I was eleven years old when World War II ended and there were never any stories told in my family about relatives who died in the Holocaust, although more than half a century later I learned that 30 members of the Parisian branch of my extended family were killed in Auschwitz. But for some reason, from an early age, I was obsessed by the thought of how important it is to recognize a threat before it is too late to respond. I could not stop thinking about the Jews who could have gotten out of Germany in time had they been willing to leave all their belongings behind and simply run. I watch the television reports, mesmerized, of people trapped in traffic jams trying to leave a city before a hurricane hit, having waited too long to get out. During the Cuban missile crisis I was in Chicago. My VW was loaded with dried food and a Geiger Counter and I had plane reservations for my wife and myself to take us both to Canada and to Mexico (depending on which way the wind was blowing.)
Perhaps that is why I am compelled to keep talking about the
dangers of a stolen president election that is still three years off. I do not
really care about the proper definition of the word “fascism.” But I care deeply about acting now to
forestall what are clearly the conscious, deliberate Republican plans to steal
the next election and install a dictatorial ruler who will end anything
resembling Democratic elections in America.
34 comments:
Prof. Wolff,
These are more serious and troubling times than you and others may realize.
I am currently in the process of preparing a petition for en banc review by the entire 6th Circuit Court of Appeals of a decision which was issued by three judges of that Court on the eve of Yom Kippur. The decision held that signs which have been used by protesters every Saturday morning for 18 years in front of a synagogue in Ann Arbor – signs which say such things as “Jewish Power Corrupts”; “Resist Jewish Power”; and “No More Holocaust Movies” – are protected by the free speech provision of the 1st Amendment and that no injunction may be entered placing reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on the usage of the signs. The basis of the decision was that these clearly anti-Semitic signs were commingled with signs relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a public forum, the street in front of the synagogue, and therefore enjoyed absolute protection under the 1st Amendment.
You can read about the decision here:
https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-court-decision-that-is-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-americas-jews/
Now I know that you are not a religious Jew. Frankly, nor am I. But I believe that those who are have the right under the freedom of religion clause of the 1st Amendment to enter their house of worship without being insulted and rebuked for their religion or their ethnicity – every Saturday morning for 18 years – and commingling such speech with other speech related to a political issue does not insulate them from injunctive relief. I also believe this is true of every other religion and every other house of worship – Muslims should be allowed to enter their mosque without being accused of supporting Isis; Catholics should be allowed to enter their church without being accused of supporting pedophile priests; and African-Americans should be allowed to enter their church without having to confront signs containing the N-word and mocking the Black Lives Matter movement. (By the way, one of the judges who held that the signs are protected by the 1st Amendment is African-American.)
In all of the legal pleadings that I filed on behalf of my clients in this lawsuit, we made clear that we were not seeking to totally suppress their right to express their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel views. We agreed that they have a right under the 1st Amendment to express these views anywhere else in Ann Arbor, in the State of Michigan, and in the United States – just not directly in front of a Jewish house of worship, whether it be Orthodox, Conservative or Reformed. And I believe this with regard to every house of worship – hate speech directed at Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, African-Americans, Mormons, Hindus, Sikhs have no place in front of their houses of worship as the congregants are entering those house of worship to engage in the exercise of their freedom of religion. Such conduct has no place in America. And I find the fact that three federal judges would conclude otherwise is quite troubling.
Now, this decision has nothing to do with Trump or his absurd claims that Biden did not win the election; or with the hypocrisy being demonstrated by members of the Republican Party; or with the threats to democracy which their hypocrisy represents, but it is, I believe, nonetheless a scary reminder of things going seriously awry in our country.
Another Anonymous,
Do you think that the fact that one of the appellate judges thought the plaintiffs' attorney was accusing the trial judge of anti-semitism might have hurt the case? Seems to me that that was not the most prudent tack to take in trying to persuade the court, but as a non-lawyer, what do I know?
Eric,
I never accused the trial judge of anti-Semitism. But I did find it strange that she ruled that the emotional distress that the plaintiffs, one of whom was a Holocaust survivor, experienced from seeing the signs in front of the synagogue was not a sufficiently concrete injury to give them standing to sue - a ruling which was contrary to literally thousands of other cases and which two judges on the Court rejected outright. This left the issue of whether the signs - including the anti-Semitic signs - were protected by the 1st Amendment. I maintain that they are not - hate speech of any king in front of any house of worship is not protected by the 1st Amendment.
An ethical question:
In detailing the Ann Arbor synagogue case he is involved in, Another Anonymous has made it transparently clear to anyone with access to Google who he is.
Should we all just keep up the pretence that we do not know his identity?
As they say these days... "just asking."
David,
How is this an ethical question? It may be a question about protocol, but certainly not ethics.
I was outed long ago by Prof. Wolff and numerous commenters have made no secret that they know my identity. This fact does not preclude me from continuing to refer to myself using a pseudonym and doing so is certainly not unethical. And I am not the only one doing so, e.g., LFC.
Re the proper definition of 'fascism', that is a curious thing to say from someone who gets all worked up if the word 'decimate' is not used according to its original meaning in Latin (and within the context of ancient Roman history to boot).
Not that I disagree re the present dangers in the US, in spite of the obvious differences with 1930s Europe.
Oh brother - as if the democrats aren't also doing their best to steal and undermine so-called 'free and fair' elections.
To Another Anonymous ....
I was not for a moment suggesting that your use of a pseudonym for yourself is what might be unethical.... but, rather, that raising the question of whether we should stop maintaining the pretence that we do not know who you actually are might be unethical.
The question was self-directed, not directed at you.
That said, I do agree with you that this is more a matter of protocol than ethics.
Though I still do not understand why you maintain the pseudonym. It seems childish.
Another,
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not familiar with U.S. constitutional law on this point, but from a free speech point of view, I believe that they have a right to stand in front of the synagogue with the signs you describe, as long as they don't block the door or the parking lot (if there is one) or physically touch those who go to the syngagogue or threaten them with violence, either verbally or through what is written on the signs they hold.
Imagine that they stand in front of Goldman Sachs with signs saying "capitalism kills" or "resist capitalist power" or "no more movies glorifying Wall St." Would they have the right to do that? I'd say "yes".
You will claim that a house of worship is different from an investment bank, but I don't attach any special value to houses of worship. Anyway, don't people worship money at Goldman Sachs?
Prof Wolff,
Another way to look at recent elections is that the party that you are supporting has not only attempted to steal elections, like Trump, but has actually succeeded in their quest. Senior DNC officials, including chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were forced to resign in disgrace when Wikileaks email releases revealed that the DNC had actively attempted to subvert a leading candidate's primary campaign in order to support the candidate they preferred, despite the party's having officially pledged to remain neutral. The favoritism shown toward the latter candidate was further confirmed by Donna Brazile, who, as a former DNC board member, was outraged to discover only after she had become acting chair on Wasserman Schultz's resignation that the DNC had made secret agreements to turn over significant aspects of campaign decision-making to that candidate in exchange for financial payoffs.
Then there was the way that the party changed its rules for which candidates would be allowed to participate in primary debates, suppressing the participation of candidates they did not like (eg Gabbard) in order to get the money of a candidate who had not even been a Democrat until fairly recently (Bloomberg).
Then there were the shenanigans in the Iowa primary election.
And the fact that the DNC has actually argued in court that because they are a private organization, they have a right to select whichever candidate they wish as their nominee, by whichever method they might want, and the courts have no right to interfere in that, even if the party were to promise the voters one thing but then do something else entirely. In the party's own words: "Those are internal issues that the party gets to decide basically without interference from the courts. ... [W]e could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right...." (In case any one needs reminding, it was a similar argument that white Southern Democrats had used to keep African Americans from being able to vote.)
Right now the Democrats are trying to enact legislation that would make it even harder for third-party candidates to participate in presidential elections (HR 1, which has already passed the House)—not exactly a move to expand participation in the democratic process—despite polling showing that even more Americans now feel we need third-party participation in elections than at any other time that question has been polled in the past 20 years.
If we are going to worry about possible threats, maybe it would make more sense to focus on the near-certainty of the horrors of the climate crisis, which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to save us from, than on the improbable possibility that Trump steals an election and presides over the Fourth Reich.
I started that post during lunch but was interrupted. I see that Anonymous @ 12:48 is on the same page.
David,
I would expect you to respect my wishes, however “childish” you may deem them, for the same reason you respect LFC’s preference, however “childish” you may regard his personal preference, notwithstanding that we all know who he is.
Leben, und leben lassen.
s. wallerstein,
Yes, the difference is that the congregants’ rights of freedom of religion and freedom of assembly are, like the freedom of speech, equally protected under the 1st Amendment. And while I would agree that protesters have the right to picket Goldman Sachs with signs stating “Kike Jews Worship Money,” they would not have the same right to carry such signs in front of a synagogue, regardless whether thay interfered with the entry or egress of the congregants, any more than they would have the right to carry signs in front of a predominantly African-American church carrying signs which state “N-er mothers give birth to crack babies,” or “N-er Lives Do Not Matter”; or carry signs in front of a mosque which state “Camel jockeys support Isis.”
There is also a principle in 1st Amendment jurisprudence that no one has a right to force someone to see or hear speech with which they disagree. It is called the “captive audience” exception. Someone would not have the right to picket Prof. Wolff’s residence with signs stating, for example, “Marxists are pigs,” and do so day in and day out. Prof. Wolff would be entitled to obtain an injunction limiting how close they could be to his home, and during what hours they would be entitled to picket his home. That is all the plaintiffs in the synagogue lawsuit are requesting.
Another,
The time of day is of course very important in picketing a residence since there seems to be a right to silence after a certain hour of the evening. For example, if the protesters shout slogans so loudly that the religious services are disrupted or if they use loudspeakers, then they should be forced to remain silent.
As for picketing an African-American church with the signs you describe, I'd say that they have a right to do so.
When I was in college, I belonged to an organization which invited controversial guest speakers. We invited Gus Hall, then General Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, a guy from the Mattachine Society, which was a gay rights organization back in the days before gay rights became a mainstream issue and George Lincoln Rockwell, der fuhrer of the American Nazi Party. I don't recall the others whom we invited to speak, but I would have had no problems inviting someone from the KKK either (although I wasn't the one who made the decisions about whom to invite). That is, if I really believe in something (and in reality, I don't believe in much), I believe in free speech.
I realize that there is a difference between a Nazi guest speaker and a group of neo-Nazis or anti-semites picketing a syngagogue, but I just wanted to give you an idea where I'm coming from.
s. wallerstein,
Every lawsuit turns on its facts, and applying the same legal principles can have a different outcome depending on the facts.
I commend your open-mindedness in your inviting speakers whose philosophies you abhor to make presentations at your university. However, the members of your audience were free to attend or not attend, as they pleased; and to stay or leave as they wished. Suppose, however, that these lectures were given in a required political science course or history course, and the students who paid tuition were required to listen to these lectures on pain of failing the course. Could a professor teaching the Civil War, for example, invite a professor who believed that slavery was a justifiable social institution in the ante bellum South to lecture to a class which included African-Americans? Could the African-Americans be required to sit through such a lecture? Would the professor’s choice of speaker be protected under the doctrine of academic freedom?
I am surprised that you would protect the right of protesters to use the signs I described in front of an African-American church. I wonder how many other readers of this blog would agree with you. Whether you are right, or whether you are wrong, is at the center of this lawsuit, and may very well require the U.S. Supreme Court to make a final decision.
Another,
You're running together two issues.
One is what I or we believe the principle of free speech dictates and the second is what U.S. law dictates or what the principle of academic freedom, as applied in U.S. universities dictates.
I have no idea what U.S. law dictates (that's your field) and I haven't set foot inside a U.S. university in almost 45 years, so I have no idea how academic freedom is interpreted these days.
I see nothing wrong with someone arguing that slavery was or is a justified social institution. Nietzsche believes that and I read Nietzsche avidly. It brings up an interesting question of what is a "justified social institution", which is worth talking about. I myself am against slavery, but from my point of view, the principle of free speech, as I see it (which has nothing to do with U.S. law), should allow people to justify slavery, for sure.
s. wallerstein,
I don’t want to engage in another one of our back-and-forth discussions.
However, when you state, “As for picketing an African-American church with the signs you describe, I'd say that they have a right to do so” you are talking about legal rights, not your personal view of what is right. In no society, except an anarchistic society, do “rights” exist outside that society’s laws.
I do not believe that protesters would have an impregnable 1st Amendment right to carry such signs in front of an African-American church, and not be subject to an injunction which held, for example, that they cannot carry such signs closer than 300 feet from the church’s property line, and may not do so 1 hr. before the church service begins, until 1 hr. after it concludes. And I would hope that most of the people who read this blog, and most Americans, would agree with me. And I certainly hope that if this case wends its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court a majority of the justices will agree with me. But, of course, there is no way of knowing ahead of time.
Another,
When I talk about protesters in front of an African-American church, I'm really talking about my personal view of what free speech entails.
Fine, by the way, this time we had a very civil and civilized back and forth discussion, which means that we're both young enough to learn from experience.
Since you like Dylan, as I do too,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Df39PjkwA
s. wallerstien,
Yes, we were so much older then, we’re younger than that now.
Cheers!
My continued practice of law has kept me young and invigorated. I have not given up tilting at windmills, and hope I never do.
I wonder if the 'process of elimination' could determine what reality we are being forced to experience now in the present? Before we could be 100% certain that we are experiencing a truthful reality in the present we would need to think up all possible realities and to eliminate them one by one. I mean if we are now in a malfunctioning holodeck or matrix where is the elevator-rescue team to save us after all of this time? And if we were in a malfunctioning holodeck or matrix why the heck can't we remember walking/getting into either one in our past or even having memories of our past lives? So a fantasy, malfunctioning program is out. So what is dreaded now is that we are inside a repatriation program (& we were forced to drink from the river Lethe in Plato's Phaedo before entering our new reality) --because we murdered or harmed someone or something in our past life before we were sentenced to this scary, dismal fantasy realm so we can learn certain lessons on goodness. [Of course, that idea cannot be totally dismissed.] But how can this be reparation when we still have yet to learn from our many offenses in our life? Or worse, yet, we're convinced we are still innocent of any offenses? Just as equally conceivable, we could be part of a universal plan in which God gives each of us a chance to redeem ourselves through good works, faith, or both. If any of these things are true then this present world could be a place of either punishment or probation. And even if God doesn't exist that would just mean the universe is our God/Creator anyway as a thinking universe even if he doesn't exist in any traditional sense--I mean if subatomic particles can appear out of nothing then so can thought waves. Plus we can all hope every day to get proof of God's existence, but never proof of God's non-existence since an all powerful God may use his great power to hide from us forever. So what is my conclusion to all of this? Being a Religious-Epicurean I believe that the worst evil is pain no matter what life you are living in. So since it is possible for awareness to exist outside the body, it is possible for awareness to exist in death after leaving the body. And since there are hells on Earth like Kursk, the Bulge, the Tet Offensive, Nagasaki, the American Civil War, Public School, the Council of Elrond, etc, why can't there be hells in the afterlife? So a Religious-Epicurian would try to do good deeds as much as is possible so that the pain in this life and in the next life is lessened. Like Pascal said: if you are a good person what do you lose by there not being an afterlife? And if there is an afterlife your goodness may just save you. A student once asked Socrates what if his good deeds go unnoticed by his brother? And Socrates said those kind deeds just prove that you are a good brother and he is a bad one. So you lose nothing. And BTW why would anyone erase your memory of your past life when they are going to give it all back to you when the cycles of repatriation are over? Why not just upload several saint's lives into your brain in a few minutes without having to go through all of this trouble? If the Platonic Guardians wanted to reform you painlessly why would they make you live a double life that can be seen as cruel or even torturous by all creatures just to make you a good person in their society? And wouldn't anyone feel like revenge after they wake up from this nightmare? God himself has no problem with pardoning people since his exalted station & great power makes him immune to retaliation. People on the other hand, or even aliens, don't have this immunity from the possible countless criminals being rehabilitated through repatriation methods & programs that would in fact be quite questionable to all men.
M.L., quite a few of those points could be disputed! Just to pick out one that might be of interest: "I believe that the worst evil is pain." (I'll call this "ethical hedonism" for short, or "Epicureanism.")
In the spirit of friendly discussion:
There's obviously a lot of plausibility to the claim that pain should be avoided, or minimized. But I worry that the claim isn't very informative, and might actually become circular if we failed to clarify the term "pain" beyond "that which we desire not to experience." (But perhaps it isn't possible to clarify "pain," any more than "redness.")
Also - and I suspect this would be troubling for someone with a more religious orientation - ethical hedonism doesn't seem to sit well with one of Socrates/Plato's most powerful claims, that "it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it." (Abbreviate this claim to "C.")
Now, given that C presumes our moral understanding to include the concept of justice (which at least seems distinct from the concept of pain-minimization), the ethical hedonist would have to either reject C, or resort to some convoluted and implausible reasoning to accommodate it. (E.g., an ethical hedonist might accept C while interpreting it to say, "There is no greater pain than to perpetrate 'injustice,' i.e., to cause someone else an avoidable excess of pain." But this seems obviously false; it strikes us as absurd to suppose that the rapist actually incurs more pain than his victim.)
Put in a way that might resonate more: As a religious person, do you think Jesus regarded the fundamentals of his mission strictly in terms of pain-minimization? (How would that thought hold up in light of the crucifixion and such? I always took it that Epicurus and his philosophical descendants would've seen that whole story as really quite ugly, horrific, and wrong-headed.)
@ Another Anonymous
I have been preoccupied lately w some personal matters and have not been reading this blog as often or commenting as often as I used to.
With that as preface, I do not appreciate your referring upthread to LFC as a pseudonym. LFC is not a pseudonym. It is the initials of my real name. By contrast, your handle, Another Anonymous, is a pseudonym.
Michael Llenos,
Before we could be 100% certain that we are experiencing a truthful reality in the present we would need to think up all possible realities and to eliminate them one by one
Impossible, as there would seem to be an infinite number of possible realities.
(How are you defining "true" and "truthful," anyway?)
If we were in a malfunctioning holodeck or matrix why the heck can't we remember walking/getting into either one in our past or even having memories of our past lives?
Has anyone ever been in a functioning holodeck or matrix? How do you know that one of its features is not to cause amnesia? (Or, if amnesia is not a typical result of using the device, perhaps the memory disruption is a consequence of the malfunction.)
the universe is our God/Creator anyway as a thinking universe even if he doesn't exist in any traditional sense--I mean if subatomic particles can appear out of nothing then so can thought waves
You have not explained why there must be any consciousness involved ("a thinking universe"). You propose considering all possibilities, noting even that we cannot totally dismiss the idea that we are in some sort of Purgatory, but then seem to refuse to consider the materialist explanation of existence, which seems to me the most plausible explanation for our reality.
Being a Religious-Epicurean I believe that the worst evil is pain no matter what life you are living in.
I take it that by "pain" here, you mean any physical sensation or mental feeling that one feels compelled to extricate oneself from if one is in such state, or to avoid if one is not. If, as you seem to believe, "good" and "evil" are absolutes, standards independent of any observer, the same for all, what of the masochist, who is drawn to pain? Is the masochist the most evil?
So since it is possible for awareness to exist outside the body
Huh? Where did that come from?
why would anyone erase your memory of your past life when they are going to give it all back to you when the cycles of repatriation are over
Why does your god, who is all-knowing, make Adam and Eve susceptible to temptation and allow them to be tempted, only to have to send Jesus to fix their transgression? And why does Jesus not know he is god, or an avatar of god? And if god is immortal and humans are mortal, how can a single being be both true god and true man simultaneously? In other words, none of the basic premises of the religion make any sense, so why would this story of erasing one's memory only to give it back later need to make any sense?
LFC,
You are being rather touchy, and unnecessarily so. My point was that not using one’s full name - whether by using a pseudonym or only the initials of one’s name – is not, per se, childish, as David claimed. I certainly did not mean to give offense.
@AA,
Ok.
Michael
You wrote:
'Socrates/Plato's most powerful claims, that "it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it." (Abbreviate this claim to "C.") Now, given that C presumes our moral understanding to include the concept of justice (which at least seems distinct from the concept of pain-minimization), the ethical hedonist would have to either reject C, or resort to some convoluted and implausible reasoning to accommodate it. (E.g., an ethical hedonist might accept C while interpreting it to say, "There is no greater pain than to perpetrate 'injustice,' i.e., to cause someone else an avoidable excess of pain...'
The difference between a Epicurist and a Religious-Epicurist is that the latter believes in life of the soul after death (unlike the former, who believes in a soul but that it disintegrates or turns to nothing after death). What I was trying to say is that since it is possible that a reward or punishment exists after death, to avoid pain (or punishment) one must try to do good deeds & be a good person as much as possible in this life. As far as avoiding pain in this life, one will try to obey the law, take the shot, avoid eating too much chocolate gummy bears, etc. But if you are on a airplane & a terrorist threatens your life, and says you should eat those gummy bears, you'll eat them so you don't experience something worse than weight gain. However, if those gummy bears are poisonous, you'll try to get rid of them, by flushing them down the toilet, or risk being beaten up or possibly killed, since you know eating them can be 100% fatal. In philosophical decision making, there is no clear cut path to always doing what philosophy demands. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.
Eric
You wrote:
'Before we could be 100% certain that we are experiencing a truthful reality in the present we would need to think up all possible realities and to eliminate them one by one
Impossible, as there would seem to be an infinite number of possible realities'
One could always take a tip from Descartes' Meditations & get rid of the major or sub-major categories that such realities fall under. You can think up all possible realities' in three different ways: (1) specifically, (2) sub-categorically, and (3) categorically. I meant a combination of #'s 1, 2, & 3 and not just #1. Sorry for the confusion.
...since it is possible that a reward or punishment exists after death, to avoid pain (or punishment) one must try to do good deeds & be a good person as much as possible in this life.
Okay, a couple issues with this:
1. It seems to reduce morality to self-interested prudence. If it turns out that there simply isn't a system of post-mortem rewards and punishments (or, if we don't have good reason to suppose otherwise), then the implication is that we don't really have compelling reason to do good deeds and be good people. I guess something like that is Kant's position, but if so, I can't say I'd accept it without hesitation! Robert Solomon somewhere recalls a scornful comment that Hegel made to a friend: "So, the only reason you care for your sick mother is that you expect a tip in the end?"
2. Even if we ignore the above, there's still the whole difficulty of achieving any certainty as to what the will of God (or whoever enforces this system of post-mortem rewards and punishments) would actually be. We can't conform to the commands of God unless we have the right idea of what those commands are. And we can't simply assume that God's will pretty much resembles our own, rather than being mysterious and inscrutable - and thus essentially alien and inaccessible to us. (I take this last point to be an unwitting (?) implication of "skeptical theism.")
Michael,
I've only read Kant's Groundwork once, so I'm not schooled at all on his ideas of Duty and the Categorical Imperative, etc--although I kinda get his basic belief system.
My ideas of charity really can be summed up with Chapter 25:31-46 in Matthew's Gospel. It's basically the same physical action mentioned in Jewish, Christian, & Islamic literature. Give food and give drink to the poor, destitute, or homeless. And the more you do this the better off you are in the eyes of Heaven. But there are no fixed rules to any of these actions. I believe it is really a personal journey to salvation. I'll tell you a story of two different men walking in a park and then you can decide which one did a truly good action over the other.
1. A man was walking away from a food stand with ten sandwiches and two bottles of cold water--too much for him to consume. And walking through the park, he came upon a homeless person who asked him for something to eat. He said in response to the homeless person: "I believe I would share this food but I don't feel the will to do good inside me, so I cannot share this food with you since it wouldn't be a good action anyway." That said the man quickly left the park.
2. Another man only bought two sandwiches and a drink from the food stand, but he suddenly realized he had an appointment to meet someone for a business chat and started to run toward his car. He noticed a homeless person who asked him for something to eat, that same homeless person who asked the first man for something to eat, so he came to a halt and gave the two sandwiches and the drink to that person not because he wanted to help out but because he could leave the park faster if he wasn't carrying any food. As the man began running again towards his car, the homeless person couldn't help but feel grateful for the food and wasn't hungry for the remainder of that day.
So who actually did something and made an greater impact? Who was more good? Number 1 man or number 2 man? Who deserves better karma? I choose the second man over the first man. But that's just me. If anyone picks the first man over the second man I'll just recall that old proverb that states: "Many men of my time are wise when it comes to doing evil, but foolish when it comes to doing any good."
It wasn't the Groundwork I was thinking of. I haven't read all the Kant I need to, so don't take my word for it on any of this stuff, but off the top of my head, the Groundwork doesn't really go into his views on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul; I think it's elsewhere in his writings (mainly the second Critique, and some later sections of the first?) that he lays those out as "Postulates of Practical Reason."
What that means (just to paraphrase a philosophy of religion course from years ago) is that according to Kant, we cannot possibly know whether God exists and whether the soul is immortal, but we're nonetheless required to at least tacitly assume that those things are the case, if the whole moral enterprise is to make rational sense. ("I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.") The demands of justice - namely, the proportional allotment of happiness to the virtuous - plainly are not satisfied in this world, so we have to assume they'll be satisfied in another world, or else morality falls badly short of its purpose and loses its justification.
My reaction to that has always been to find it flimsy and fantastical, and hard to square with one of Kant's own mottos: "The point isn't to become happy, but to become worthy of happiness." But this objection seems so obvious that I have to figure I'm reacting against an oversimplified caricature of Kant...? I need to take the time to study more of his work before I can be sure.
I'm no Kant expert, but I do help the homeless who have camped out in a park near my apartment. I do it not expecting a reward, but out of compassion for their situation. If I felt no compassion or sense of solidarity, I wouldn't help them.
I'm an atheist and I don't believe in any afterlife. Any acts of charity that I carry out I do them because I want to, I'm motivated to do them, as I said, out of compassion.
If people feel no compassion for the homeless and most don't, well, they're not going to help them and that's the way the world is. Maybe we can pretend that there's some kind of moral imperative to help the homeless, but that doesn't convince me at all.
How does Kant's take on morality help us understand social relationships among other animals?
FRANS DE WAAL: [R]eciprocity's very well developed [among primates]. And we've done experiments on reciprocity, where, for example, we look in the morning which chimps groom each other. And then we wait a couple of hours. And then we introduce food and we see who shares food with each other.
And we have found in those studies that if you have groomed me in the morning, your chance of getting food from me is increased in the afternoon, meaning that I keep that in mind. I have a memory of favors that have been done to me just as we humans do.
...
GUY RAZ: But they don't have to do this to survive. I mean, their species doesn't require this.
DE WAAL: No, I think it's absolutely essential for their life. Why would you live in a group? Because group life is better for you than solitary life. And if you live in a group and you do things together - like chimpanzees. They hunt together. They defend their territory together. And they warn each other against predators. So if you live in a group, you have to do each other favors. Otherwise there's no point in living in a group.
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DE WAAL: Synchronization, which is part of that whole empathy mechanism, is a very old one in the animal kingdom. And in humans of course, we can study that with yawn contagion. Humans yawn when others yawn. And it's related to empathy. It activates the same areas in the brain. Also, we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic. People who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, they don't have yawn contagion. So it is connected. And we studied that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head that yawns. And there's an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations. So yawn contagion - that you're probably all familiar with and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now - is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole synchronization that underlies empathy.
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RAZ: [C]ould you see primates acting selfless, you know, doing something that doesn't necessarily benefit them?
DE WAAL: Yeah. So at the field station, for example, have a very old female -her name is Penny - who can barely walk, who has arthritis. And we've seen young females as soon as she, for example, she heads to the water spigot, which is quite a distance, they run ahead of her. And they take a drink for her. And they return to her and spit in her mouth so that she doesn't need to walk that whole distance.
Or if she needs to go into a climbing frame where other chimps are sitting and grooming and socializing, they push her up because she cannot really climb into those things anymore. And so yeah, we see the kind of altruistic act where they help each other. And we don't think they get these favors in any way returned because she's a very old female that can barely do anything for them anymore, which is basically empathy-based altruisms in the chimpanzee.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/338936897
Assuming de Waal's observations and analyses are accurate, are these chimpanzees doing these things because they are worried about eternal damnation in the afterlife? Are they thinking about karma?
And while you're cogitating on that, here's something else to chew on:
Animals are not the only kinds of organisms that are able to communicate.
Some scientists say their studies suggest trees can communicate, and cooperate.
And a large body of evidence supports the conclusion that even bacteria can communicate—they can "talk" to their own kind using secret, shibboleth-like "languages", and they can communicate with other species of bacteria, using other kinds of chemical signaling. They can alter, and even coordinate, their behavior in response to these messages. From our perspective as humans, none of this requires "thinking." It's a mechanical process that has likely arisen through hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
If complex behaviors like this can be produced by evolution, why couldn't behaviors that we call "moral" also be produced by evolution?
Eric,
I agree that it's probably more noble to do a good deed expecting no return than to expect some kind of return. But the point I was hinting at with #1 man and #2 man was that perhaps it doesn't matter that much what your intentions are just as long as you do a good deed. #1 man was caught up on intensions only and didn't help a suffering person, while #2 man helped a suffering person although not with any good intentions. And I believe it may be true that almsgiving is in our genetics, but there are very many more people on Earth that don't give to the suffering compared with those who do give. And although Judaism doesn't believe that animals are accountable for their lives I believe they are to some degree. I also believe there are heavens set aside for animals, just like a portion of Elysium set aside for animals in Isaiah 11:6-9. And I do believe lions can eat grass in that setting, just as pet cats sometimes eat lawn grass to help with their digestion of the meat that they do eat. And if we don't know all of the specifics of that setting how can we know that any of those specifics are illogical or unrealistic? Who knows maybe lions and other cats may get instantly new stomachs and new jaws as they are transferred to such places above the Earth?
How does Kant's take on morality help us understand social relationships among other animals?
I'm not sure that it does, but I'm also not sure that Kant would find that troublesome for his project. As always, I haven't studied this stuff in depth, so this is patchy, semi-educated guesswork on my part compared to the expertise Prof. Wolff has; but with that disclaimer, I take Kant's moral philosophy to be basically a metaphysics of the pure good will. It doesn't (or doesn't necessarily) shed a lot of light on what human/animal willing is, because in those cases, the will is never pure, but always conditioned by the brute, natural circumstances of the mind and its environment (e.g. by what we happen to imperfectly perceive and instinctively crave). I think that's at the basis of Kant's assertion of the limits of ethical introspection:
"In fact, it is absolutely impossible by means of experience to make out with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action otherwise in conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and on the representation of one's duty. It is indeed sometimes the case that with the keenest self-examination we find nothing besides the moral ground of duty that could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that good action and to so great a sacrifice; but from this it cannot be inferred with certainty that no covert impulse of self-love, under the mere pretense of that idea, was not actually the real determining cause of the will..." (Groundwork, Sect. II)
So, I think it's like this: Kant's moral philosophy is to human/animal willing, what formal logic is to human/animal thinking. (Purportedly, anyway.)
If the formal logician discovered some counterintuitive result, in which P demonstrably entailed Q, and yet (as a psychological generalization) the human intellect tended to find this entailment less than obvious, or even required some careful training to avoid concluding that P entailed not-Q... Still, the logician's discovery would be valid, interesting, and authoritative. And the idea is that it would remain so, even if the natural scientists discovered how we evolved in a way that didn't conduce to a clear, immediate insight into its validity.
For example, evolutionary science might have an interesting story to tell as to why beginning logic students often find it difficult to avoid this or that common fallacy (e.g. affirming the consequent). But the logician, or whoever's task it is to distinguish fallacious from non-fallacious logic, would presumably find that story irrelevant to his/her work. I want to think of Kant as similarly "aloof" (or strictly concerned with the "metaphysics") in his theorizing on the moral will.
Hopefully I'm making some sense... With Kant, it's hard to be sure that one knows what one's talking about. :)
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