *defined* by reference to genuine needs because
genuine needs (and the appropriate balance that makes them "best met")
can be determined only by reference to morality. (Also, to make a very
different point, why shouldn't morality include things aimed at
something higher or at least more fun than barely staying alive, if
that's what "genuine needs" means?)
>So, a part of a moral order that serves the human good is that it
>induces individuals to subordinate their own good --at certain
>junctures, in certain ways-- to larger goods.
Here you distinguish the good of individuals from the human good --
presumably the aggregate good of all individuals? I'm not sure why you
think individuals should sacrifice their own good to that of others. My
answer would be that morality is part of the good of individuals, so by
living in accordance with it each of us is bringing about his own good,
but that move doesn't seem to be available to you since your procedure
seems to be to start with human goods without yet knowing anything about
morality and then to derive morality from them. (Not that I've done
that well recently in characterizing your views!)
>In addition, the moral order will help individuals achieve their own
>good better than they would if they were merely slaves to their
>impulses.
Suppose someone established an order in his psyche that achieved his
good better than compliance with the moral order would, but at a great
cost to the good of others. Is that a logical possibility in your view?
A factual possibility?
>It's that middle ground between arbitrariness-and-anarchy on the left
>and the Almighty God on the right that you haven't seemed willing to
>acknowledge the possibility of. Have I misunderstood?
In the long run and rationally I think theories that leave God out of
the picture don't work. There have of course been people who have lived
by theories that I don't think work. Imperial Confucianism for example
tended toward atheism while rejecting arbitrariness and anarchy.
Whether such a theory could work today as a practical matter is I
suppose a question of spiritual sociology, to invent a science.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Thu Jul 25 12:16:55 1996
Subject: leapfrogging the turtle?
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 12:16:56 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB79B6.6E414280@eb2ppp3.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 24, 96 11:18:09 pm
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>I'm not interested in quibbling about what should or shouldn't be on
>the list, but I think we can agree about at least some needs without
>having spoken about morality. For example, we could agree about the
>needs of rhesus monkeys or foxes without talking about morality, right?
>
>So I don't see why the idea of needs has to come after the idea of
>morality, rather than vice versa.
A male rhesus monkey needs to get a harem, Dole needs to take California
this November, and a fire needs oxygen. The human race doesn't need
Southern Sung landscapes, and it certainly doesn't need peace since
strife is the source and origin of all things. Neither Darwinian
evolution nor the biosphere needs the human race.
What do we do with all these needs and non-needs? How do we sort
through them simply taking them on their own terms?
>Now, your question of "why should a person sacrifice his own good?" Do
>we both mean by that, sacrifice his own self-interest? The more
>interesting question is: why WOULD a person do it?
I think man is rational enough that in the long run he won't do it
unless he thinks he should do it. So "why SHOULD he sacrifice" is at
least as interesting, especially if the discussion has any connection
with our own conduct as it will if we are at all rational even at the
margins.
The margins are important, by the way. Most of the time habit carries
us through, but occasions arise in which we could get an important
advantage by trimming, adopting a new interpretation that just happens
to let us off the hook, doing something just this once, whatever. How
we act on those occasions has a cumulative effect. At such times saying
"well I've been socially conditioned to act thus and so and that general
kind of social conditioning is very beneficial for people generally
including me most of the time" won't do the trick. Something more
principled is needed.
>But we SHOULD because a world in which people play for the team is one
>in which, on balance, every one is likely to be better off than a world
>in which it is a Hobbsean war of all against all. Without morality, we
>have what Shakespeare called an universal wolf, or something like that.
In the absence of a principle that makes the good of all part of my good
this seems to me only a demonstration that it is to my advantage for
other people to be moral.
>I still don't get what God does for your system. Again, I've not seen
>anything that He supplies, and I don't get what you think is necessary
>that you can't get without positing Him.
In brief: if there is no God then purpose is something particular
actors impose on the world rather than something found in the world.
If that's true of purpose then it's also true of goods since goods
imply purposes; if there are no purposes in the world other than those
we adopt then good is something we posit rather than something that
makes the world what it is. If goods are posited by us then we get
into the problems of arbitrariness, conflicts between individual and
common goods, etc. that I've been worrying about.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Thu Jul 25 17:30:23 1996
Subject: Re: tradition and liberalism
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 17:30:23 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7A1A.58D4CCA0@eb2ppp3.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 25, 96 11:13:32 am
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>According to the first, a community of people is best serve living
>within a framework of traditional practice and belief. According to
>the second, liberalism is fundamentally misguided and therefore
>dangerous to the good life. Right?
Right.
>Thing is, these two are not the same, and can even be in conflict. For
>example, in the Anglo-Saxon culture, liberalism is fundamentally
>established as part of the tradition.
Liberalism can't exist except as part of a tradition. No school of
thought or approach to government can. Traditions can run into trouble,
though. Specifically, there are going to be big problems in a tradition
to the extent liberalism becomes absolutely dominant within it and
causes it to reject in principle the authority of tradition. I view
those problems as problems for liberalism rather than problems for
tradition -- the latter can get along without the former but not the
reverse.
Everything depends on what the tradition contains apart from liberalism.
Until quite recently Anglo-Saxon culture had an established religion --
the informal Protestant establishment in the United States and the
Anglican Church in England -- and emphasized limited government, which
radically limited the role liberalism played in social life. Liberalism
was far from an absolute. Now that's changed. The established faith is
liberalism itself, and government is limited only in the sense that it's
not allowed to do things that aren't liberal.
>Consider that the essence of liberalism is that individuals possess
>rights. Would you accept that formulation?
Rights to pursue their own goals, whatever those goals happen to be.
>So my question is: are you opposed to liberalism altogether? If so,
>does that mean that you are opposed to traditions that enshrine the
>idea of rights? If not, just where do you draw the line between the
>liberal ideas that you endorse and those you oppose?
I don't have any special opposition to liberalism as one constituent of
a political tradition. As a constituent it can provide a way of
recognizing that power is not wholly to be trusted and that any
formulation of the good, beautiful and true we come up with is going to
be flawed in some way. But I think it's catastrophic for liberalism to
become the fundamental constituent against which everything in political
and social life must be measured. Where you draw that line is a matter
of judgement; I think we've clearly passed it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Thu Jul 25 17:34:39 1996
Subject: turtle's pace
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 17:34:39 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7A33.528FD7E0@eb2ppp3.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 25, 96 02:12:16 pm
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Sorry if I'm beating this subject line thing into the ground, but it's
become a habit.
>But if you say that the problem with my Godless cosmos is that a person
>might well decide that it's in his interest for other people to be
>moral, but for himself to be a sociopath, I'm not prepared to preclude
>that possibility. But the logical non sequitur in your position is the
>assumption that if you add God, you've solved that problem.
No. I'm not saying "we've got this Godless cosmos that works just fine
as it is except unfortunately it gives Nietzsche no reason to take the
interests of the herd into account so I'd better patch in something
additional to solve the problem". Instead I'm asking "what would a
cosmos be like in which it would be an error for someone to think it's
in his interest to be immoral".
>But here we are again: what is it that make God's purpose my purpose.
For morality to be obligatory it seems that there must be purposes
independent of our actual will that somehow are necessary purposes for
us. We experience morality as obligatory and cannot do otherwise.
Therefore we must accept that such purposes exist. How to account for
them? How best to think of them? Is it helpful to suppose that we and
the world were made with those purposes in mind?
It seems to me that the difference between us here is that you start
with a world in which there is no moral obligation and try to construct
it. From such a perspective adding a very powerful being to the world
would have no effect. (Actually, I don't think anything would help, and
you've set yourself a hopeless task.) In contrast, I start with a world
in which we know there is moral obligation and ask how such a world can
best be understood.
>Is this conversation still useful for you?
Very much so -- I'm convinced it's far more useful for me than for you.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Fri Jul 26 08:11:36 1996
Subject: what the tortoise taught us
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 08:11:36 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7A6A.3AB6C840@eb1ppp5.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 25, 96 08:44:26 pm
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>I know that "liberal" has become equated with big government in the
>modern American context, but I'm not sure that there is an intrinsic
>connection between the liberal tradition --in which freedom is
>paramount-- and, say, the welfare state. Milton Friedman is a liberal
>by your lights, isn't he? He's hardly a big government type. Is there
>a close connection between the idea of liberty (which is mostly a
>negative kind of freedom, freedom from) and the more recent notions of
>entitlement (which implies a positive right to get something)?
Milton Friedman is of course a classical liberal. I think though that
contemporary liberalism legitimately develops classical liberalism by
trying to free men from a broader range of restrictions. Both
contemporary and classical liberalism aim to maximize men's ability to
pursue their goals, whatever those goals happen to be. The difference
is that contemporary liberalism accepts that social institutions other
than the state, notably classical property rights, can burden that
ability and is willing to use state power to lighten or remove such
burdens.
>In a slightly different direction. You write: "Rights to pursue their
>own goals, whatever those goals happen to be."
>
>How would you like those rights to be limited in ways they are not now
>in America?
Whatever is needed to protect the institutions necessary for human
happiness. To take one example, the family is necessary for human
happiness. Therefore people don't have a right to carry on their sex
lives in a way that generally engaged in would fatally weaken the
family. If by "how" you mean the manner of restriction then I would say
that social custom and understandings are by far the most important,
supplemented by formal means such as law as appropriate.
>You say you want to ask yourself, what would a cosmos look like in
>which acting immorally would be a mistake for someone trying to pursue
>his interest? I don't mind the question, though asking that question
>cannot be mistaken for having shown that in fact the cosmos is such a
>place.
Can we help viewing it as such a place? I don't think anyone can
categorically deny moral obligation. People just don't seem to be able
to live that way, and if someone did I think it would be reasonable to
think of him as defective rather as we would think of someone unable to
recognize an object as one he had seen before, or categorically
incapable of distinguishing true sentences from false sentences, as
defective. People say it's all relative, or all socially constructed,
or whatever, but at some point they sidestep the force of that claim.
What we can not deny we must accept. Since moral obligation is for us
an inescapable fact we must then make sense of it. It's difficult to
make sense of moral obligation without viewing it as part of our good
since both our "obligation" and our "good" seems to be goals that for us
are somehow rationally correct. It would be very puzzling though if the
rationally correct goals of a single agent were inconsistent. It would
also be odd to define our "interest" in a way that puts it at odds with
our "good". Therefore our interests include performance of our
obligations. Q.E.D.
>When you say, "it is in each person's interest to act morally," do you
>mean what is usually meant by interest?
I was putting an objective interpretation on it, as one might for
example who said that it is in the interests of a drunk not to find his
car keys or a child to be forced to go to school. As I was using it it
meant the same as "good".
>I'm hoping you aren't doing something slippery like defining interest
>as "what one gets when one acts morally" or something else that would
>render your proposition tautological.
I don't find it tautological. Very likely you will.
One difference between us may be that I think the most important
feature of human action is rationality. It seems to me we can and
often do act for reasons, those reasons are profoundly and rightly
affected by the way we understand ourselves and the world, and
systematic reason is the appropriate standard for our conduct. You
seem to think of human action more mechanistically -- we act for
psychological motives based on drives that are not rational at all.
Our differing conceptions of "interest" I think follows from that
deeper difference.
>By another way, why do you say this conversation is more useful to you
>than to me?
Responding to questions helps me clarify and develop my views, which is
a more direct benefit than learning about the views of another. Unless
the other is Plato or somebody, which I am not.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Fri Jul 26 09:04:12 1996
Subject: Jihad v. McWorld
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 09:04:12 -0400 (EDT)
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The following article by Benjamin Barber appeared in the March 1992
Atlantic Monthly and has since been expanded into a book. It seemed
relevant to the discussions we were having a while back about
Christendom, the New World Order, u.d.g. so I thought I'd send it
around.
My own comments on the article:
1. Barber's quasi-religious faith in democracy seems odd to me.
Process is important, but is it *that* important? Can it really redeem
the world? If it could, wouldn't it be because the process somehow
fosters particular substantive goods that are at least conceptually
distinguishable from it?
2. Similarly, he discusses the forces he refers to as Jihad mostly by
reference to process -- authoritarianism, exclusion, etc. I think
that's a distorting perspective. Even if psychological conceptions of
human needs like social ties are added to the picture the discussion is
still incomplete.
3. The emphasis on process rather than substance means an emphasis on
anarchy and conflict. His choice of the word "Jihad" illustrates that
emphasis. For Barber particularist movements and peoples exist not by
reason of goods they find within own specific way of life but by reason
of arbitrary line-drawing.
Nonetheless, an interesting article:
The two axial principles of our age--tribalism and globalism--clash
at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible
political futures--both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a
retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a
threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is
pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against
tribe--a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths
against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial
social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in
on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand
integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast
music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh, and
McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global
network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology,
communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly
apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.
These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at
the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join
the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live
up to its reputation as the world's largest integral democracy while
powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist assassins, are
imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining up:
the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming
new unions with one another or with like-minded nationalities in
neighboring states. The old interwar national state based on
territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional
development.
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the
forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite
directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by
universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and
ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous
from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much
hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves
democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal
whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is
unlikely to be democratic--or so I will argue.
McWorld, or the Globalization of Politics
Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market
imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology
imperative, and an ecological imperative. By shrinking the world and
diminishing the salience of national borders, these imperatives have
in combination achieved a considerable victory over factiousness and
particularism, and not least of all over their most virulent
traditional form--nationalism. It is the realists who are now
Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent
England or Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony.
Yesterday's wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of
McWorld.
THE MARKET IMPERATIVE. Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism
assumed that the quest for ever-expanding markets would in time
compel nation-based capitalist economies to push against national
boundaries in search of an international economic imperium. Whatever
else has happened to the scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this
domain they have proved farsighted. All national economies are now
vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational markets within
which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking
is open, and contracts are enforceable under law. In Europe, Asia,
Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding
national sovereignty and giving rise to entities--international
banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and
Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and
multinational corporations that increasingly lack a meaningful
national identity--that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an
organizing or regulative principle.
The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for
international peace and stability, requisites of an efficient
international economy. Markets are enemies of parochialism,
isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology attenuates the
psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and assumes a
concord among producers and consumers--categories that ill fit
narrowly conceived national or religious cultures. Shopping has
little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing
British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox
fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts puritanism.
In the context of common markets, international law ceases to be a
vision of justice and becomes a workaday framework for getting
things done--enforcing contracts, ensuring that governments abide by
deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and so forth.
Common markets demand a common language, as well as a common
currency, and they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by
cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer
programmers, international bankers, media specialists, oil riggers,
entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, demographers,
accountants, professors, athletes--these compose a new breed of men
and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only
marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of
everyday life will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from
an American mode, shopping has a common signature throughout the
world. Cynics might even say that some of the recent revolutions in
Eastern Europe have had as their true goal not liberty and the right
to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to shop (although the
vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods). The market
imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some of
the claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical
with the democratic imperative.
THE RESOURCE IMPERATIVE. Democrats once dreamed of societies whose
political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The
Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while
to create a way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis
genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to be independent of any
other community or polis. Not even the Athenians were able to
achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, is dependency.
By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up
with a flowering empire held together by naval power and
commerce--an empire that, even as it appeared to enhance Athenian
might, ate away at Athenian independence and autarky. Master and
slave, it turned out, were bound together by mutual insufficiency.
The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as
well, for the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the
cornucopia of natural resources, and the natural barriers of a
continent walled in by two great seas led many to believe that
America could be a world unto itself. Given this past, it has been
harder for Americans than for most to accept the inevitability of
interdependence. But the rapid depletion of resources even in a
country like ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the
maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on the planet,
leave even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and
many other nations in permanently desperate straits.
Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some
nations have almost nothing they need.
THE INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGY IMPERATIVE. Enlightenment science and the
technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. They
entail a quest for descriptive principles of general application, a
search for universal solutions to particular problems, and an
unswerving embrace of objectivity and impartiality.
Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a
common discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy
and regular flow and exchange of information. Such ideals can be
hypocritical covers for power-mongering by elites, and they may be
shown to be wanting in many other ways, but they are entailed by the
very idea of science and they make science and globalization
practical allies.
Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and
are facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of
these technologies tends to be systemic and integrated--computer,
television, cable, satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip
technologies combining to create a vast interactive communications
and information network that can potentially give every person on
earth access to every other person, and make every datum, every
byte, available to every set of eyes. If the automobile was, as
George Ball once said (when he gave his blessing to a Fiat factory
in the Soviet Union during the Cold War), "an ideology on four
wheels," then electronic telecommunication and information systems
are an ideology at 186,000 miles per second--which makes for a very
small planet in a very big hurry. Individual cultures speak
particular languages; commerce and science increasingly speak
English; the whole world speaks logarithms and binary mathematics.
Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even
compels, open societies. Satellite footprints do not respect
national borders; telephone wires penetrate the most closed
societies. With photocopying and then fax machines having
infiltrated Soviet universities and samizdat literary circles in the
eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits in
communism's bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be
far behind. In their social requisites, secrecy and science are
enemies.
The new technology's software is perhaps even more globalizing than
its hardware. The information arm of international commerce's
sprawling body reaches out and touches distinct nations and
parochial cultures, and gives them a common face chiseled in
Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon Valley. Throughout the
1980s one of the most-watched television programs in South Africa
was The Cosby Show. The demise of apartheid was already in
production. Exhibitors at the 1991 Cannes film festival expressed
growing anxiety over the "homogenization" and "Americanization" of
the global film industry when, for the third year running, American
films dominated the awards ceremonies. America has dominated the
world's popular culture for much longer, and much more decisively.
In November of 1991 Switzerland's once insular culture boasted
best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the No. 1 movie,
Scarlett as the No. 1 book, and Prince's Diamonds and Pearls as the
No. 1 record album. No wonder the Japanese are buying Hollywood film
studios even faster than Americans are buying Japanese television
sets. This kind of software supremacy may in the long term be far
more important than hardware superiority, because culture has become
more potent than armaments. What is the power of the Pentagon
compared with Disneyland? Can the Sixth Fleet keep up with CNN?
McDonald's in Moscow and Coke in China will do more to create a
global culture than military colonization ever could. It is less the
goods than the brand names that do the work, for they convey
life-style images that alter perception and challenge behavior. They
make up the seductive software of McWorld's common (at times much
too common) soul.
Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is nothing that
looks particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as
well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as
well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market
outcomes as well as greater productivity. The consumer society and
the open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy
have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage. An
efficient free market after all requires that consumers be free to
vote their dollars on competing goods, not that citizens be free to
vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and
programs. The free market flourished in junta-run Chile, in
military-governed Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of
autocratic European empires as well as their colonial possessions.
The ecological imperative. The impact of globalization on ecology is
a cliche even to world leaders who ignore it. We know well enough
that the German forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians
driving gas-guzzlers fueled by leaded gas. We also know that the
planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian
farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning
down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and
because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush
jungle into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the
delicate oxygen balance and in effect puncturing our global lungs.
Yet this ecological consciousness has meant not only greater
awareness but also greater inequality, as modernized nations try to
slam the door behind them, saying to developing nations, "The world
cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry!"
Each of the four imperatives just cited is transnational,
transideological, and transcultural. Each applies impartially to
Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; to democrats and
totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists. The Enlightenment
dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable degree
been realized--but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized,
depoliticized, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete,
for the movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of
global breakdown, national dissolution, and centrifugal corruption.
These forces, working in the opposite direction, are the essence of
what I call Jihad.
Jihad, or the Lebanonization of the World
Opec, the world bank, the united nations, the International Red
Cross, the multinational corporation...there are scores of
institutions that reflect globalization. But they often appear as
ineffective reactors to the world's real actors: national states
and, to an ever greater degree, subnational factions in permanent
rebellion against uniformity and integration--even the kind
represented by universal law and justice. The headlines feature
these players regularly: they are cultures, not countries; parts,
not wholes; sects, not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting
minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional
nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East
Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Abkhasians,
Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha, Catalonians, Tamils,
and, of course, Palestinians--people without countries, inhabiting
nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that
will seal them off from modernity.
A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of
integration and unification, a movement aimed at bringing together
disparate clans, tribes, and cultural fragments under new,
assimilationist flags. But as Ortega y Gasset noted more than sixty
years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed its
strategy. In the 1920s, and again today, it is more often a
reactionary and divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once
helped cement together. The force that creates nations is
"inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of the Masses. "In periods
of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty
standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and
nationalism is nothing but a mania..."
This mania has left the post-Cold War world smoldering with hot
wars; the international scene is little more unified than it was at
the end of the Great War, in Ortega's own time. There were more than
thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, racial,
tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions
doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. Some new world order!
The aim of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries,
to implode states and resecure parochial identities: to escape
McWorld's dully insistent imperatives. The mood is that of Jihad:
war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an
expression of community, an end in itself. Even where there is no
shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the quest for
ever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries
those at risk: In Switzerland and Spain, Jurassian and Basque
separatists still argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes
in the language of bombs. Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet
Union may well continue unabated--not just a Ukraine independent
from the Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine independent from the
Ukrainian republic; not just Russia severed from the defunct union
but Tatarstan severed from Russia. Yugoslavia makes even the
disunited, ex-Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the
Soviet Union look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up
within factional motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds.
Kurdish independence would threaten the territorial integrity of
four Middle Eastern nations. Well before the current cataclysm
Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet Union, only
to be faced with its Ossetians (164,000 in a republic of 5.5
million) demanding their own self-determination within Georgia. The
Abkhasian minority in Georgia has followed suit. Even the good will
established by Canada's once promising Meech Lake protocols is in
danger, with Francophone Quebec again threatening the dissolution of
the federation. In South Africa the emergence from apartheid was
hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha's Zulus and the
African National Congress's tribally identified members threatened
to replace Europeans' racism with an indigenous tribal war. After
thirty years of attempted integration using the colonial language
(English) as a unifier, Nigeria is now playing with the idea of
linguistic multiculturalism--which could mean the cultural breakup
of the nation into hundreds of tribal fragments. Even Saddam Hussein
has benefited from the threat of internal Jihad, having used renewed
tribal and religious warfare to turn last season's mortal enemies
into reluctant allies of an Iraqi nationhood that he nearly
destroyed.
The passing of communism has torn away the thin veneer of
internationalism (workers of the world unite!) to reveal ethnic
prejudices that are not only ugly and deep-seated but increasingly
murderous. Europe's old scourge, anti-Semitism, is back with a
vengeance, but it is only one of many antagonisms. It appears all
too easy to throw the historical gears into reverse and pass from a
Communist dictatorship back into a tribal state.
Among the tribes, religion is also a battlefield. ("Jihad" is a rich
word whose generic meaning is "struggle"--usually the struggle of
the soul to avert evil. Strictly applied to religious war, it is
used only in reference to battles where the faith is under assault,
or battles against a government that denies the practice of Islam.
My use here is rhetorical, but does follow both journalistic
practice and history.) Remember the Thirty Years War? Whatever forms
of Enlightenment universalism might once have come to grace such
historically related forms of monotheism as Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, in many of their modern incarnations they are parochial
rather than cosmopolitan, angry rather than loving, proselytizing
rather than ecumenical, zealous rather than rationalist, sectarian
rather than deistic, ethnocentric rather than universalizing. As a
result, like the new forms of hypernationalism, the new expressions
of religious fundamentalism are fractious and pulverizing, never
integrating. This is religion as the Crusaders knew it: a battle to
the death for souls that if not saved will be forever lost.
The atmospherics of Jihad have resulted in a breakdown of civility
in the name of identity, of comity in the name of community.
International relations have sometimes taken on the aspect of gang
war--cultural turf battles featuring tribal factions that were
supposed to be sublimated as integral parts of large national,
economic, postcolonial, and constitutional entities.
The Darkening Future of Democracy
These rather melodramatic tableaux vivants do not tell the whole
story, however. For all their defects, Jihad and McWorld have their
attractions. Yet, to repeat and insist, the attractions are
unrelated to democracy. Neither McWorld nor Jihad is remotely
democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy; neither promotes
democracy.
McWorld does manage to look pretty seductive in a world obsessed
with Jihad. It delivers peace, prosperity, and relative unity--if at
the cost of independence, community, and identity (which is
generally based on difference). The primary political values
required by the global market are order and tranquillity, and
freedom--as in the phrases "free trade," "free press," and "free
love." Human rights are needed to a degree, but not citizenship or
participation--and no more social justice and equality than are
necessary to promote efficient economic production and consumption.
Multinational corporations sometimes seem to prefer doing business
with local oligarchs, inasmuch as they can take confidence from
dealing with the boss on all crucial matters. Despots who slaughter
their own populations are no problem, so long as they leave markets
in place and refrain from making war on their neighbors (Saddam
Hussein's fatal mistake). In trading partners, predictability is of
more value than justice.
The Eastern European revolutions that seemed to arise out of concern
for global democratic values quickly deteriorated into a stampede in
the general direction of free markets and their ubiquitous,
television-promoted shopping malls. East Germany's Neues Forum, that
courageous gathering of intellectuals, students, and workers which
overturned the Stalinist regime in Berlin in 1989, lasted only six
months in Germany's mini-version of McWorld. Then it gave way to
money and markets and monopolies from the West. By the time of the
first all-German elections, it could scarcely manage to secure three
percent of the vote. Elsewhere there is growing evidence that
glasnost will go and perestroika--defined as privatization and an
opening of markets to Western bidders--will stay. So understandably
anxious are the new rulers of Eastern Europe and whatever entities
are forged from the residues of the Soviet Union to gain access to
credit and markets and technology--McWorld's flourishing new
currencies--that they have shown themselves willing to trade away
democratic prospects in pursuit of them: not just old totalitarian
ideologies and command-economy production models but some possible
indigenous experiments with a third way between capitalism and
socialism, such as economic cooperatives and employee
stock-ownership plans, both of which have their ardent supporters in
the East.
Jihad delivers a different set of virtues: a vibrant local identity,
a sense of community, solidarity among kinsmen, neighbors, and
countrymen, narrowly conceived. But it also guarantees parochialism
and is grounded in exclusion. Solidarity is secured through war
against outsiders. And solidarity often means obedience to a
hierarchy in governance, fanaticism in beliefs, and the obliteration
of individual selves in the name of the group. Deference to leaders
and intolerance toward outsiders (and toward "enemies within") are
hallmarks of tribalism--hardly the attitudes required for the
cultivation of new democratic women and men capable of governing
themselves. Where new democratic experiments have been conducted in
retribalizing societies, in both Europe and the Third World, the
result has often been anarchy, repression, persecution, and the
coming of new, noncommunist forms of very old kinds of despotism.
During the past year, Havel's velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia
was imperiled by partisans of "Czechland" and of Slovakia as
independent entities. India seemed little less rent by Sikh, Hindu,
Muslim, and Tamil infighting than it was immediately after the
British pulled out, more than forty years ago.
To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a NATURAL politics,
it has turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is
the antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and
meritocratic, focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the
administration of things--with people, however, among the chief
things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives
McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that
privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense
of civic liberty and self-government.
For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly
antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military
junta, theocratic fundamentalism--often associated with a version of
the F|hrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a
people. Even the government of India, struggling for decades to
model democracy for a people who will soon number a billion, longs
for great leaders; and for every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or
Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous assassins, the Indians
appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from the lengthy
travail of their freedom.
The Confederal Option
How can democracy be secured and spread in a world whose primary
tendencies are at best indifferent to it (McWorld) and at worst
deeply antithetical to it (Jihad)? My guess is that globalization
will eventually vanquish retribalization. The ethos of material
"civilization" has not yet encountered an obstacle it has been
unable to thrust aside. Ortega may have grasped in the 1920s a clue
to our own future in the coming millennium.
"Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. But as always
happens in similar crises--some people attempt to save the situation
by an artificial intensification of the very principle which has led
to decay. This is the meaning of the 'nationalist' outburst of
recent years....things have always gone that way. The last flare,
the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the very eve of their
disappearance there is an intensification of frontiers--military and
economic."
Jihad may be a last deep sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld. On
the other hand, Ortega was not exactly prescient; his prophecy of
peace and internationalism came just before blitzkrieg, world war,
and the Holocaust tore the old order to bits. Yet democracy is how
we remonstrate with reality, the rebuke our aspirations offer to
history. And if retribalization is inhospitable to democracy, there
is nonetheless a form of democratic government that can accommodate
parochialism and communitarianism, one that can even save them from
their defects and make them more tolerant and participatory:
decentralized participatory democracy. And if McWorld is indifferent
to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government
that suits global markets passably well--representative government
in its federal or, better still, confederal variation.
With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities,
and the universal rule of law, a confederalized representative
system would serve the political needs of McWorld as well as
oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic elitism is currently doing.
As we are already beginning to see, many nations may survive in the
long term only as confederations that afford local regions smaller
than "nations" extensive jurisdiction. Recommended reading for
democrats of the twenty-first century is not the U.S. Constitution
or the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen but the
Articles of Confederation, that suddenly pertinent document that
stitched together the thirteen American colonies into what then
seemed a too loose confederation of independent states but now
appears a new form of political realism, as veterans of Yeltsin's
new Russia and the new Europe created at Maastricht will attest.
By the same token, the participatory and direct form of democracy
that engages citizens in civic activity and civic judgment and goes
well beyond just voting and accountability--the system I have called
"strong democracy"--suits the political needs of decentralized
communities as well as theocratic and nationalist party
dictatorships have done. Local neighborhoods need not be democratic,
but they can be. Real democracy has flourished in diminutive
settings: the spirit of liberty, Tocqueville said, is local.
Participatory democracy, if not naturally apposite to tribalism, has
an undeniable attractiveness under conditions of parochialism.
Democracy in any of these variations will, however, continue to be
obstructed by the undemocratic and antidemocratic trends toward
uniformitarian globalism and intolerant retribalization which I have
portrayed here. For democracy to persist in our brave new McWorld,
we will have to commit acts of conscious political will--a
possibility, but hardly a probability, under these conditions.
Political will requires much more than the quick fix of the transfer
of institutions. Like technology transfer, institution transfer
rests on foolish assumptions about a uniform world of the kind that
once fired the imagination of colonial administrators. Spread
English justice to the colonies by exporting wigs. Let an East
Indian trading company act as the vanguard to Britain's free
parliamentary institutions. Today's well-intentioned quick-fixers in
the National Endowment for Democracy and the Kennedy School of
Government, in the unions and foundations and universities zealously
nurturing contacts in Eastern Europe and the Third World, are hoping
to democratize by long distance. Post Bulgaria a parliament by
first-class mail. Fed Ex the Bill of Rights to Sri Lanka. Cable
Cambodia some common law.
Yet Eastern Europe has already demonstrated that importing free
political parties, parliaments, and presses cannot establish a
democratic civil society; imposing a free market may even have the
opposite effect. Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be
imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the
inside out. The institutional superstructure comes last. Poland may
become democratic, but then again it may heed the Pope, and prefer
to found its politics on its Catholicism, with uncertain
consequences for democracy. Bulgaria may become democratic, but it
may prefer tribal war. The former Soviet Union may become a
democratic confederation, or it may just grow into an anarchic and
weak conglomeration of markets for other nations' goods and
services.
Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses. There is
always a desire for self-government, always some expression of
participation, accountability, consent, and representation, even in
traditional hierarchical societies. These need to be identified,
tapped, modified, and incorporated into new democratic practices
with an indigenous flavor. The tortoises among the democratizers may
ultimately outlive or outpace the hares, for they will have the time
and patience to explore conditions along the way, and to adapt their
gait to changing circumstances. Tragically, democracy in a hurry
often looks something like France in 1794 or China in 1989.
It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic
ideal in the face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull
realities of McWorld will be a confederal union of semi-autonomous
communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional
economic associations and markets larger than
nation-states--participatory and self-determining in local matters
at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The
nation-state would play a diminished role, and sovereignty would
lose some of its political potency. The Green movement adage "Think
globally, act locally" would actually come to describe the conduct
of politics.
This vision reflects only an ideal, however--one that is not
terribly likely to be realized. Freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once
wrote, is a food easy to eat but hard to digest. Still, democracy
has always played itself out against the odds. And democracy remains
both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular faith
potentially as inspiriting as Jihad.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Fri Jul 26 18:24:47 1996
Subject: Re: what the tortoise taught us
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 18:24:47 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7AEC.B1AE95E0@eb1ppp5.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 26, 96 12:18:29 pm
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>There seems to me a real gap between saying that people should be free
>to pursue their lifeplans, unimpeded, and saying that people are
>entitled to be given all the means to get what they want. The link --
>people getting what they want-- may be real; but the ideological
>shift from autonomy and freedom from interference to dependence and
>entitlement to assistance.
The distinction you draw is a valid one if property rights are presocial
and prepolitical. If that's accepted then "let 'em do what they want"
implies classical liberalism. However, contemporary liberals say (I
think with some justice) that property rights are neither presocial nor
prepolitical. Therefore they want to subject property rights to the
fundamental liberal political principle of maximizing lifeplan choice.
They argue that there are systems of determining who gets what that
advance that principle better than classical common law property rights.
For example, they say that taking $5000 from Bill Gates and using it to
pay for a poor person's appendectomy would increase the poor person's
autonomy greatly while not materially reducing that of Bill Gates and so
is required by liberalism once the superstition of property-worship is
done away with. They say that rules that assign the $5000 to the poor
person are no less non-interfering entitlements than rules that assign
it to Bill Gates unless the latter (common-law) rules are viewed as
somehow metaphysically necessary. From a liberal point of view, such an
outlook seems reasonable to me.
>One element I would put in is that Big Government is also a legitimate
>outgrowth of the development of Big Private Powers, such as corporate
>giants. It's one thing to have countless social atoms running around
>unimpeded, another to have social megamolecules plowing through the
>landscape. In such an environment, the liberal idea that we are each
>entitled to have our boundaries respected, to have our neighbors not
>impinge upon us, can lead to the belief in the need for a larger
>referree than might have been necessary two centuries ago when these
>liberal ideas started taking off.
I don't think that's what's happened, though. Back before WWI when
people were worrying about the antitrust laws and the Interstate
Commerce Commission that line of thought might have had some appeal, but
not more recently I think. On the whole, I think Big Business likes and
facilitates Big Government, certainly more than Small Business does. If
you go through the elements of Big Government most of them aren't
responses to problems created by Big Business. Social security, the
welfare system, the enormous expansion and centralization of the
education system, high taxes, the civil rights laws, health and safety
regulations, environmental laws -- none of them seem to me to have any
special Big Business connection except that Big Business usually finds
it easier to deal with them than small business does. What problems do
they deal with that would diminish if the average size of enterprises
dropped dramatically?
I do think though that bigness in one part of our social life may lead
people to expect it in other parts.
>I would be roused to respond with a certain amount of anxiety and
>energy to demonstrate that my position was indeed logical, and perhaps
>some concern that maybe it would prove to be logically untenable. Your
>response has seemed to me quite unperturbed.
I gave responses that were as adequate as my own clarity of thought and
uncertainty as to what you needed allowed. Basically, I have been
trying to diagnose the situation, to understand why it is that what
seems to me a convincing articulation and discription of our moral
experience and its implications seems to you an argument full of logical
holes.
Apart from restating my own views in different words in the hope that a
different formulation might be more understandable, I have tried to
characterize your apparent understanding of morality (unsuccessfully --
you found my description incomprehensible) and most recently to tie our
differences to radically different understandings of human action
(apparently that didn't impress you either). Basically I think the
problem is that I've been describing how I get from A to B and why A is
where we start and you've been complaining that I haven't shown that B
follows from X.
>And I'm wondering what, if I am interpreting your equanimity correctly,
>to make of it.
When you're discussing fundamental issues everything is always on the
line, so "equanimity" is the wrong word. Panic is pointless, though.
In America in 1996 I'm used to living in an intellectual culture that
says I'm wrong about things. Also, "what you're saying makes no sense"
isn't exceptionally alarming because mutual incompehension is so
common. As suggested, I have theories about why things look so
different to you and to me although I haven't been able to make those
theories understandable to you.
>Possibilities that come to my mind include: a) you don't think my mind
>strong enough in the logic department that if I wave a red flag it
>should be taken too seriously
No, there's nothing wrong with your logical powers.
>b) whatever the logical qualities of my mind, your certainty of your
>position has been so well established previously that nothing can
>perturb your confidence in it;
It's more a matter of whether issue has been joined. It seems to me it
hasn't.
>c) your beliefs, though presented in terms of logic, are not really
>based on logic and that your holding them does not really depend on how
>well they withstand logical argument;
It's true that my beliefs aren't based on logic all the way down.
Neither are yours or anyone's (except maybe Anselm's if the Ontological
Argument works). We all start with experience as it seems to us and try
to interpret it as best we can. True beliefs should withstand logical
argument. By its nature, though, logical argument can only criticize
one part of a position by reference to other parts.
>d) your energy for our conversation has more to do with the exercise of
>articulating your position and rather little to do with inquiring
>seriously into the adequacy or validity of the position;
It's a mixture. The ultimate goal is a valid and well-articulated
position, but the most one can hope from any particular discussion is to
clarify one's position and find inadequacies in particular parts of it.
Conversions with regard to fundamentals do occur but not all at once.
It is difficult to inquire directly into the validity of fundamental
parts of one's position, because those parts are difficult to articulate
and hold at arm's-length to judge and it's hard to find more basic
fundamentals by reference to which to judge them. I try to deal as
best I can with challenges to the overall adequacy or validity of my
position; how well I do has a cumulative effect but what that effect
will be can't be said in advance.
>e) you are different from me in some other ways that I haven't
>understood, and so your approach to our conversation has meanings that
>I also don't understand.
People are always different from each other in ways they don't
understand. I've tried to characterize some differences between us in
recent messages but apparently said nothing you found illuminating. As
to meanings in the conversation, I can't think of any except the obvious
ones.
>I hope I don't offend you by raising this question.
Why be offended? If there are problems there are problems. If people
found it easy to see eye-to-eye on things the world would be a lot
smaller than it actually is.
>But if there are avenues and purposes of conversation that I might have
>assumed are open for us, but that are not really relevant to your
>purposes, I'd like to understand those boundaries so that I'll not
>dissipate my energies expecting something inappropriate.
I don't know of any. That doesn't mean I'll be able to say anything
useful to you on any particular issue. You'll have to use your own
judgement to decide on what issues I'm likely to say something you'll
find illuminating. Our discussions have been helpful to me. I would
like them to be helpful to you as well, but can't control everything
that determines whether they will be.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Jul 26 18:30:07 EDT 1996
Article: 7897 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Jihad v. McWorld
Date: 26 Jul 1996 09:38:45 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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vtnet@xs4all.nl (Maarten of the net) writes:
>Even so it is usually tacitly implied, evidence suggest that there is
>no direct link between the ontribution to the productive process and
>the power to consume (primarily wages and proceeds from enterprise.)
>
>The `conservative right', including the so-called libertarians, that
>have no real theoretical foundations, attempt to deny the problem of
>appropriation altogether.
The libertarians present economic arguments that in a free market the
return to factors of production will tend toward their marginal
productivity so that for example if an additional hour of labor would
add $5 to the value of production then the wage rate will tend to
approach $5/hour. Their claim then is that the way to prevent unmerited
appropriation is to get rid of things that interfere with free markets.
Putting aside the question of whether the libertarians are right or
not, why is the failure of economic reward to match contribution to
production (what you call "appropriation") the fundamental political
problem that all these schools of thought are trying to deal with? It
seems most of them don't think so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri Jul 26 18:30:11 EDT 1996
Article: 7899 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Claes Ryn
Date: 26 Jul 1996 18:29:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <4t9p9f$13k@nadine.teleport.com>
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In <4t9p9f$13k@nadine.teleport.com> cfaatz@teleport.com (Chris Faatz) writes:
>Anyone aware of any of this fellow's work available in cyberspace?
>What about Irving Babbit's?
Look at the National Humanities Institute Home Page at
http://www.access.digex.net/~nhi/index.html.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Jul 27 06:53:18 EDT 1996
Article: 7903 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Jihad v. McWorld
Date: 27 Jul 1996 06:50:24 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 63
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References: <4t4usa$pab@panix.com>
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In ygg@netcom.com (Yggdrasil) writes:
>McWorld delivers peace?
>If it does, it is only because of the willingness of the New
>World Order to send in the imperial legions (as it did in Kuwait)
>and impose its will.
It does if everyone accepts it through and through. The same could be
said of Islam and lots of other things, but Barber puts McWorld and
Islam in different logical categories. Possibly what's going on is
that his theory of history tells him McWorld is fated to triumph
absolutely (he suggests as much), in which case it *would* bring peace,
possibly it's a matter of ruling class ideology looking like a neutral
description of reality from the standpoint of the ruling class while
other views look like sectarian opinions.
>Where is it written that a confederal option would necessarily
>have a "concern for accountability, the protection of
>minorities."
It's written that way in all communitarian writings. The idea seems to
be that the nature of man is to be a late-twentieth century liberal, so
central enforcement of such things wouldn't materially interfere with
local self-rule and local resistence would simply be illegitimate.
I might as well add a couple of my own comments on the article:
1. Barber's quasi-religious faith in democracy seems odd to me.
Process is important, but is it *that* important? Can it really redeem
the world? If it could, wouldn't it be because the process somehow
fosters particular substantive goods that are at least conceptually
distinguishable from it?
2. Similarly, he discusses the forces he refers to as Jihad mostly by
reference to process -- authoritarianism, exclusion, etc. That's a
distorting perspective. Even if psychological conceptions of human
needs like social ties are added to the picture the discussion is still
incomplete. It's discussing human life from outside in the manner of a
zoologist, as a matter of the physical and psychological needs of _homo
sapiens_ and how things might be organized to satisfy them, without
reference to the possible validity of the goods men recognize. To
continue Ygg's power analysis, it's worth noting that a ruling class
that discusses human life that way is a ruling class that recognizes no
kinship with its subjects or limitations on its power.
3. The emphasis on process rather than substance also means an
emphasis on anarchy and conflict as the alternative to a single
universal world system. His choice of the word "Jihad" illustrates
that emphasis. For Barber particularist movements and peoples exist
not by reason of goods they find within own specific ways of life but
by reason of arbitrary line-drawing and conflict. That seems wrong,
though. The separatist groups that have been most successful in
maintaining themselves under modern conditions, like Hasidic Jews and
the Amish, are inward-turning rather than aggressive and imperialistic.
If you want to live in a particular sort of world it's a whole lot
easier to make your own world and stay within it than to transform the
rest of the world in your image, especially since under modern
conditions of instant easy universal communication it would have to be
the *whole* rest of the world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Sat Jul 27 18:40:22 1996
Subject: Re: the voice of the turtle
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 18:40:22 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB7B3E.1A4A8220@eb3ppp14.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Jul 26, 96 09:51:40 pm
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>You write: "Since moral obligation is for us an inescapable fact we
>must then make sense of it. It's difficult to make sense of moral
>obligation without viewing it as part of our good since both our
>"obligation" and our "good" seems to be goals that for us are somehow
>rationally correct. It would be very puzzling though if the rationally
>correct goals of a single agent were inconsistent. It would also be
>odd to define our "interest" in a way that puts it at odds with our
>"good". Therefore our interests include performance of our
>obligations. Q.E.D."
>I don't know if you really think that propositions of this sort can be
>established as true through mathematical means.
No, the "Q.E.D." was a joke that I put in because I'd put the paragraph
into abstract conceptual form and it seemed very unlikely you'd find it
convincing.
>I think your syllogism can be restated: 1) it is necessary for a
>decent society that at least most people feel and act on a sense of
>moral obligation; 2) people will not act according to their moral
>obligations unless they have come to experience their own good, their
>own interest, as being in alignment with such action; 3) therefore it
>is necessary --if people are going to live in a decent society-- that
>those two either inherently be in alignment or that they be brought
>into alignment.
Not quite. As presented the syllogism is intended to lay out a coherent
system of concepts that makes sense of our actual experience of moral
obligation, not to present a plan for social engineering.
>You are asserting, if I understand, that it is inherent in the nature
>of the human being --and his innate "good" or natural "interest" or
>whatever-- is in fact and inevitably in alignment with a transcendant
>moral order. That may be. It would certainly make things simple if it
>were. Actually, I would guess that this proposition is more associated
>with New Age and countercultural thinking than it is with most
>conservative thinking that I know about. (It is also the direction in
>which I have generally leaned, as in a chapter called "Guiding Voices"
>in my 1993 book FOOL'S GOLD: THE FATE OF VALUES IN A WORLD OF GOODS.)
>But these days I am moving more toward bringing in some beliefs I think
>of as conservative, according to which social learning is necessary to
>do at least some degree of structuring, or restructuring of our
>interests and motives so that we will be in greater alignment with the
>demands of a moral order, will be more motivated to fulfill those
>obligations that a decent society requires that we take on.
To square the circle all you have to do to is stick in Original Sin.
Original Sin says that our truest nature and most fundamental interest
is to will the good. Unfortunately we've become corrupted somehow so
the good can't be constructed from our actual desires, impulses,
purposes, etc. As a result social learning is needed. The social
learning is not however oppressive because properly understood it frees
and realizes our truest self. The objection to the counterculture is
thus not to paradise but to "paradise now".
If you hold the beliefs you describe as conservative but don't view man
as a good being that has become corrupted I think you're likely to run
into problems because you'll end up holding the view that society should
use people as a means for the good of the community. On the Original
Sin theory we benefit people and help realize their nature when we
demand that they act in a way that doesn't injure others. The
difference might not seem to matter but in the long run I think it
matters a great deal what people think justifies them in telling other
people what to do.
Viewing man as a good being that has become corrupted creates its own
theoretical problems though: what sense can be made of this good
original human nature that's different and supposedly more real and
important than the not-so-good human nature we know about from
experience? How can we know enough about it for it to be any use to us
if we the knowers are also corrupt? Non-religious answers to such
questions are hard to discern.
>If my position seems to you not to make sense, if it seems to be
>attempting an impossible task, as you say, I certainly invite you to
>play Socrates to my whoever, to midwife out of me my argument and, I
>would hope, illuminate whatever the crux is at which we seem to take
>different forks in the road of logic.
The "impossible task" I had in mind was the attempt to rely exclusively
on cranes and not at all on skyhooks, for example to treat morality as
emerging solely from submoral things like Darwinian evolution. To be
helpful on the issue I should look at your books, though.
We can talk when you return, though. Good luck on whatever it is that
is taking you away!
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Sat Jul 27 20:53:51 1996
Subject: Re: evolution
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 20:53:51 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <31FAC76F.28B4@vt.edu> from "Morton Nadler" at Jul 27, 96 06:50:39 pm
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Morton Nadler writes:
>The essence of a sicentific theory is explanatory power AND
>negatability; no matter how many observations are explained by it, if
>an experiment or observation can be designed that could contradict or
>negate it, then that is a scientific theory, i.e., subject matter for
>scientific investigation.
If something doesn't qualify as a scientific theory by this definition
does that mean it isn't true or isn't knowledge? "Morton Nadler
exists" doesn't seem to be a scientific theory from your standpoint.
At least I can't think of an observation you could make that would
negate it. The problem gets worse for "at least one scientist exists"
and even worse for "sentient beings exist". Are those just matters of
faith that have no connection to knowledge? How about "the
propositions of formal logic and mathematics are true"? I thought
"science" just meant "systematized and critically evaluated knowledge",
but your definition seems far more limited.
>God, i.e., the concept of god is not negatable. There are no
>observations or experiments that could be designed that would disprove
>the existence of god--or God. And [without meaning to offend] there are
>no phenomena that are explained by the hypothesis.
If the world or consciousness or moral obligation or the ultimate
preconditions of knowledge didn't exist it would I think undercut the
arguments for the existence of God. They all seem to me things
explained by the hypothesis and I can't think of any hypotheses from
the natural sciences that explain them.
>So, to paraphrase Newton: no scientist has need of that hypothesis--in
>science.
Wasn't that Laplace?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From jk Mon Jul 29 07:45:35 1996
Subject: Buchanan and evolution
To: newman@listserv.vt.edu
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 07:45:35 -0400 (EDT)
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A couple of current threads came together in an op-ed piece in the _New
York Times_ today by an eminent scientist about debates over evolution
and creationism. The writer started off by saying Pat Buchanan had
recently argued in favor of creationism on national TV, and shortly
thereafter referred to the "clear fallacies" of "strict creationism".
Does anyone know just what Buchanan argued for?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Now's evil for evil? Ah, a liver of lives won!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Aug 1 06:19:08 EDT 1996
Article: 63711 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.activism,alt.politics.usa.newt-gingrich,alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.correct,alt.politics.reform,alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater,talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: Burned Churches, Facts, and the Media
Date: 1 Aug 1996 06:02:49 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 11
Message-ID: <4tpvc9$k1p@panix.com>
References: <31F3289F.288A@maverick.com> <31F5B2C5.6210@fia.net> <4t7vrc$shl@star.Hi.COM>
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In <4t7vrc$shl@star.Hi.COM> rogers@star.Hi.COM (Andrew Rogers) writes:
>You'd also know that there are about six times as many "white"
>churches as "black" churches.
Where are the burnings happening and to what kind of churches? If it's
mostly a problem of frame churches in isolated locations in the rural
South it's probably not a 6-1 ratio.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu Aug 1 06:19:09 EDT 1996
Article: 63712 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.fan.newt-gingrich,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.activism,alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.correct,alt.politics.reform,alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Subject: Re: Right-wing goes porno at Pleasureland!
Date: 1 Aug 1996 06:09:25 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <4snr8q$dev@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com> <4so6g3$69e@quasar.dimensional.com> <4t0iuu$8cm@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu> <4t1b00$pr7@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com> <4tocfc$fpt@nntp.seflin.lib.fl.us>
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In <4tocfc$fpt@nntp.seflin.lib.fl.us> z800525a@bcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us (Scott Levison) writes:
>: >>: the few downtown porn palaces. But don't
>: >>: expect any GOP finger-wagging at the shop: Its
>: >>: landlord is convention chair Jack Ford.
>I thought that if a Republican owned a porno palace it was "free
>enterprise," but if the same place is owned by someone to the left of
>a Republican, they are "purveyors of filth...."
If you own a building you can't necessarily control the legal
businesses your commercial tenants engage in.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Thu Aug 1 08:46:58 1996
Subject: Re: "negatability of the theory of evolution"
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 08:46:58 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <31FFEC1D.6E6E@vt.edu> from "Morton Nadler" at Jul 31, 96 04:28:29 pm
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Morton Nadler writes:
> The theory is supported, until further notice, by the wealth of
> observation, continually augmenting, demonstrating evolution of new
> species from old.
I thought there was a shortage of evidence that any particular species
had given rise to any other particular species. Putting that aside,
though, and accepting that we all have family trees going back to the
Precambrian, what is the evidence that natural selection or any other
natural mechanism accounts for the observations?
> Note also that acceptance of evolution does not in itself contradict
> "creation." Just as some astronomers hypthesized that the universe
> was created of a sudden with all its physical laws, and that the Lord
> then stepped back and let it take its course.
As you suggest there have been deists. Presumably we know God through
his presence and action in this world; it seems unlikely on the deistic
account that we can know enough about him for him to matter to us very
much.
> Religion is being stripped more and more of its role as EXPLANATION of
> the world; its role as answering questions about the MEANING of our
> sojourn on this earth is left.
This radical separation of fact and value puzzles me. For one thing,
it doesn't give us a good way of thinking about subjective experience.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Thu Aug 1 13:15:14 1996
Subject: Re: "negatability of the theory of evolution"
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 13:15:14 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <3200E763.621B@vt.edu> from "Morton Nadler" at Aug 1, 96 10:20:35 am
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Morton Nadler writes:
> Jim, you don't address my "thought observation" that would negate
> evolution.
I didn't understand what you wanted to make of it.
> > I thought there was a shortage of evidence that any particular species
> > had given rise to any other particular species.
> It doesn't matter that there is a shortage as long as there is any at
> all, as long as the theory is not "negated." We know about mais, wheat,
> other food grasses, we know about foot high precursors of horses, etc.
> etc.
Is there in fact evidence that a particular modern species is descended
from a known fossil species? As to horses, my understanding is that
there's no particular basis for thinking that (for example) modern
horses are descended from Eohippus. I have no idea what the evidence
is on food grains.
> If you accept the reality of the fossil record, unlike some others
> who explain it away as "the good Lord put it there to test our
> faith," how do you explain it other than by evolution? In my
> definition of negatability I neglected to state what I thought was
> obvious, that in science there must be an alternative THEORY, i.e.,
> one that also explains the available observations and experiments at
> least as well, and is also negatable but not yet negated.
The theory "evolution works just like Darwinists say, except God stuck
in a providential bias toward a certain sort of complexity that has
been necessary for the evolution of a creature capable of reason and of
knowing good and evil but can't be reduced to a naturalistic mechanism"
explains observations and experiments at least as well as Darwinism and
would be equally negated by your thought observation.
> Example: some are vegetarian, some are not. Some vegetarians believe that
> there are objective health reasons not to eat any animal protein, [wow,
> violation of "i before e except after c"]. Others do it out of
> "soidarity" with other mammals, considering them our cousins (believers
> in evolution) and eat fish, eggs, etc. Still others believe that we were
> enjoined [we?] in the Garden to eat of any fruit or plant, so they
> probably don't accept evolution.
>
> So you see, values are indeed subjective.
Some are neodarwinists and some aren't. Some think Julius Caesar had a
headache on his fortieth birthday and some don't. Some think the stock
market will rise and others disagree. Are science, history, medicine
and financial quotations all subjective?
As to capital punishment, people do reason on the subject and there are
relevant facts. What's the point of saying its morality is subjective?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Thu Aug 1 18:29:34 1996
Subject: Re: "negatability of the theory of evolution"
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 18:29:34 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <32012E8D.E3D@vt.edu> from "Morton Nadler" at Aug 1, 96 03:24:13 pm
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Morton Nadler writes:
> > > Example: some are vegetarian, some are not.
> > Are science, history, medicine and financial quotations all
> > subjective?
>
> Sorry, Jim, I was giving examples of value judgements by people, based on
> the same information. The "counterexamples" you give are not equivalent.
> None of them are value judgements.
No, they're different factual conclusions based on the same evidence.
Why don't the considerations that lead you to consider value judgements
merely subjective lead you to think the same of judgements of fact?
Evidence never forces a factual conclusion. For a demonstration
consider Descartes' _Meditations_ and consider the pickle he would have
been in if God (in his view) hadn't rescued him.
> Now, if I buy a lottery ticket or a mutual fund, I may hope to win,
> but even using all available information, that hope is not based on a
> knowledge of the future. Again, such purchase flows from my values
> system, even using all available facts.
You seem to say that judgements of future facts are subjective in the
same sense that judgements of value are. Would you extend that to
judgements of past facts, since memory and other evidence of what
happened in the past must be interpreted and can be misleading? How
about present facts not immediately present to you?
> BTW, your "alternative" theory to evolution begs the question. You
> say darwinism tempered by.... Since we are obviously here, there was
> something that caused us to be produced. So, can I say that the
> difference between us can be expressed by "secular darwinism"
> [morton] vs. "religious darwinism" [jim]?
What question does it beg? Also, I'm not sure the expression
"religious darwinism" makes sense since the point of darwinism (as I
understand it) is to account for the development of life into its
present form wholly by reference to mechanistic natural law.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sat Aug 3 06:43:11 1996
Subject: Re: GOP judicial behavior
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 06:43:11 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960803001627.0069ade4@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Aug 2, 96 08:16:27 pm
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> Republicans are mostly a bunch of time-servers who care more about
> getting good ink in the Washington Post's Style section than they do
> about ideas. With every passing month it seems more likely that
> there is a major party realignment down the road, and it's probably
> not a long way off, either. I don't know what the rest of the
> conservatives on this list think, but as far as I'm concerned, the
> sooner the GOP gets a decent burial, the better.
Is it serving time and angling for good press or something that can
only be called personal conservatism? As you say, Republicans
fundamentally don't care about ideas. They aren't so different from
other politicians in that regard. They believe in generally accepted
ways of looking at things and in working with the system. That doesn't
make them anything other than conservative, in a personal and
nonideological sense. Their intentions I think are often quite public
spirited, but if there are problems with the system and its built-in
tendencies they aren't going to transform anything. For all that, I'd
rather have them in office than the Democrats.
Is there really going to be a major party realignment that will change
things? It's not as if the problem is that we're ruled by this party
rather than that. I think a lot of the problem is that so much of
public life has become so centralized in recent decades. It's
difficult to rebel effectively against centralization, though. In
order to do anything about it through ordinary political means the
rebels have to rise to dominance within a centralized system, and then
they end up defending and advancing centralization and all its
preconditions and consequences just like everyone else. Those in
power, whatever their differences, band together against threats from
the outside which are uniformly understood and presented publicly as
extremist. That's what we've seen in the case of the Buchanan
movement. Maybe my analysis is too static though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sat Aug 3 09:07:40 1996
Subject: Re: the voice of the turtle
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 09:07:40 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB807C.E0D3D660@eb4ppp5.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 2, 96 02:11:51 pm
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I should congratulate you on your family piety. For my own part, I'm
home alone, waiting for my children to come home from various summer
things while my wife is out in Ohio celebrating her grandmother's 106th
birthday. We'll be off to Scotland in a couple of weeks to visit my
Mom, though, so maybe by the end of the summer I'll have caught up.
>One opening question: do you know what is the origin of the cranes-
>and-skyhooks image?
Daniel Dennett, in a recent book (which I haven't read) about hyper-
Darwinism.
>Your account of original sin seems unusual to me. I thought original
>sin meant some kind of fundamental defect, not a later corruption of an
>original unblemished nature. Do you think the meaning you give is the
>usual Christian one?
I think so. I've attached extracts from the Catechism of the Catholic
Church. Remember that part of the function of the doctrine is to
explain why there are big problems even though God doesn't make bad
things.
>Just what is this truest nature?
To know and will the good.
>By what means does it become corrupted?
By choosing something other than the good, thereby treating as the
supreme good the satisfaction of our own will as such.
>And what does it mean to say it is our "fundamental interest" to will
>the good?
It fulfills our true nature. Our fundamental interest is to become what
we are at our best.
>If it goes contrary to our desires, etc., how does that from the notion
>that we have no such interest, but must run contrary to our interest
>--at least to a degree-- to will the good?
It would not go contrary to our desires etc. if we were in our best
state. A drunken man may want to find the car keys but it may not be in
his interest to do so.
All the foregoing depends on things like "good" and "right" not being
reducible to what we happen to want, and goodness and rightness
nonetheless being motivators and in fact rationally the most compelling
motivators. It seems to me we can't account for the way we speak of
them in any other way.
>If I recall, you've been critical of the idea of equality as it has
>worked its way in our culture. I've been thinking some about equality
>since then, and would appreciate having you develop your thoughts on
>this question more explicitly and fully for me, if you would.
Equality is a big topic. Some random comments:
1. Moral equality consists in the nature of each man as an
independent moral agent. As a result of that nature each of us
individually is morally indispensible in the sense that there are
important goods (like our own moral goodness and community with others)
that can't be brought about without our active participation.
As a social principle moral equality is important and pervasive, but
like other extremely general principles it doesn't compel many concrete
things. It does bar things like treating human beings as raw material
for fertilizer factories.
2. Social order requires inequality, and the fundamental principles of
a social order determine the nature of its characteristic inequalities.
It follows that political demands for equality can be viewed as demands
that one sort of social order be replaced by another, and therefore that
old inequalities be replaced by new. For example, denunciations of
sexism, heterosexism and agism imply among other things the replacement
of the family as a serious social institution by something else. The
Left wants to replace it with the state bureaucracy while many
libertarians want to replace it with the market. Both state and market,
of course, necessarily involve gross inequalities.
3. Today "equality" means among other things "equality of respect",
which means that all life plans should be equally respected and to the
extent possible equally facilitated by the public order. One
consequence of that demand is that all life plans have to be deprived
of their effect on the lives of others except to the extent they become
part of a public order that some authority capable of surveying society
and its members' life plans from above has determined equally to favor
all life plans. So the tendency of the current liberal conception of
equality is to require that society be ruled by a small class of
experts viewed as external to the society and responsible only to
themselves and their own self-generated standards, and that the members
of the society be limited to pursuing their own purely private
satisfactions and supporting the order established by the experts.
ATTACHMENT
X-within-URL: http://www.christusrex.org/www1/CDHN/visible3.html
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
374 The first man was not only created good, but was also established
in friendship with his Creator and in harmony with himself and with
the creation around him, in a state that would be surpassed only by
the glory of the new creation in Christ.
375 The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an
authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition,
teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an
original "state of holiness and justice".[250] This grace of original
holiness was "to share in. . .divine life".[251]
379 This entire harmony of original justice, foreseen for man in God's
plan, will be lost by the sin of our first parents.
385 God is infinitely good and all his works are good. Yet no one can
escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem
to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to
the question of moral evil. Where does evil come from? "I sought
whence evil comes and there was no solution", said St. Augustine ...
386 Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to
give this dark reality other names would be futile. To try to
understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation
of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin
unmasked in its true identity as humanity's rejection of God and
opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life
and history.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sun Aug 4 06:58:23 1996
Subject: Re: GOP judicial behavior
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 06:58:23 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960804003407.00695000@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Aug 3, 96 08:34:07 pm
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> >Is it serving time and angling for good press or something that can
> >only be called personal conservatism?
>
> I think that would be stretching the word past the point of
> recognition.
By "personal conservatism" I mean a preference for working with
categories and systems that have developed over time and become basic
to the social arrangements that surround you. I think Bob Dole and
lots of other Republicans are personally conservative in that sense.
If you have that kind of outlook then in a divided society your
positions will change as your position in the world changes. That's
especially true if you don't take the divisions seriously. Hence the
frequency of "growth" that leads to "strange new respect".
I don't think it's as unprincipled as you make out. It's more like
belief in America. If you believe in America you'll believe in the
American political system, so you'll find it hard to recognize a
fundamental split between rulers and ruled. If you're personally
conservative you'll rely on the implicit wisdom of the system, and
you'll find it hard to view Washington D.C. as representing a different
system of things from the local one to which you first gave your
loyalty, so when in Washington you'll tend to do as those in Washington
do.
> I don't think political efforts to save ourselves are entirely
> useless.
I agree. I would go so far as to say that having Republicans instead
of Democrats in office is not entirely useless. You can present
arguments to the contrary but there are also arguments about the
uselessness of electoral politics generally. Politics is a resultant
of myriad influences, and by chipping away at things you may eventually
change things even though nothing particular you do seems to matter.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sun Aug 4 07:58:07 1996
Subject: Re: the voice of the turtle
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 07:58:07 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB813A.2305F5A0@eb5ppp24.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 3, 96 12:48:09 pm
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>But if the question is "What is our true nature?" and someone says, "It
>is to know and to will the good," even though such willing that we do
>is at variance to the good at least often, various questions remain.
>
>Such as, what do you mean by calling this our "true nature"?
To say "it is our true nature to know and will the good" means
something like "when we know and will the good we display most fully
the characteristics that make us human beings with the specific value
that human beings have". If we weren't able to know and will the good
I don't see why we would have more moral value than pigs. If someone
were truly amoral he could not be part of any human society and could I
think best be understood as inhuman. The point of an ability is its
use, though; it's our nature to be good in the same way it's the nature
of a horse to run.
I don't know if that explanation adds anything for you. Maybe I should
talk about the "true nature" of something else. In the case of my sick
cat, I would say that being a cat is its nature, while being sick or
being mine is not. Being sick is against its nature, because "sick"
means something like "not functioning physically as a cat should";
being mine (I take it) is not against its nature but is irrelevant to
it since it would be equally a cat and equally good as a cat if it
weren't mine.
>And then there is the question: what is the reason to believe that
>this is indeed our "true nature"?
Thinking it's not our true nature makes it hard for me to understand
moral obligation, and I see no reason to deny the existence of moral
obligation. I've never known anyone to deny it consistently and
categorically. Also, thinking it's our true nature is part of the most
coherent and illuminating overall understanding of man and the world I
can come up with.
>Does your mother's being in Scotland mean that she is Scottish? that
>you had upbringing in Scotland?
Her maiden name was Murray, her father played the bagpipes, and her
grandfather was from Inverness and didn't much like America. I don't
know how Scottish that makes her.
She's there now because she visited my brother when he was living there
and liked it, she was looking for a new place to live, and Lord
Seafield was selling off slices of his ancestral home so she bought
one.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sun Aug 4 17:18:43 1996
Subject: Re: GOP judicial behavior
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 17:18:43 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199608041936.PAA05223@mh004.infi.net> from "Michael W. Ridenhour" at Aug 4, 96 03:36:08 pm
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> a Clinton re-election will mean dictatorship for this country.
I think you overestimate the competence of the Clinton people.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sun Aug 4 21:45:56 1996
Subject: Re: GOP judicial behavior
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 21:45:56 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960804231823.006bad08@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Aug 4, 96 07:18:23 pm
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> The Libertarians have more of a profile with younger voters than ever
> before. They are wrong on moral issues, but they're right on
> everything else--and if we could go even a fraction of the way down
> the road toward a libertarian remodeling of this country, it would
> enable normal people to gain some control over their lives again.
Fusionism forever! If the libertarians are wrong on moral issues it's
because they're wrong on the nature of man. If they're wrong on that,
they're also going to be wrong on the social forms that would
predominate under minimal government. So I have no great objection to
a libertarian legal regime, at least in comparison with what we have
now, and that after all is what is at issue politically.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Mon Aug 5 20:54:53 1996
Subject: Re: GOP judicial behavior
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 20:54:53 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960805233533.006b69e4@swva.net> from "Seth Williamson" at Aug 5, 96 07:35:33 pm
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> But I don't see a vote for a Libertarian as, practically speaking, a
> vote for a Libertarian future. I think the Libertarians have about
> as much chance of enacting their next-to-no-government regime as
> Madonna does of joining Mother Teresa's order.
Still, not so long ago put-the-condom-on-the-cucumber would have seemed
an improbable course of study for American junior high school students.
Traditional sexual morality had become a one-horse-shay by the 50s,
though, so it turned out that astonishing changes were possible.
Liberalism may be in the same position today; no-one really has an
argument for it except that the alternatives are so shocking.
Techno-optimists argue that contemporary liberalism is doomed because
recent developments in communications and information technology make
it too hard for governments to keep track of, control and tax
productive activities. In addition (they say) the intangibility of
most modern wealth and the efficiency of modern economies in turning
intelligence, boldness and good judgement into money have greatly
increased the advantages of productive enterprise over predation.
Whether those arguments are solid or not, they do I think point to a
truth, that the modern centralized state depends on particular social
conditions that aren't necessarily going to last forever.
Centralization has been succeeded by decentralization in the past; why
not this time around?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Tue Aug 6 13:25:35 1996
Subject: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 13:25:35 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB832B.2AB5A3C0@eb5ppp6.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 6, 96 00:05:39 am
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>Let us assume that I disagree, i.e. that I believe that moral
>obligation --which we will need to define-- does not require what you
>think it requires. I would like to invite/challenge you to
>interrogate me Socratically on the presumption that I am willing to
>defend some such position that, apparently, you would think would be
>indefensible.
Maybe these questions would get things started:
1. Is it always reasonable to do what is moral?
2. Is it ever reasonable not to?
3. What if anything makes it reasonable to act one way rather than
another?
>By the way, sorry about your cat. Is there any improvement?
Actually, it was two cats, both with leg wounds that have now healed,
and they aren't really mine -- more my children's. I cut some corners
when I told the story.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Tue Aug 6 13:30:37 1996
Subject: Fiscal Follies
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 13:30:37 -0400 (EDT)
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BillR54619@aol.com writes:
>What we must not do, cannot do - and I GREATLY FEAR THAT WE WILL DO, in
>our haste to "pay ourselves first" is to place severe impediments on
>needed discretionary spending, and particularly in the foreign and
>defense sectors where we have already spent our "peace dividend" and
>threaten to truly weaken our strength and commitment as the world's
>only remaining superpower. If the American people do not have any more
>sense of their greatness and calling as a nation than that, then I
>truly do not want to be called an American any more. NO ONE stands to
>take our place. Chaos, bloodshed, and famine will be left in our wake.
Is empire necessarily a good thing? The great ages of Greece, Italy and
Europe have not been those in which they were united under a single
superpower. China throve during the Warring States period --
unification under the First Emperor was not altogether a blessing. And
the Bible does not depict foreign conquest, whether of Israel or by it,
as an unmixed good.
Empire *certainly* need not be a good thing for the imperial people,
which in the nature of things loses a government it can call its own
while gaining an empire that usually doesn't much benefit those who
aren't part of the ruling elite.
>I must therefore also face an unpleasant matter. That matter is the
>moral and ethical stance of the Republican party with respect to social
>issues. For if the Republicans weaken on those grounds, to the extent
>of pandering to the prochoice and libertine factions who operate under
>the slogan of the "big tent" of the Republican Party, then there is
>indeed serious trouble afoot. If the Forbeses and Kemps and Wanniskis
>and Whitmans succeed not only in conquering the party in the economic
>interests of Wall Street, but also convert Main Street Republican moral
>values to Wall Street moral standards, then all, all is lost.
If you prefer Main Street to Wall Street, and like concrete moral values
that in the nature of things are particularistic more than libertinism,
why favor imperialism? Why choose Babylon over Jerusalem?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Wed Aug 7 07:01:22 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 07:01:22 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB83E1.3CE45DA0@eb5ppp6.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 6, 96 09:26:43 pm
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> I don't think I'd like to start with those questions. The whole
> notion of reasonableness seems to add a whole new can of worms.
I brought up the notion because it has to do with how we relate
particular actions with an overall plan of life, and the latter with
other things. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.
>I say, there is such a thing as moral obligation.
If something is morally obligatory is that a motive for you to do it?
How?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Wed Aug 7 07:17:30 1996
Subject: Creationionism
To: newman@listserv.vt.edu
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 07:17:30 -0400 (EDT)
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A new book, _Darwin's Black Box_, by Michael Behe, would probably be
worth looking at in connection with these discussions. The author is a
practicing biochemist (at Lehigh), and the book was published by the
Free Press and got a full-page review in the most recent _NY Times_
Sunday book review section.
It appears that what the book does is go through the extremely
intricate and delicate mechanisms that are needed for cells to survive
at all, observe that life is irreducibly complex, and conclude that
theories based on chance and mechanism are much less plausible than
theories based on design. The reviewer praised the descriptive aspects
of the book but pooh-poohed the "God of the gaps" and spent the last
quarter of the review talking as if Behe were demanding that no further
research into the origins of life be undertaken.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Wed Aug 7 19:25:56 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 19:25:56 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB8454.5FCB5120@eb5ppp6.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 7, 96 11:04:58 am
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>It is a very powerful motive for me, Jim. The question of "how" breaks
>down into two kinds of how: the cross-sectional and the longitudinal.
>By the first I mean: how does it happen, right now, in the present,
>that when confronted with a situation I feel strongly motivated to meet
>my moral obligations in it?
I mean cross-sectional. I am especially interested in the relation
between that motive and other desires and motives you may have. Are
they all of the same kind? What sorts of things determine which motive
wins?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Thu Aug 8 05:05:54 1996
Subject: Re: Fiscal Follies
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 05:05:54 -0400 (EDT)
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Bill Riggs:
> If we truly do not have to live by the rule of the tooth and claw,
> and can choose whether or not it is worth it to stay king of the hill
> (a questionable assumption, but then any and all assumptions are
> questionable, so what of it ?), then somehow we must find a better
> way to understand ourselves.
Is "king of the hill" really the same as "empire"? The one means first
in power, the other refers to a particular use of power. If a country
does not have a clear conception of its interests I suppose it is
likely simply to want "more" and use pre-eminent power if it has it to
establish an empire.
As to understanding ourselves, I'm not sure that comfort-loving
sentimentalists are good at running empires.
> Lost in this miserably and putrid excuse for a polity is the
> red-blooded pride that can unite us as a nation, and give us purpose
> and direction.
Red-blooded pride might help create empire, but it's altogether too
populist, particularistic and prerational to survive empire. Certainly
I don't see imperialism as a cure for social and spiritual chaos at
home.
> To the extent that Bill Clinton is sincere in his communitarianism,
> he espouses an introverted projector's scheme of activism at the very
> time when the entire world is being inexorably bound closer and
> closer together.
Closer together and farther apart. Modern techniques make it efficient
to fragment production and distribute it among people who interact only
technically, with very little to do with each other socially. So it
seems that in principle the world could dissolve into a large number of
small societies dealing with each other in an abstract and nonpolitical
marketplace.
> There is no escaping what you call "empire" because that particular
> train left the station a long time ago - just after the Riggses got
> off the boat to the colonies, really. We ARE the imperialists.
And we live by bread and circuses. Why is that the side of life to
build on for the future?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Fri Aug 9 17:32:28 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 17:32:28 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB85F6.96C40B60@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 9, 96 12:28:52 pm
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It appears from what you say that you have a system of moral concepts
and principles that you value because you believe it to be correct for
reasons that have nothing particular to do with your personal tastes and
goals. That system is connected to your relations with other people and
somehow has the effect of making their well-being a motive for your
actions, at least in some cases. It also seems that you would find it
intolerable if you judged yourself and your actions to be grossly
lacking by reference to that system.
Am I right so far? If not, where have I gone astray? If so, then
another question -- some people would find it intolerable if they were
less rich and famous than other members of their high school class. Do
you think your reluctance to judge yourself a bad person is the same
sort of thing? If not, what are the points of difference? For example,
would you be equally pleased in each case if you discovered how to worry
less about the issue?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Fri Aug 9 21:58:58 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 21:58:58 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB862D.03BA1E40@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 9, 96 07:22:29 pm
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>I imagine that for both me and my morality, and the someone else and
>his "rich and famous," the motivation has to do with realizing some
>image of what it is that makes a person "worthwhile" or "good" or
>"valued."
Is one image more right or more valid than the other?
>For both of us, the motive could be expressed in terms of the good
>feeling of feeling good about oneself and avoiding the bad feeling of
>feeling one is a bad, or worthless person.
The judgement of what it is that makes a person good is prior to the
feeling. The good feeling follows from the judgement. So it seems
that if you have good feelings about yourself you must (among other
things) be judging him to be in error since the judgement those
feelings are based on is a judgement that his principles are wrong.
>Among the ancient Greeks, as I read recently in a study of cosmogony
>and ethics, the traditional notions of virtue had basically to do with
>getting what you can for yourself and your outfit, pretty much
>regardless of ethics; it would be a matter of shame to be able to take
>advantage and to refrain from doing so.
It was certainly a view in ancient Greece that what was good was to
benefit friends and injure enemies, and I'm certain many people
regularly acted on it. Socratic criticism demonstrated that people
didn't hold that view consistently, though. There was for example a
conception of impersonal justice. The stated purpose of the _Republic_
is to demonstrate to Greeks based on their own ethical understanding
that a life of justice, even one leading to failure, disgrace,
suffering and crucifixion, is better and more worthy of choice than a
life of successful injustice enabling one to benefit friends and injure
enemies as wished. Or if Socrates and Plato come too late in the day
for you, after Greek culture had already begun to decline, the
emotional and ethical climax of the Iliad is the interview at the end
between Priam and Achilles, in which they recognize and act on their
common humanity. So it seems that the moral world of the Greeks always
included something more overarching than pursuit of advantage at
whatever cost to others.
Assuming it didn't, though, what follows? The Greeks made errors in
cosmogony, why not in ethics?
>BUT I WOULD NOT CHOOSE to have them extracted, because I believe them
>to be right, and even if it would liberate me to have more jollies out
>of life, I would not think it a good extraction because I believe these
>demands make me a better person for the world to have around. And as a
>father, I try to inculcate what I think is an appropriate level of
>moral demand so that my children will feel best about themselves when
>they do what I believe a wise morality demands of us.
If you would not so choose (all caps) then it seems that for you
ethical concepts and principles trump good feelings, so their
motivating force cannot be explained by reference to good feelings.
Also, it seems you do think you know better than the devotee of wealth
and fame, or even the average Greek, and that you believe good feelings
aren't good when they don't follow on wise morality, because otherwise
your treatment of your children would be a merely manipulative attempt
to advance your own purposes rather than any good of theirs.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Fri Aug 9 22:06:24 1996
Subject: Re: quick question on tradition and the divine
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 22:06:24 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB8639.71C64E20@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 9, 96 08:56:23 pm
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> SO I wonder whether you also believe that the traditional cultures of
> other, non-Christian societies--say, traditional Indian or Chinese
> societies-- are also divinely inspired at their root.
I think so. I don't have any general theory analyzing the varying
degree and extent of inspiration and revelation though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sat Aug 10 07:36:23 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 07:36:23 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB8648.2506F1C0@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 9, 96 11:11:37 pm
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>To wit, the judgment preceeds the feeling. Yes indeed. But also no.
>Yes, cross-sectionally. Not necessarily, developmentally.
I'm not sure of the implications. Do you think the correctness and
validity of your moral views depend on the way you came to hold them?
If so, since you believe in the rightness of your judgements and the
error of the average ancient Greek and the wealth-and-fame guy, do you
base that belief on some more fundamental belief about the specific
nature of your upbringing?
>The question is, what is it that makes one image more valid than the
>other?
And the answer?
It seems to me, by the way, that what it means for one image to be more
valid than another and the implications of such superiority are also
important questions, but we can discuss whatever you want.
>You seem to think that logic requires --"because otherwise"-- that
>either I am manipulating my children for my own purposes or for their
>good. I say that there is a third possibility. If by my purposes you
>mean something somehow for MY SAKE, and if by "any good of theirs" you
>mean something that will make them BETTER OFF somehow, I say that at
>least part of my moral training of them is for a different purpose:
>and that is for the sake of goodness. Which doesn't necessarily help
>me, and being an instrument of which doesn't in every respect mean that
>they individually will be happier.
I imagine that it is specifically because you love them that you want
your children to be good as much as you do. It seems to me that love
consists in treating the good of another person as an end that is as
compelling as one's own good. If your desire that your children be
good is a desire for an end quite distinct from their good I don't see
why love for them (as I imagine) would make it stronger. I am of
course only speculating about your domestic situation and feelings.
>Those later Greeks (Plato, etc.), as I understand it, were trying to
>transform the basic less-than-ethical thrust of heroic Greek values.
That's why I mentioned Homer, and emphasized that all Socrates does in
the Platonic dialogues is question his interlocutors about what they
really believe. He wasn't able to produce anything for which the actual
Greek outlook did not already provide the materials and implicitly the
design.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sat Aug 10 11:27:19 1996
Subject: Wall Street: Thumbs on the Scale
To: neocon@abdn.ac.uk (neocon)
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 11:27:19 -0400 (EDT)
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> The American Financial Markets are largely 'self-regulating' and
> depend upon the intergrity of active participants to prevent fraud
> and unjust enrichment. But profit (greed) is the end game and
> departures from virtue are frequent -- only challenged and coming to
> light when the excesses involved are so enormous that they can no
> longer be covered up.
Actually, the self-regulation is less dependent than that on pure
virtue since what A steals B will lose, which gives B a greedy (profit
seeking) interest in bringing to light and challenging any hanky-panky.
There are routine ways of doing that, like outside auditors.
> A large proportion of the American national debt -- about $1 trillion
> before we get through -- involves paying off the literally thousands
> of little scams operated by savings and loan and banking executives
> allowed to run wild during the Reagan 'end-government-regulation'
> era.
The basic S&L problem was that the government deposit insurance program
guaranteed to B that he would get his money back no matter how much A
stole, chiselled or poured down the drain. So the people who put up
the money didn't much care how it was used. That's uncommon in
business. It was less the administration than the congress that
greatly expanded the insurance program and interfered with regulators.
(Real estate almost by definition is a *very* local business, so if you
want something fixed you go to someone with strong local ties who also
has national influence. That means a congressman.)
> Thousands upon thousands of innocent pension holders and others saw their
> security wiped away by the Michael Milken scam -- junk bonds -- which netted
> Milken $l.5 billion at the cost of 2 years in a federal (country club)
> prison.
What's the scam if the risks are disclosed? As they were -- the
liabilities for failure to disclose relevant information in a public
financing are enormous. They got Milken to plead guilty on a point
bearing no proportion or necessary connection to the activities that
made him famous by the simple expedient of telling him that otherwise
they would prosecute his brother. Milken had invented a new way of
raising money, and that annoyed a lot of people because some of the
money was used to buy companies and fire their managements. Like other
innovators he made a lot of money off his invention.
> Ivan Boesky did his hundreds of millions thing with insider trader
> -- activities i.e. We know in advance where to bet -- the suckers are
> -- the losers.
He indeed was a crook, and he lost his money and went to jail and his
wife left him.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sat Aug 10 18:21:43 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 18:21:43 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB86C6.007784E0@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 10, 96 12:23:22 pm
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>What I believe the legitimate purpose of morality is to lead one to act
>in a way that enhances the well-being of the sentient creatures
>(especially, but not only, humans) who are affected by one's actions.
>In other words, what makes something right rather than wrong is that it
>has a positive rather than a negative overall impact on the felt
>experience of creatures that can suffer and feel joy, i.e. for whom it
>matters how things are.
A couple of questions:
1. From discussions up to now it seems you believe that morality
trumps your own feelings, at least in a sufficiently clear case. It
also seems you believe that its special status does not depend on
feelings, impulses, habits, upbringing, etc., either yours or those
characteristic of your society, because for you morality is a standard
for all those things that determines whether you should act in
accordance with them or attempt to overcome and if possible change them.
The *content* of what morality commands of course depends for you on
what gives pleasure and pain, and so on all the things I mention, but
the validity of the "greatest positive experience" principle does not
depend on those things.
So the question becomes what gives a particular principle (maximizing
universal utility or whatever) that kind of special authoritative
status. Such a status is what seems to be involved in saying one image
of the moral ideal is more valid than another. In other words, what is
this "legitimacy" of which you speak? It doesn't seem to be a feeling
or an experience, individual or collective. It isn't what it is by
virtue of being a personal goal that you or other people happen to
have. It is not logic or anything known to modern natural science. It
nonetheless seems fundamental to any adequate conception of morality,
and it is something you accept as real and important.
2. You seem to identify the good with well-being, defined as the
maximum of positive felt experience over negative felt experience. How
about a life based on harmless but gratifying delusions, electrodes
attached to the pleasure centers of the brain, and other such joys?
Assuming no adverse social repercussions, would you choose a fools'
paradise for your children?
>Thus it is that my efforts to shape my children reflects both my love
>for them, and concern for their good, and my caring about the larger
>world, and concern for its good (meaning the good of all the other
>creatures my children will have an impact on). So a good deal, but not
>all, of my fathering of them is devoted to their good-- i.e. to trying
>to enhance the likelihood of their having lives that are fulfilling to
>them.
It seems from what you say here that you would care more about and do
more to promote the morality of other people's children committed to
your charge than your own children. The concern for the larger world
would be the same and (assuming you didn't love the other children as
much) there would be less conflict with other strong concerns. If the
other children did something fulfilling but wrong you would be more
upset than if your own children did. Is that right?
>Also, what of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade? Did his
>parents in raising him to be a person ready and able to make such a
>sacrifice serve HIS GOOD?
Why not, if the way they raised him led him to be a better person living
a life more worthy of admiration and imitation?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Aug 10 18:40:21 EDT 1996
Article: 7931 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Buchanan & the Taxpayers?
Date: 10 Aug 1996 11:51:13 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <4ui5nc$p4h@nadine.teleport.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <4ui5nc$p4h@nadine.teleport.com> cfaatz@teleport.com (Chris Faatz) writes:
>So, what do people think are the odds that Pat will *really* and
>*finally* break with the GOP, and head off into the political
>wilderness with Phillips' US Taxpayers' Party? And, what would the
>effect of such a principled abandonment mean, especially in the
>current situation where the twin parties of the ruling class (however
>you want to define that term) have virtually monolithic control over
>the electoral process?
I think it's more likely than not that he will. Respectable and
influential Republicans have collectively joined ranks with the rest of
their class and defined serious support of traditional moral
understandings and opposition to universal empire and the centralized
managerial state as hate-filled bigoted extremism. Is there really a
place for him in the party?
How successful a third party can be depends largely I think on breaking
centralized control of the electronic public forum. It will be
difficult -- decentralization is technically easier than it was until
recently, but old habits die hard and glossy presentation, packaging,
and tie-ins still give the established media class a tremendous
advantage. On the other hand, people feel alienated from their rulers
and may be looking for something new. It also depends on having
something compelling to say beyond "what's going on really stinks".
Whether he can come up with something that will be appealing to people
in their current state of mind and with their current attitudes and
habits and also work long-term is a question. "Republican virtues
forever" may not catch on as a slogan.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat Aug 10 18:40:22 EDT 1996
Article: 7934 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Equal Employment Op = Unconstitutionally Vague Law?
Date: 10 Aug 1996 18:40:01 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <4uj341$1fd@panix.com>
References: <024341Z10081996@anon.penet.fi>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <024341Z10081996@anon.penet.fi> an693616@anon.penet.fi writes:
>Equal Employment Op = Unconstitutionally Vague Law?
>A law is unconstitutionally vague when a typical citizen
>cannot figure out how to conform his behavior in order
>to be in full compliance with that law.
As the courts use it, "void for vagueness" is mostly a slogan applied
to get rid of stuff they don't like. In the case of stuff they do
like, EO laws for example, they say it's remedial legislation that
should be construed broadly to achieve its beneficial purpose. If you
think "construed broadly" and "vague" have rather similar meanings you
are of course right. That doesn't mean you'll win.
Since "void for vagueness" is mostly used in constitutional challenges
to criminal laws, you might sharpen the issue by looking at the U.S.C.
provisions making it a serious crime to deprive people of rights
protected by federal law. In order to comply with the statute it is
necessary to know in advance what a court would construe those rights
to be. Why break the law if you can do that when you could make
millions as the world's best lawyer?
>2.) Again, the EEO laws prohibit discrimination which
>is a mental process.
Not a good argument. Consider a law that punishes attempted murder.
State of mind is part of the crime.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun Aug 11 15:37:57 EDT 1996
Article: 7937 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Buchanan & the Taxpayers?
Date: 11 Aug 1996 15:37:46 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 58
Message-ID: <4ulcqa$ffp@panix.com>
References: <4ui5nc$p4h@nadine.teleport.com> <4uib5h$oul@panix.com> <4ukt72$rvr@nadine.teleport.com>
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cfaatz@teleport.com (Chris Faatz) writes:
>: Is there really a place for him in the party?
>
>It depends. The same question (forgive me) could have been asked many
>years back about Jesse Jackson in the Dems.
I think there's a difference in the attitude of establishment Democrats
toward Jesse Jackson and establishment Republicans toward Pat Buchanan.
Many Democrats might have thought Jackson was imprudent, or went too
far, or demanded too much, or was wrong on important issues, but they
didn't feel he represented evil and alien forces. What establishment
Democrats publicly called Jackson a commie as establishment Republicans
have called Buchanan a fascist?
>Pat, however admirable much of his program is, has been in the
>Republicans, and played a leading role there, long enough that it's
>50- 50 in my view as to whether he'll bolt or not.
I said "more likely than not", which isn't so radically different from
50-50.
>I think he'd need to take into account a) whether the traditionalists
>and right-to-lifers would follow him out; b) what kind of an edge his
>leaping into the Taxpayers would bring him; and, c), what other forces
>he could attract.
He needs enough people behind him to affect the public debate. At this
stage that's more important than winning elections. I would expect that
as a long-time political commentator and columnist he would see it that
way.
>it does portray rather vigorously that Buchanan has a) a very strong
>and consistent program with potential mass appeal over and above the
>"protest" vote type, and b) deep historical roots in terms of
>decentralization of power, America First politics, and a return to
>traditionalism.
>
>My biggest fear (for what it's worth) is the *legislation of values.*
The risk as I see it is Sam Francis's theory of MARs grabbing control of
big government and using it for their own purposes. Traditionalism and
centralized power simply don't mix -- the whole point of "family values"
and the like is to make things other than the bureaucratic state
responsible for the functioning of society.
>the Moral Majority's crusade to put more government on our backs, i.e.
>a moral-inquisatorial government well armed with constitutional
>amendments....
What did the Moral Majority want to do that required a federal
moral-inquisitorial government? It seems to me they would have been
satisfied with states and localities doing things they had been doing
for a long time before the federal government decided to get involved
in things like school prayer and abortion.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Sun Aug 11 15:34:39 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 15:34:39 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB86FD.75E35060@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 10, 96 08:48:37 pm
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>I say that what makes the moral dimension authoritative is that I was
>taught in such a way that the voice of what-is-right became
>authoritative. By that I mean that I believe that if I'd had (at least
>some) other parents, I'd have developed into a person who paid little
>attention to such a voice.
This is an account of how you became a person who believes it
authoritative, not an account of what makes it authoritative. I thought
your view was that your acceptance of a moral principle and the
principle's validity are two different things. As you have said, "The
"feeling" that something is right is rather unreliable." So you could
wrongly accept a principle as valid, and a principle could be valid
without your accepting it as such.
>there have been some aspects of the morality I was taught that I have
>worked to free myself from ... And in addition there are many other
>moral ideas that I've added to what I was taught, some replacing, some
>supplementing what I was taught.
So apparently there is some principle or source of enlightenment that
trumps upbringing and tells you when to follow upbringing, when to
ignore it, and when to go beyond it. It's hard to see how that superior
authority could depend for its validity on the particular upbringing you
happen to have had. Where did it come from and what makes it valid and
authoritative?
>But I did not decide, and I will not decide to do that, because I do
>not believe it would be the right thing to do. Or, another way of
>putting it is, upon serious reflection on the nature and purpose of the
>kind of fundamental moral beliefs I had been taught, I decided that I
>really did believe in the value of being moral, and would not trade
>that for another way of being.
So it seems that after thinking about it a lot you've concluded that
"being moral is good" is not merely something that you accept because of
your upbringing, but is something that without respect to your
upbringing would be bad to reject. Where does that badness come from?
It seems it doesn't depend on your upbringing; your belief in the
badness might come from your upbringing, but not the badness itself, and
you reject the view that the badness depends on your belief.
>It is not because I think that being moral serves my own true good. It
>is, rather, because I ALREADY AM THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WANTS TO ACT
>FOR THE GOOD OF MORE THAN ME.
Would it be your true good to be a different kind of person?
>I also agree with you --THOUGH ONLY IN PART-- that being moral is
>probably in fact a part of finding true fulfillment, part of the "true
>nature" of the human being. But I don't think that morality is
>entirely so
Can you suggest which part of morality is part of our true nature, true
good, or whatever, and which part is not?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Mon Aug 12 14:35:39 1996
Subject: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 14:35:39 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB883B.0705F6E0@eb4ppp20.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 12, 96 10:23:27 am
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>My reasoned judgment tells me that what is Good is the well-being of
>sentient creatures ... That is what I believe in; I think it would be
>true even if my upbringing had not equipped me to see it, or to care
>about it if I saw it.
>
>I give this belief authoritative weight because I believe in it, and
>believe I should give it authoritative weight.
>
>In that sense, it is not in one's own personal, individual interest to
>be the more moral sort of person.
You seem to be saying that reasoned judgment tells you your actions
should promote or at least respect an impersonal good, and the principle
you should do so is independent of upbringing and is binding on you
whether you recognize its binding quality or not.
>From that it appears that if you didn't recognize the binding character
of morality you would be ignorant or in error, and if you recognized it
but didn't act accordingly there would be something wrong in the
relation between your moral knowledge and your actions. So to be
immoral appears on the view you present to be defective in a serious
way.
I don't see the gap between saying all that and saying that it is your
true nature to be moral; presumably you exhibit your true nature as a
rational being when you know what you should know and act accordingly.
I'm also not sure what is gained by insisting on a conception of
"interest" that is concerned only with the positive qualities of your
felt experience. One can define a word as one chooses, but "interest"
seems to suggest the complex of things that ought to guide your conduct
if you are rational, and we seem to be in agreement that morality as
such is necessarily part of that complex. In addition, it seems odd to
think that a serious personal defect would be in one's interest.
Another comment -- I of course understand what people mean when they
talk about conflicts between duty and self-interest and the like. In
that popular sense your view that well-being is one thing and being
good quite another is perfectly comprehensible. The point I tried to
capture with expressions like "true interest" is that the conception of
interest such conflicts imply is not in the end one we can rely on in
making rational sense of our own conduct.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
From jk Mon Aug 12 21:52:31 1996
Subject: Re: turtle steps
To: schmoore@shentel.net (Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore)
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 21:52:31 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <01BB888C.D57C1B20@eb3ppp19.shentel.net> from "Andrew Bard Schmookler & April Moore" at Aug 12, 96 08:28:10 pm
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>Let us imagine a creature that by virtue of the nature with which it is
>born wants only one thing, and that is to get as much money as it can
>for itself.
So far it sounds like a creature that could not have moral obligations.
To have a moral obligation you must be able to choose to do things
because they are right, and these creatures can't do that.
>they can override the nature of the creature, i.e. they can manipulate
>the inborn nature in such a way that it comes to care about something
>more than itself and its income.
I'm not sure what it would be for a nature which only wants one thing to
be manipulated to want something completely different. Do you mean that
the creature is deceived into thinking that e.g. the happiness of others
is really a kind of money in the bank?
Putting that aside, "manipulate the inborn nature" sounds non-
educational, so that the creature would come to act and want to act in a
way that conforms to morality without however understanding anything
about it. It would be rather as if someone trained me through a system
of punishments and rewards and psychological manipulation to answer with
alacrity questions about the history of Tannu-Tuva posed in Chinese
(which I don't understand), without however teaching me anything about
that history or about the meaning of the questions and answers.
So far it doesn't sound like the creature has become a moral agent.
>Now, would you say that this creature was acting according to his true
>interest, his true nature? I would not. Would you say that this
>creature accepted his being bound by moral obligation. I would.
The question to my mind is whether he really was bound by moral
obligation. If so, the process you harshly describe as manipulation was
in fact education through which he realized what was (contrary to
initial assumptions) an innate capacity to understand morality and
freely conform his conduct to it. In that case, I would say he was
acting according to his true interest and true nature, which had been
realized with the aid of education. The dialogue you presented made it
sound as if he did understand although it was rather short for a Turing
test.
>you say that my position requires that a person who does not feel bound
>by moral obligation must be either ignorant or in error.
Or that there is something seriously wrong with the relation between his
moral knowledge and his conduct, just as there would be something wrong
with a person who never took practical consequences into account when
acting.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Dammit, I'm mad!
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