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Thursday, April 21, 2022

SEVERAL THINGS

There are several matters of great importance on which I should like to comment, but first let me try to clear up this matter of the reductio ad absurdum argument. A reductio is, strictly speaking, a logical argument that proves a proposition by assuming the negation of the proposition and deriving from it a contradiction. One then invokes the law of the excluded middle to conclude that the original proposition has been demonstrated. For example (I get this from Wikipedia), one proves that there is no smallest positive rational number by assuming the negative – that there is a smallest positive rational number – and then dividing that by two, thereby arriving at a smaller positive rational number. The term is also used to apply to arguments in which one assumes the negative of a proposition and then derives silly or foolish or patently unbelievable conclusions which, however, are not contradictory.  Nothing in Marc Susselman’s argument about evolution strikes me as having the form of a reductio in an interesting sense.

 

Now on to matters of greater importance.  The three subjects that have dominated the news for some time now are the Covid pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like other news junkies, I spend a great deal of time each day reading or listening to the latest news with regard to these three crises, and although I am no kind of expert on any one of them, I have developed opinions about the second and third that it might be of some interest to share with the readers of this blog.  I will discuss the second today and try to say something about the third tomorrow.

 

Let me begin with the January 6 affair. Like everyone else, I watched it unfold in real time, as the saying goes.  Even though there had been months of reporting about the efforts of Trump and his supporters to challenge the results of the election in several different states, it was perhaps natural at first to imagine that the assault on the Capitol on January 6 was the culmination and indeed the centerpiece of those efforts. A great deal of effort has been expended trying to blame Trump for the violence, and there is no doubt that he welcomed it and enjoyed it, but it does not seem to me that his heated rhetoric in the speech at the Ellipse constitutes much in the way of evidence of legal liability, since that kind of language is so common in political discourse.

 

What really fascinated me were text messages that were revealed to have been sent by people like Sean Hannity begging Mark Meadows to get Trump to call the violence off since it was screwing up the plan. Eventually we learned that there was in fact a serious, coherent, marginally plausible plan grounded in the Constitution to overcome the result of the election. As we all now know, the plan, which had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol, had three parts: first, to have a number of key states send alternative slates of Trump electors to Congress; second, to have Mike Pence decide to set aside the competing slates from those states as contradictory, leaving no candidate with a majority of the electoral votes; and third, in accordance with the specifications of the Constitution, thereby to throw the election into the House of Representatives where, each state voting as a unit, Trump would be re-elected president.

 

This was not a crazy plan, for all that it would have meant the end of constitutional democracy in America. It depended, so far as I can see, on three things: first, that the Vice President would go along with the plan; second, that the entire Republican majority in the Senate would vote to support the Vice President’s action, thereby producing a standoff between the Senate and the House leading to the vote by states in the House; and third, that the Supreme Court would decline to step in and sort the matter out, on the quite defensible ground that the Constitution left the matter to the action of the House.  The violence in the Capitol was, if anything, counterproductive, or so it seems to me. It made it less likely, rather than more, that the Vice President would go along with the plan and that the entire Republican Senate bloc would vote for it.

 

I think we are about to get a more detailed and circumstantial account of the entire business from the House committee than we ever could have hoped for. So far as I can see, the only element in the entire plot that clearly breaks some laws is the written assertions by the alternate electors of six of the seven relevant states that they were “duly elected.” I hope each of those individuals gets the book thrown at him or her, along with all the co-conspirators who put them up to it. But I do not think there is much hope that Trump himself will be hauled into court on the matter.

115 comments:

Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D. said...

From the reporting I have seen, it appears that Pence, having been apprised of the plan, sought advice from John Dean and another lawyer whose name I forget. The lawyer wrote up some language that Pence read as he accepted the certifications that differed from the usual language. Trump knew before hand that Pence wasn't going along with the plan hence the chant to hang Pence and the gallows erected by the protestors.

The level of coordination between Trump and militias is unclear at this point, but it seems likely there was a connection. They were present ostensibly to provide security for Roger Stone and others, and had planned well in advance for armed intervention of some sort. Since the original plan to have Pence refuse to certify the electors from certain states was going to fail then violence was the only option. Had the certification process been delayed Trump could declare martial law, assume emergency powers and declare the election invalid.

Now the threat of decertification has devolved to the 17 or so states that now have enacted legal provisions to allow the legislature/governor to declare midterm elections invalid. Imagine if Kemp loses to Stacey Abrams, and Warnock wins.

Marc Susselman said...

Prof. Wolff,

Perhaps I misapplied the term reductio ad absurdum to the syllogism I offered, but surely there is a form of arguments along the following lines: Assume P(1) is true; assume P(2) is true. If they are both true, then the following propositions must also be true. Some, or all, of those propositions are absurd. Therefore P(1) and P(2) cannot both be true. It may not have a name, but is the form of the syllogism invalid?

For example, I claim that all men are superior in intelligence to every woman.
Donald Trump is a man and therefore must be superior in intelligence to Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is absurd.
Therefore the proposition that all men are superior in intelligence to every woman is false.

This may not technically constitute a reductio ad absurdum argument, but it surely is a form of logical analysis we many use every day.

Hence my argument that the assumption of the truth of the two propositions regarding the connection between evolution and our moral beliefs – that there are no valid moral precepts - leads to what appear to be the absurd results I cited.


Marc Susselman said...

You are ignoring a third condition that was necessary for the plan to succeed. There had to be competing slates of electors for a sufficient number of states already in place and submitted to the Senate on January 6 to allow Pence to reject both slates. There were none. This presages, however, competing slates being submitted in 2024.

David Palmeter said...

Marc,

Reaching back to my freshman class in logic some 66 years ago in the dim pass, I’d say that you have constructed a syllogism which means, if the major and minor premises are true, then the conclusion follows of necessity: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. The logical necessity depends upon the truth of the premises. Your first premise, “All men are superior in intelligence to every woman” is just that, a premise, a given. IF that premise is true, then the conclusion of necessity follows. But the syllogism doesn’t prove either of the premises. I think you can put together all kinds of crazy premises and get a valid conclusion, e.g., All Nazis were nice guys; Hitler was a Nazi, therefore Hitler was a nice guy. The debate is not about the conclusion but about the validity of the premises.

To the extent that I have this wrong, I plead not guilty by reason of senility.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

You are confusing a valid syllogism with a sound syllogism. In order for a valid syllogism to be sound, the conclusion must be true. An absurd conclusion is obviously not true. Therefore the syllogism is not sound. If the syllogism is valid, but not sound, the premises cannot be true. That was the form of my argument.

You are, i believe, mistaken, but it does not follow that you are senile.

Marc Susselman said...

Actually, there are two federal statutes under whose terms Trump could be indicted. They are set forth below.

18 U.S. Code § 373 - Solicitation to commit a crime of violence

(a)
Whoever, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against property or against the person of another in violation of the laws of the United States, and under circumstances strongly corroborative of that intent, solicits, commands, induces, or otherwise endeavors to persuade such other person to engage in such conduct, shall be imprisoned not more than one-half the maximum term of imprisonment or (notwithstanding section 3571) fined not more than one-half of the maximum fine prescribed for the punishment of the crime solicited, or both; or if the crime solicited is punishable by life imprisonment or death, shall be imprisoned for not more than twenty years.

18 U.S. Code § 2101 – Riots

Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including, but not limited to, the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, or television, with intent—

(1)
to incite a riot; or
(2)
to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or
(3)
to commit any act of violence in furtherance of a riot; or
(4)
to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in or carrying on a riot or committing any act of violence in furtherance of a riot;
and who either during the course of any such travel or use or thereafter performs or attempts to perform any other overt act for any purpose specified in subparagraph (A), (B), (C), or (D) of this paragraph— [1] Shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

To be indicted under 18 U.S.C. § 2101 it would not have been necessary to have engaged in interstate travel just before January 6. It would have sufficed if you used a telephone in order to incite the violence, and the evidence appears to confirm that he did. A defense of freedom of speech would not succeed. See Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972).

There have been successful prosecutions and convictions under both statutes. For example, in U.S. v. Markiewicz, 978 F.2d 786 (2d Cir. 1992), members of the Oneida Nation were prosecuted for inciting a riot in a bingo hall owned and maintained by the Oneida Nation. The convictions were sustained on appeal.

Prosecution for violating 18 U.S.C. § 373 does not require interstate travel as a predicate. In U.S. v. McNeill, 887 F.2d 448 (3d Cir. 1989), the defendant was indicted and convicted for soliciting a person to kill is parole officer. His conviction was sustained on appeal. In U.S. v. Boney, 769 F.3d 153 (3d Cir. 2014), the defendant was indicted and convicted of soliciting a person to retaliate against an individual who was a witness to his distribution of 500 grams of cocaine. His conviction was sustained on appeal.

There is no reason why Trump could not be indicted under either or both of these statutes. An insurrection against the United States government is a crime. Therefore, inciting such violence, or soliciting individuals to participate in such an action, is an indictable offense. The fact that Trump was a sitting President would not give him immunity. I suspect, and am hopeful, that Merrick Garland is looking into indicting Trump and is waiting for the January 6th Committee to complete its hearings and publish its report before indicting Trump.

Marc Susselman said...

Post-script regarding my comment above regarding the 2024 election:

In 2024 the Vice President responsible for certifying the election will either be Kamala Harris, or another Democrat should Harris have succeeded to the Presidency. No Democrat is going to rule that the competing slates of electors cancel each other out. S/he will accept the Democratic slated of electors, and the Supreme Court would never (?) accept such a case for review, since (with the exception of Bush v. Gore) avoids disputes involving political questions. I believe the 2024 election is relatively safe from such a scheme. The greater challenge is state legislation aimed at suppressing the vote of minorities.

I think I have reached my in moderation cut-off.

aaall said...

MS, if Harris succeeds to the presidency and the Republicans take at least one house of the Congress in 2022, there will likely be no vice president in 2024. This will certainly be the case if the Republicans take the House of Representatives as the Republican Speaker would then be next in line. The 25th amendment requires the president to nominate a vice president but the Congress doesn't have to confirm. If the Republicans take the Senate then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate will be a Republican presiding over the process as opposed to a Democratic vice president.

You are way too optimistic. With Bush v. Gore the Republicans with a one vote majority did a coup with a lawless decision. They now have a two vote majority. BTW, if you check out Rehnquist's concurrence in Bus v. Gore there's some reference to state legislative supremacy which I'm sure will be trotted out..

Jeffery S. Cohen said...

I have a personal memory of that fateful January 6th that may or may not be of any interest. I'm a young lefty western university student who knows many other young lefty university students. I would definitely say most, if not all, are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Some are Marxist. Some are communist. Some are anarchist. Most of these students read writers like Zizek, Mark Fisher, Chomsky as if they are gospel. We all know this crowd and their general attitudes.

Anyways, I distinctly remember being horrified on January 6th. I felt near tears. This cohort of students? Many were happy to see what was occurring on January 6th! Many wanted to see radical change and believed January 6th was a good step towards that. Somehow these left-leaning students couldn't see the inherent fascism of the entire event. They were so driven by Anti-American sentiments that they were exited to possibly see the public execution of Nancy Pelosi! When it was eventually dispersed by police, they were saddened less had happened.

Even though my isolated experience may mean nothing it all, the entire occurrence had left me with two sentiments. 1) I was surprised to see that so many educated young liberal students were entirely blind to the creeping of fascisim and, more so, to the death of liberal law and order (which they all benefit from mightily). It left me quite disillusioned with many in the modern 'Left' 2) I couldn't help but wonder what it is they really *want*? Radical violence for the sake of it? An actual uprising of some sort? Real ideological shifts? Or are they just bored in their apartments smoking too much pot and excited at the prospect of excitement? Who knows. The desires of the young are often unknown even to them. I certainly can only say that I know what I want in the most immediate sense. Right now, that is a sandwich. Maybe tomorrow it will be political violence.

aaall said...

"The violence in the Capitol was, if anything, counterproductive, or so it seems to me."

Perhaps not as Pence had already indicated his disapproval. Recall that his SS detail tried to get him to get in his limo and at that point he would be out of the picture for awhile (hey, this is a coup after all) and Grassley would have taken over.

Also the crowd had parts some of which were organized cadres. Fortunately some staff had the presence of mind to grab and safeguard the ballots. Had they been stolen or their chain of custody violated there would have been a considerable delay getting the copies from the Archivist. That also would have given the phony slates a possible opening.

s. wallerstein said...

John Rapko recently linked to an article by Tony Wood (I'm not sure in which thread) and coincidentally Amy Goodman interviews Wood today. For those of us whose eyesight is no longer so great, I'll link to the video here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqioEeWyYgI&t=607s

Wood is very bright and very balanced in his views. I thank John Rapko for turning me on to him.

LFC said...

Jeffery S. Cohen,

Interesting comment. Hard to know how much your experience generalizes, though. (Btw without looking him up, I don't think I know who Mark Fisher is. A generational thing perhaps, or else just my ignorance.)

Jeffery S. Cohen said...

LCF,

I agree my comment is not meant to be taken as a generalization. And I am not attempting to argue that my experience constitutes any general truths. I think it's most interesting (also in the current context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) as evidence of the left being extremely ideologically fragmented and lost, especially among the younger generation. So many voices, so many ideas, so many bleeding hearts! But again, what is it they *want*?

s. wallerstein said...

Jeffrey Cohen,

The left has never been in power in the U.S., there's no left political party besides the Greens, which has no real weight, etc., and the left has always been somehow "fringe" in the U.S. since the McCarthy era when it was persecuted and destroyed.

That being the case, it's not odd that the U.S. left is ideologically fragmented and lost.

I live in Chile where there is a tradition of leftwing political parties, including a legal Communist Party which participates in a coalition government now with certain key ministeries and the left is far from lost here. It's an organized political force such as the Democrats are in the U.S. The mayor of Santiago where I reside is a Communist.

So I think it's due to contingent historical circumstances that the left in the U.S. is in the sorry state you mention.

aaall said...

" Most of these students read writers like Zizek, Mark Fisher, Chomsky as if they are gospel."

Which is perhaps part (most?) of the problem. Listening to the you tube videos and reading the assorted red/brown manifestos, e.g.

https://compactmag.com/article/away-from-the-abyss

has been like a museum trip to view various prehistoric fauna encased in amber.

Meanwhile in the real world:

"Since the beginning of the second stage of the special operation, and it started just two days ago, one of the tasks of the Russian army has been to take full control of Donbas and southern Ukraine. That will ensure the opening of a land corridor to Crimea and influence critical elements of the Ukrainian economy," acting Central Military District Commander Rustam Minnekayev said at an annual meeting of the Union of Defense Plants of the Sverdlovsk Region on Friday. "Establishing control over southern Ukraine would also give the Russian army access to Transvestite [sic], where facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population have also been observed."

"Transnistria" means Moldova would be next. Any negotiated settlement that leaves a Russian presence in Ukraine means an impoverished and depopulated Ukraine and Russian imperialism moving west.

Those students JC references have been more influenced by nihilistic right populism then anyone on the left.

BTW, I sort of suspected something like this. Cool move:

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/us-navy-p-8-poseidon-maritime-patrol-aircraft-reportedly-assisted-ukrainians-in-hitting-russian-navys-black-sea-flagship-rts-moskva-121/

LFC said...

Since the people at the LGM blog have worked themselves into something approaching a frenzied hysteria over the so-called red-brown statements (btw does Compact magazine have a paid subscribership of more than 1,000?), I'm not sure it's necessary to hold up that journal, or whatever it is, for further aspersions here. Personally I don't care what Compact is saying about this, and I also don't care what the mob at LGM is braying about. There are enough real, serious problems that require addressing to see the attacks on the so-called red/brown statements as a kind of arguably irresponsible diversion, because my guess is that the influence on policy or anything else of the so-called red/brown alliance is zero. Let Compact say it wants. Few people are heeding it, is my sense, and probably even fewer care about the self-righteous, quasi-mindless hysteria displayed in some of the LGM comments on this. N.b. I almost never look at LGM but I was there briefly a week or two ago, and that was enough.

LFC said...

Correction: what it wants

s. wallerstein said...

What is the LGM blog?

Achim Kriechel (A.K.) said...

s. wallerstein said...
What is the LGM blog?

I would also be interested.

Marc Susselman said...

I think its "Law, Guns, Money."

Marc Susselman said...

Correction:

"Lawyers, Guns and Money."

s. wallerstein said...

Thanks, Marc.

aaall said...

Golly, didn't mean to trigger anyone. I just found the folks who signed the item an interesting collection. Many seem to be "just want to watch the world burn" types. Some are involved with the growing international National Conservative movement (actually a Fascist International). Many, if not most (all?) of those folks see liberal democracy as not desirable.

Anyway, the circulation of those sorts of journals is irrelevant. Who reads them isn't. Human Events had a low triple digit circulation in its early years. It''s likely some of you have never heard of it. However, one of its subscribers, advocates and true believers was Ronald Reagan (a Hollywood divorce actually changed the world).

I know that Campos and Leiter seem to hate each other but LFC's reaction to a lefty blog seems a bit over the top and what it terms "Red/Brown" is a thing and hardly trivial (s.w. note the company GG and Freddie are keeping).

It's easy to miss straws in the wind. Back in the late 1980s I started listening to Limbaugh and other Righty talkers (got to know a couple). In November 1994 I was at a meeting of one of the committees I was active in and mentioned Limbaugh. Some scoffing ensued from the academics on that committee. Then it was pointed out how he was a factor in the previous week's electoral wipe out. Silence ensued.

The "serious" discussion over Trump being a fascist often reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lJO8N6bxSg

Ditto the IR 'realists" believing anything other then a crushed invasion will lead to anything good.

And it seems other things are going on (at least three):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/22/die-in-fire-at-russia-defence-institute







LFC said...

aaall

I don't give a sh*t about Campos and Leiter hating each other -- I have basically no interest in that little thing.

When that Compact letter came out, Lemieux posted something at LGM in his pretty standard snide, sneering, sardonic style -- basically saying everyone who signed that letter was a crypto-fascist.

Well, maybe most of them are, but Samuel Moyn, whatever you think of his work, isn't. When I had the temerity to point that out in the comments section at that blog I was mobbed by a pack of commenters, one of whom told me to "grow the f*ck up." I told him the same thing and further asked him to stop posting insults.

I'm done with this topic. You're free of course to spend your time as you wish and to think what you like, but I doubt that Compact is the next straw in the wind like Reagan reading Human Events. That's partly because these sorts of outlets prob no longer have the influence even in intellectual circles that they once did.

Btw that letter, while I myself certainly wd never have signed it, was not quite the open apology for Putin that the LGM crowd thought. I don't even remember exactly what it said (and I don't really care).

P.S. LGM is not really a "lefty" blog; it's a liberal Democratic blog where anyone who is two millimeters to the left of Schumer and Pelosi is often deemed to be a worthless POS who shd burn in the fires of everlasting damnation.

p.p.s. When I see evidence that "red/brown" has started to infiltrate the thinking of anyone other than GG, FdeB, the people who run Compact, plus maybe a couple of academics, then I might start to pay attention.

Human Events was a John Birch Society organ, of course. It didn't have to engage in alliances. Red/brown, to the extent it's even a thing, is by definition a collection of strange bedfellows. How much do you expect them to actually agree on, beyond some vague gestures in the direction of deploring a hubristic (as they see it) U.S. foreign policy?

s. wallerstein said...

I googled "red/brown" and have a vague idea of what it means in general.

What exactly does it refer to in this context?

LFC said...

One exception at LGM is Erik Loomis, who is somewhat to the left on certain issues. But I basically don't read it any more, even occasionally bc I can't stand the smug, sneery, snarky, broad-brush tone of Lemieux and some of the others. It's a shame bc the front-page posters are often knowledgeable, but they feel they have to adopt that tone for the commenters, I guess.

LFC said...

s.w.

"Red/brown" in this context refers to people identifiably (or self-identified as) on the right (brown) and people identifiably (or self-identified as) on the left (red) coming together to, in this case, take a line that some other people view as insufficiently condemnatory of Russia, insufficiently supportive of Ukraine, and too prone to blame U.S. and NATO for their (alleged) role in the origins of the conflict.

"Brown" of course suggests fascist, "red" communist, so "red/brown" is probably not a label these people themselves use so much as one their opponents attach to them.

But when someone like Greenwald signs the same letter as a bunch of right-wingers, it's supposed to signal some dire left/right alliance. Personally I never read anything Greenwald writes and I don't much care what he says. Ditto most of the other people who signed that letter. Some or many of the names I cdn't even place, and I was upbraided in the LGM comments section for that.

Moyn is a serious leftish academic historian (highly 'credentialed'). He also has started to write for broader audiences, and I believe is active on Twitter. One may disagree w aspects of his politics of course. He probably should not have signed that letter just on the basis of some of what it said and also who else was signing it. But the idea that he is a crypto-fascist is complete nonsense. When I pointed that out in the LGM comments section, I was set upon.

This is absolutely my last comment on this particular topic.

s. wallerstein said...

LFC,

Thanks for the explanation.

Achim Kriechel (A.K.) said...

now currently running 300 km from here the elections in France. I must confess, a victory of Le Pen and its effects on Europe are currently beyond my imagination. Should Macron win narrowly, then hopefully ALL have read the label "Last Exit".

s. wallerstein said...

Red/brown:

Political parties and movements often demand a "be true to your school" or "my party right or wrong" allegiance which can be intellectually stifling.

I've been on the left since age 16 or 17, mostly in Chile and there are a lot of left doctrines and practices which I question, but I generally keep my questions to myself to avoid losing the few friends I have.

However, loyalty is a virtue in itself and in addition, if we (on the left) are trying to construct a political project, loyalty and consistency are vital to that construction.
Constructive criticism, yes, but criticism for the sake of criticism, no.

Glenn Greenwald has been all over the place. He is very individualistic and while individualism is a virtue in a poet or in a philosopher like Nietzsche or Foucault, in political life it does not contribute to the construction of an alternative political project.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

I do not entirely agree with your comment. I believe any criticism of another’s position which is not mean-spirited, but which points out the flaws of that position from the critic’s perspective is constructive, even if it is not the perspective of others, and even if it is not accompanied by a proposal for improvement. Loyalty for the sake of loyalty is not constructive. You yourself have described yourself on this blog as nonconformist and a perpetual contrarian. If the people whom you think are your friends would alienate you for just asking questions – well, then, are they truly your friends?

s. wallerstein said...

Marc,

I'm not sure that anyone is "TRULY" my friend, but there are people in my life and being a non-conformist and a contrarian, I watch out what I say because at age 76 it's not easy to reconstitute my social circle anew.

s. wallerstein said...

By the way, this video is what led me to make the above comments on Glenn Greenwald. Here he protests against the many injustices in the trials of the Capitol building rioters.

I'm not calling into question his legal expertise (there are lawyers in this forum who may do so of course), but of all the injustices in the world why does he single out the problems of those people who stormed the Capitol building? Why not Amazon warehouse workers or homeless people mistreated by the cops or women who can't get an abortion because of restrictive legislation?

That is, there are so many injustices in this world that the ones a person choses to emphasize say something about him or her. I'm not claiming that Greenwald is a Trump supporter or has been transformed into a racist rightwinger, but that maybe his need to be contrarian (publicly) is an individualistic option that one cannot always permit oneself in this polarized political climate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKq7YZRQy0Y

aaall said...

LFC, I only mentioned the Campos /Leiter thing because it amuses me. Two tenured folks with law prof wages, one eminent in his fields and the other gets to live in Boulder.

Anyway, I checked out Moyn's Twitter and a few articles he wrote and I have to wonder why he signed the letter. I realize that at the time he was concerned about Putin's invasion reigniting the Cold War mentality that led to so many bad things but I think he underestimated what Putin is up to and overestimated the chances of old things happening again.

I don't know how these letters are circulated. Did he know who else would be on the letter? He seems to have been in Nepal trekking around then so altitude effects on judgment (I know from personal experience what the Himalayas can do)? Does one get to see the final product before its published?

Some of the signers are really bad actors and that, not the odd innocent, is the reason for the Red/Brown thing. When histories are written Rufo e.g. is going to be in the Coughlin, G. L. K. Smith, Robert Welsh, etc. column. I hope SM's more careful in the future. (Human Events wasn't, to my knowledge, a Birch publication. The internet changed things but the principle is the same - e.g. Libs of TikTok. These folks do talk amongst themselves.)

As for comments, I've had my death imagined on some sites (not LGM) so water off a duck's back is the best attitude.

Yea! It seems Macron is re-elected. One bullet dodged, two to go. I read that France is sending Ukraine some Caesars (155 mm self-propelled) so that continues. Two more Russian generals down, one wounded.

s. wallerstein said...

No, I don't believe that one gets to see who signs a petition after one has signed and before it is published.

Chomsky signed a petition against cancel culture and later was criticized because some conservatives also signed. Chomsky replied that he had no idea who else was going to sign the petition after he signed it and that in fact, he never does.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

Good point about Greenwald – why choose to champion the rights of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists when there are so many other worthwhile causes to champion? To me, it speaks of a person who is extremely smug and self-centered, who thinks his championing the rights even of insurrectionists sets him apart as superior to the rest of us. But what it really demonstrates is that he has very bad judgment.

P.S.: I am too busy right now to watch the video, but I will do so later.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

So, I could not resist and started watching the interview of Julie Kelly by Greenwald. Ms. Kelly has written a book about the Jan. 6 insurrection and the prosecutions. After 6 minutes of her b.s., I stopped watching. Her main gripe is that most of the prosecutions involve charges of misdemeanors, e.g., parading through the halls of Congress, rather than crimes of violence, and that those accused of such misdemeanors have no choice but to plead guilty because they can’t get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., whose population voted overwhelmingly for Biden. B.S. If you are charged with a misdemeanor such as parading through the halls of Congress, you do not have to plead guilty if you have a valid defense, e.g., this is a case of mistaken identity, I was not even in Washington on Jan. 6, and here is my alibi who will testify that I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma that entire day. If you do not have a defense of misidentification, then the fact that you plead guilty to misdemeanor is not a violation of your civil rights, as Ms. Kelly claims. She ten gores on to claim that actually the police provoked a lot of the violence. More B.S. I have watched videos of the insurrection, and the police were being overwhelmed by the rioters. Then she trivializes the violence which the insurrectionists engaged in, and claims that their use of weapons, e.g., a helmet as a battering ram, is exaggerated. She claims that the Democrats are exploiting the Jan. 6 events for the sole purpose of disparaging Trump. Please. Bottom line – Greenwald is a narcissistic jerk for giving her a platform.

s. wallerstein said...

I googled "Amnesty International Capitol Building Protestors" to see if a reputable international human rights organization, not linked, as far as I know, to the Democrats,
had anything to say about the supposed unjust legal proceedings the protestors were undergoing and zero, nothing.

LFC said...

aaall

I don't know whether or not Moyn knew all the names that would be on that letter (it was a letter, not a petition, so slightly different).

Anonymous said...

“Nearly 80,000 people were defendants in federal criminal cases in fiscal 2018, but just 2% of them went to trial. The overwhelming majority (90%) pleaded guilty instead, while the remaining 8% had their cases dismissed, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data collected by the federal judiciary.

Most defendants who did go to trial, meanwhile, were found guilty, either by a jury or judge. (Defendants can waive their right to a jury trial if they wish.)

Put another way, only 320 of 79,704 total federal defendants – fewer than 1% – went to trial and won their cases, at least in the form of an acquittal, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/

aaall said...

When folks act like Greenwald, I want to see the receipts. A running joke since the sanctions is how many Substacks fade away.

Anon, they are on video. Some videoed themselves and posted it. Cell tower info shows locations. Going meta isn't responsive. The reporter is with American Greatness - a rightwing journal.

Interesting book:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en&#

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MQ-SC9bmp4

LFC said...

aaall

I saw (via Zoom) a talk by Gerstle on his Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. I think it's prob been archived on YouTube or soon will be (at the National History Center channel).

Marc Susselman said...

Very nice version.

But here is my favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOeFhSzoTuc

Vive la France!

aaall said...

Another good thing:

https://digbysblog.net/2022/04/24/the-right-got-a-wake-up-call-today/

I hadn't realized it was this bad:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-finlandization-terrible-model-ukraine

Marc Susselman said...

I have been preoccupied with my proposed syllogism above and its application to the nature of law and legal precepts: Are legal principles synthetic a posteriori (which is the natural response), or synthetic a priori (the natural response to which is, “How could they be?”)

Take the following adaptation of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, that all human beings are created equal and endowed by virtue of their being human with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The use of the word “equal” obviously does not mean that all human beings have the same cognitive or athletic skills and abilities. What does it mean? I propose that it means that all human beings are equal in how society must treat them regardless of those aspects of their physiognomy over which they have no control and which are irrelevant to evaluating their character – their race, skin color, national origin (i.e., where born), gender (although not irreversible, not relevant to evaluating character), religion (although not irreversible, not relevant to evaluating character), height, (weight?). Regardless these differentials, society and the law should treat them all equally, in terms of their opportunities in life, their right to liberty, and their opportunities to achieve personal happiness.

The first question is, is the proposition true? Do we all believe it? If anyone were to deny its truth, I would say to that person, fine, we will treat you differently from the rest of us - we will deny you life, liberty, and/or your right to pursue happiness because of your race, and/or where you were born, and/or your gender, and/or the religion you have chosen, and/or your height, and see whether you protest that this is wrong and unfair.

Is this proposition a synthetic proposition, meaning, is its negation logically contradictory? It is obviously synthetic, rather than analytic – its negation is not internally inconsistent.

What is its derivation, is it a posteriori, derived from our sense perceptions? I don’t see how it could be, any more, according to Hume, than our belief in causation can be justified a posteriori.

Which means it must be a synthetic a priori proposition which is a true proposition about human beings for which we do not have to consult our sense perceptions in order to determine its truth.

Rebuttals?

Michael said...

^There's gotta be a simpler way of stating that question! :) Your main concern, at least in its initial statement, could probably be divorced from Kant's theory of knowledge (which is connected to several unresolved controversies*) and divorced from your argument concerning evolution, and boiled down somewhat as follows:

When people say, "All human beings deserve equal treatment under the law," what's going on?

That is: What do they mean by this expression, and how would they account for their believing (or at least saying) it? How would they respond if challenged to justify it?

*A good place to get an overview of these controversies would be the SEP: analytic/synthetic distinction, a priori justification and knowledge, rationalism vs. empiricism

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Here is your gloss of the principle about equality that is at issue:

"I propose that it means that all human beings are equal in how society must treat them regardless of those aspects of their physiognomy over which they have no control and which are irrelevant to evaluating their character – their race, skin color, national origin (i.e., where born), gender (although not irreversible, not relevant to evaluating character), religion (although not irreversible, not relevant to evaluating character), height, (weight?)."

According to your gloss, the principle is a normative proposition, as indicated by its essential reference to how human beings "must" be treated.

Whether normative propositions should be construed as analytic, synthetic a priori, or synthetic a posteriori is a matter of some contention in meta-ethics. But, the first point to be made about the principle you cite is that on your gloss it is a normative proposition, however such propositions should then be construed along the meta-ethical continuum.



Marc Susselman said...

David,

Yes, it is obviously a normative proposition. But that, certainly, does not entail that it is false. Does it entail that whether it is true or false in indeterminate?

Do you agree that the proposition is true? If not, why not?

Is it analytic or synthetic? It cannot be analytic, since its denial is not internally inconsistent.

Is it known a priori, or a posteriori? How could it be known a posterior, what sense perceptions would confirm its truth?

What does construing the proposition along the meta-ethical continuum tell us?

Why am I concerned about this? I am an attorney, whose objective is enforcing legal principles, both civil and criminal. A good number of those principles, particularly in the area of criminal law (but not exclusively), purport to have their basis in ethics. If there is no validity to that derivation, I need to know; I need to know whether what I have devoted 44 years of my life to is nothing more than a sham.

Marc Susselman said...

Post-script:

Another source of my concern is this: Many of us commenting on this blog are making normative judgments. For example, you, I, aaall, David Palmeter, LFC, Prof. Wolff, et al., all agree (in varying degrees, perhaps) that minimizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and blaming it on the U.S. and it allies efforts to expand NATO, are misguided and in some sense “wrong.” Others, e.g., s. wallerstein, Anonymous, disagree with us. And this is not the only subject about which we express normative judgements. We have been making them repeatedly about Trump and the Republicans. If there is no rational basis for making normative judgments – if they have no potential for being true – then what are we doing?

s. wallerstein said...

Marc,

You're distorting what I say once again. Instead of telling others what my position is, why don't you stick to telling others what yours is? We'll get along a lot better if you stick to that. Thanks.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

I am sorry, but how have I distorted the opinions you have expressed on this blog regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Have you not written that the media's almost uniform condemnation of the invasion should be viewed with a degree of skepticism? Does this not entail that Russia has a perspective regarding the invasion which may be justified (not which does, but which may)? Is this contrary to my position, and that of the others whom I identified that Russia has absolutely no justification for its invasion?

s. wallerstein said...

Marc,

I've stated that I will not engage in this kind of conversation with you again. I make affirmations and since you afterwards "explain" what I say in your own words, you inevitably distort what I say and then I lose hours reexplaining my position.

If you stop "explaining" what I say, I would bet that we will get along very well in the future in spite of our political and philosophical differences.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

Well, I dispute that I have distorted or misrepresented what you have opined about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and you are refusing to explain how I have distorted what you have written. We will get along better if I refrain from explaining your comments? What does that mean? We do not live in the same residence, and surely you are not threatening to fly to Michigan to teach me a lesson, so to speak.

And anyway, you are missing the point of my comment, which is on what basis do those of us who are making normative judgments on this blog have a philosophical justification for doing so, if there is no validity to normative statements?

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Of course, a proposition's being normative does not entail that it is false. The prior question is whether it has any truth value at all and, if so, what sort of truth conditions are at issue.

That brings us to meta-ethics: the study of the logical status of normative and evaluative propositions.

Here's a brief outline:

One meta-ethical concern: Do normative and evaluative sentences have truth values?

Yes: Cognitivism.
No: Non-cognitivism.

Non-cognitivism comes in many varieties, e.g.

Emotivism: "X is right [obligatory, etc]" = "X: Hurrah"
Prescriptivism: "X is right [obligatory, etc]" = "I endorse doing X" or "Let X be done"

Cognitivism also comes in many varieties, e.g.

Intuitionism: "X is right [obligatory, etc]" = "X instantiates the non-natural, i.e. metaphysically autonomous, property of rightness."
Naturalism: "X is right [obligatory, etc]" = "X instantiates some natural, i.e. empirically accessible, property P [ e.g. utility maximization or the equal distribution of some commodity]"

Naturalism comes in many varieties, e.g.

Objectivism: Rightness is identical with some "attitude-independent" empirical property [e.g. utility maximization or the equal distribution of some commodity]
Subjectivism: the rightness of a state of affairs is constituted by the fact of its being the object of some human attitude, e.g. approval or endorsement.

[A fine point: The difference between non-cognitivism and subjectivist cognitivism can seem a bit precious, since they both take normatively to be a function of human attitudes of approval or endorsement.... They just take it to be a different kind of function. For non-cognitivists, a normative sentence is primarily used to express attitudes, whereas for cognitivist subjectivists, normative sentences are used to make true or false statements about the objects of those attitudes. For the opposition, i.e. intuitionists and objectivist naturalists, these attitude-dependent and attitude-expressive views come to much the same thing in that they have similar implications for questions about moral relativism.]

Your questions about whether normative statements are to be construed as synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori do map onto the meta-ethical classifications briefly sketched above, but are no longer the starting point for doing meta-ethics.

I hope the helps map the territory of concern.






David Zimmerman said...

Again to Marc:

In sketching the territory of meta-ethics I certainly have not answered the pressing questions you raise about normativity, e.g. whether normative judgment have truth value and, if so, what sort of truth conditions they have.

I have views on theses matters, but I don't think that my laying them out here would do anybody much good.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

That is a great overview of the area of meta-ethics, and thank you for taking the time to write it. It appears that I am a cognitive intuitionist. (If I am not mistaken, this was G. E. Moore’s view as well.)

It demonstrates why I left the Ph.D. philosophy program at U of M and switched to law, where ultimately you get a final answer. It may not be the answer I agree with it, but it’s an answer, which has its redeeming value. As Justice Jackson once opined, “The Supreme Court is not final because it is infallible; it is infallible because it is final.” But, my question remains, is the pretense that law is ultimately based on ethical principles nothing more than a sham?

Moreover, your mapping of the area, with its varied options and inconclusive result regarding the validity of normative judgments, still leaves, for me, the question of what precisely are we who comment on this blog, frequently with normative judgments, are doing? And I do not ask this sarcastically or facetiously. You, for example, have made a number of statements in which you have expressed in very firm terms that certain perspectives are, from a normative view, erroneous and unjustifiable. I have to infer that you believe making such normative judgments is rational and justifiable, correct? It seems to me that a non-cognitivist could not, legitimately, offer such opinions. So that would make you a cognitivist of some kind, no? And what about the rest of the commenters who have expressed strong opinions about Russia’s invasion; the duplicity of Trump; the hypocrisy of the Republicans? (Are accusations of hypocrisy value based, or no more than recognition of inconsistent positions?)

Marc Susselman said...

David,

OK. I just checked your resume’ at Simon Fraser University. So, I will have to read one or more of your publications to find out in which school of meta-ethics you fall, and why.

s. wallerstein said...

Marc,

We see the world very differently. When I say that we will get along better, far from threatening you, I simply mean that if you refrain from explaining what I say in your own words, which tends to distort my meaning, I will most probably enjoy conversing with you.

Of course you always have the possbility of going back, seeing what I did say and quoting me in my own words.

As for morality, I feel a bit inhibited giving my opinion after Professor Zimmerman's learned exposition, but I'm not a moral objectivist (I believe that it the correct term): I don't believe that the statement is "x is morally wrong" is objective in the sense that
the statement "Santiago is the capitol of Chile" is.

Marc Susselman said...

s. wallerstein,

My final statement on this subject. If you comment on a public blog such as this, you do not have the right to prohibit others from responding civilly to your comment. In the last 24 months, when I have responded to some of your comments, I have been civil, and I have never intentionally misinterpreted or distorted one of your comments. If one is to respond to a comment, it will necessarily be based on the respondent’s interpretation of the comment. One may not post a comment, which necessarily invites responses based on the respondent’s interpretation of the comment, accuse the respondent of distorting or misinterpreting the comment, but then refuse to explain how the respondent’s interpretation is a distortion or misinterpretation. In past comments you have accused me of not playing fair. You are not playing fair.

s. wallerstein said...

Marc,

The truth is that I'm sick of losing time answering all your distortions. But if you want to continue this game, go for it buddy.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Thank you for the gracious response to my pedantic "meta-ethics" post.

You ask: "...is the pretence that law is ultimately based on ethical principles nothing more than a sham?"

At the risk of a bit more pedantry, I'll just note that "based on" is ambiguous in the question you raise.

It could mean: "Do moral principles and commitments enter into the very identification of a statement as a law within a given legal system?"

This is the question that divides so-called "legal moralists" and "legal realists" in the philosophy of law. Legal realists insist that the identification conditions for laws are completely independent of any moral principles. The most sophisticated legal realist was the great HLA Hart. Legal moralists, by contrast, insist that a statement counts as a law only if it is at least consistent with some moral principle or another. Lon Fuller was a prominent defender of this view.

Now, this distinction may not map neatly onto what [I think] really concerns you, for "based on" could also mean that
laws and legal systems are properly the object of moral judgements, so that it is appropriate to criticize laws and legal systems from a moral point of view.

Legal realists need not reject this idea. Hart set out a very complicated account of the "rules of recognition" that [in his view] constitute an injunction as a law within a legal system [in his masterpiece, "The Concept of Law"]. His account does not require that a R of R make any essential reference to morality.

However, Hart would not have rejected the idea that a give legal system, though a genuine legal system, is fair game for moral criticism. The obvious example would be the Nurmberg Laws under the Nazi regime in Germany. Hart would consider them genuine laws, but I am sure that he also considered them to be morally vile. [Fuller would not even consider them actual laws.]

I suspect that everyone on this blog, whether legal realist or legal moralist on the conceptual issue, would take it for granted that any law or system of laws is open to moral criticism... which brings us back to your ultimate concern whether morality has a rational basis or is just a "sham."

FWIW... which isn't very much, I long ago wrote a dissertation defending a kind of naturalist subjectivism that included [by my lights] robust enough rational constraints on the normativity-constituting attitudes to provide as much rational grounding for morality as one could reasonably hope for. It would fall short of what moral rationalists like Kant or intuitionists like Moore or naturalist objectivists would want. I'd love to have something stronger than "constrained subjectivism," [wouldn't we all?] but don't see any way to make the stronger positions work. That, however, is a story for another occasion.



Marc Susselman said...

David,

Thank you for this additional information. I have more reading to do in the area of philosophy of law.

David Zimmerman said...

To S. Wallerstein:

I share your doubts about meta-ethical moral objectivism. I too believe that the truth conditions of a statement like "Bashing in the skull of a sleeping four year old is morally wrong" are metaphysically different from those of "Santiago is the capital of Chile."

Spelling out the difference is hard though. ["Entire careers..." and all that.]

For ease of exposition, let's take a different example of a clearly objective truth, say, the law of free falling terrestrial objects. It is a fact that an object dropped in a vacuum from say 200 ft above the ground falls at a rate of 32 ft per second per second. This fact is what makes the original statement true, regardless of whether anybody believes it or approves of it or has any attitude towards it at all.

Meta-ethical objectivists believe that the same sort of thing holds of moral statements like the one about infant bashing. The trick is to spell out precisely [or even roughly] what such "moral facts" are like. GE Moore [actually, WD Ross] thought that we could just "intuit" that infant bashing is an instance of the autonomous property of wrongness. But what is this intuition? Some kind of spooky sixth sense? Naturalist objectivists think that we have some technique for identifying just what empirically accessible property is identical or to be reduced to moral wrongness. But what is this technique? The methods of the empirical sciences don't, on the face of it, reveal such property-identities or reductions. [I am hardly doing these forms of meta-ethical objectivism justice, but time is short.]

For a naturalist subjectivist, it is the fact that human beings take up attitudes towards certain types of actions and practices that [ultimately-- the story may be a long one] constitutes them as morally right or wrong.

But, then, how do we avoid falling into the most crude sort of "anything goes" moral relativism or nihilism? What entitles a naturalist subjectivist to make moral judgements with any sort of confidence that he or she is doing anything more than just spouting off? venting?

Short answer: Attitudes like approval and disapproval, endorsement and rejection, are themselves subject to rational constraints, such as getting the empirical facts right, distributing attitudes consistently across the set in accordance with their actual objects, and the like. In short, attitudes can be more and less rational, and that is enough to block the most crude "boo/hurrah" "anything goes" moral relativism.

Question: How much conflict in basic attitudes would remain if everybody subjected his or hers to rational constraints like the ones just cited? A lot less than currently exists? Definitely. Enough to eliminate all conflicts of attitudes and thus all moral disagreement? Probably not. But enough convergence of rationally constrained attitudes to sustain civilized human life? We better hope so.

One philosophical moral of the story: In the hunt for a robust [enough] basis for morality, naturalist subjectivism is a "fall back" position, to be embraced only when one has become convinced that the more robust objectivist positions are out of the running.

I, for one, have become so convinced, and thus have choice but to fall back.... I hope without too hard a bump.

S. Wallerstein: I hope that my sketch of a basis for moral naturalist subjectivism, a position we seem to share, makes sense to you.

The big worry, yet again, is that if no version of moral objectivism is philosophically sustainable [a big "if"], then we all are left either with something like "constrained naturalist subjectivism" as the basis of our moral judgments or with nothing at all. And if the latter, then all this moral talk is empty rhetoric.



s. wallerstein said...

David Zimmerman,

First of all, thanks for the lengthy exposition of your position.

I myself am very confused. I'm not claiming that "anything goes", but of course the Islamic fundamentalist also considers his or her position to be "rational". The white supremacist too.

There are probably certain evolutionary constraints. No culture can survive if they routine bash in the skulls of 4 year old children from that same culture, but lots of them justify bashing in the skulls of children from "enemy" cultures.

Yes, I can claim that my principles are somehow "better" than those of the white supremacist, but he or she makes the same claim. So I'm confused and my feeling is that I'm going to have to live with confusion and go on advocating what seems best to me, sort of like Rorty's liberal ironist, as I understand it.

Anonymous said...

Some background on the present crisis:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150npp3q49x7w/how-harvard-lost-russia

David Zimmerman said...

To S Wallerstein:

I do take your point: Even in the absence of assurance that there is a firm meta-ethical basis for one's deepest moral convictions, it is virtually impossible to refrain from pressing them as hard as one can against those who pursue ends that seem morally vile, such a white supremacists and their ilk. Yet, despite one's conviction and in philosophically reflective moments, there is the lingering feeling that the whole morality game is a sham.

So, I share your sense of confusion.

Actually, white supremacist views may be one of the easier cases for us to deal with, since they are so obviously based on empirically false claims about people of colour. The same goes for deeply and savagely misogynistic practices that brutalize women across so many cultures. Your principles bearing on the treatment of non-white people and woman ARE better than those of the white supremacists and mullahs, because they are so wrong about the empirical facts.

By contrast, there are harder moral cases, such as abortion, where basic conceptions of, e.g. personhood, clash, and where getting the indisputable empirical facts straight may not resolve the moral disputes.

Distributive justice is another area where imposing the uncontested rational constraints may not force convergence of views.

I confess that I have never understood Rorty's liberal ironism... how he could wholeheartedly embrace moral views while at the same time disavowing any robust notion of rationality, including epistemic and logical rationality. His pose always struck me as philosophically lazy.

Thanks for your responses to my posts.




s. wallerstein said...

David Zimmerman,

You're right about white supremacist and Islamic fundamentalist positions being weak on empirical facts. I stand corrected on that.

Abortion, as you point out, is a better example. And also, as you point out, distribution justice issues. A few days ago I listened to a podcast with Joshua Cohen speaking about Rawls, who has been very criticized by Professor Wolff and others on the more radical left and actually, I hadn't any very good arguments to counter those of Joshua Cohen.

Rorty quotes Schumpeter: "to realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand by them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian".

I guess the point is that one's convictions are the tools one has and if they stand up to rational scrutiny and those of empirical science (your two parameters) and you care about others and about ending cruelty (Rorty's point), then stand by your convictions.

Thank you too.

Marc Susselman said...

David, s. wallerstein,

O.K., I feel compelled to stick my nose in again. David, above you stated the difficulty with moral objectivism is identifying what the attributes are of those principles we claim are moral, vs. those which are not. But why does it require explanation as a prerequisite to qualify as a morally justifiable precept? Putting Prof. Singer’s exception for newborns which suffer from painful disabilities aside, it is a fact that bashing in the skulls of new-born, healthy infants is immoral. Period. Everybody who reads this blog believes this, even s. wallerstein. The fact that children are killed in warfare, as in Ukraine, is not a counter-example which proves it is not immoral. The same is true with dismembering a human being while still alive who has not committed any crime (whether it is also immoral to dismember a human being who has committed a crime, who has even confessed to the crime voluntarily and without duress, is beside the point). Why cannot it not be true that we can identify a moral precepts as being a true moral precept even if we cannot define why it is a moral precept, like the primary colors? A proposition can be true without the ability to prove that it is true. If Godel proved this for mathematics, why cannot it not also be true of some normative judgments?

If this is not the case, then most of us who comment on this blog are all hypocrites, because we make normative judgments on this blog all the time, with steadfast fervor. If there are no correct normative judgments unless they can be proved, then we have no business making them. And how long must we wait until the cognitivists and the non-cognitivists of every stripe come to a consensus?

Marc Susselman said...

Post-script:

This is why I disagree with the dichotomy posed by Plato in the Euthyphro, i.e., is the moral precept that it is immoral to bash in the skull of a newborn human (not an example he uses) because it was chosen by God, or did God choose it because it is true? It is true, regardless whether there is a God, and regardless whether s/he chose it. And it is true regardless that in some cultures female babies were left out in the cold to die. If this basic moral precept is not true, then why are we arguing whether Russia did or did not have a right to invade Ukraine, and whether or not it would be moral for Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons?

Marc Susselman said...

Post-post-cript:

s. wallerstein,

Are you going to accuse me of distorting your opinion by asserting that even you believe that bashing in the skull of a newborn healthy human is immoral?

David Zimmerman said...

To S. Wallerstein:

We are in large agreement on the main points.

At the cost of a bit of repetition: my problem with Rorty is that he really had no use for the practices of rational scrutiny qua rational, much less for the methods of empirical science, considering them just one or two more "narratives," on a par with any other "narrative" one might care to embrace, such as astrology or witchcraft.... take your pick. He really was an anti-rationalist in liberal's clothing.

But Rorty, thank the non-existent gods, is not the issue here.

s. wallerstein said...

David Zimmerman,

As you undoubtedly are aware, Rorty opted out of philosophy later in his career and migrated to the literature department.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

First, the easy bit about the Euthrypho problem. [I'll save a thoughtful response to your longer, interesting post for tomorrow when I have gathered my energy].

You do not actually disagree with anything Socrates says in his posing of the EP. His conclusion is the same as yours, namely that the gods disapprove of bashing in the skull a baby because it is objectively wrong to bash in the skull of a baby, not that the bashing.... is wrong because the gods disapprove of it.

The Euthyphro problem is meant to establish the truth of meta-ethical objectivism as opposed to meta-ethical subjectivism, even if the subjective attitudes in question are those of the gods.

As you recall, Socrates's' challenge to the idea that bashing... is wrong because the gods disapprove of it is a kind of reductio: "What if the god's approved of the bashing? Would that show that the bashing is morally right? NO! That is absurd. Therefore, that reading of the disjunction, which grounds wrongness in the god's disapproval, cannot be correct. Therefore, The wrongness of bashing... is an objective property of that practice. The gods disapprove of bashing... because IT IS WRONG--- FULL STOP. QED."

You and Socrates are on the same page.

FWIW: Wallerstein and I are on the other page: For us, the moral wrongness of any act or practice is, meta-ethically, a function of its being the object of some attitude.... to be sure, not of the gods but of human subjects.

Now, the challenge for us naturalist subjectivists is to specify the kind of attitudes that count as rightness and wrongness-grounding... no mean task. A bit on this, and your longer comment, tomorrow, I hope.

Good night all.

David Zimmerman said...

To Wallerstein:

Right....comparative literature at Stanford.

Not to be disrespectful to your regard for Rorty [though I admit that I am trying to wean you away from him].....

but most philosophers I know said "good riddance."

OK--- I have to admit, he WAS entertaining and did have a lot of engaging things to say about America politics.

s. wallerstein said...

David Zimmerman,

First of all, I'm not an expert on Rorty. I've only read Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

From that, I liked the notion of liberal ironist because I see myself as an ironist in the sense he uses the word and also a liberal in the sense he uses the word, which is not exactly the sense used in the media.

I'm not concerned with his epistemology nor with epistemology in general. I wasn't a philosophy major and my knowledge of philosophy is that of a curious lay person. My main concerns are ethics and politics and as I said above, I identified with his notion of liberal ironist.

I'm not claiming that Rorty is a major philosopher nor do I possess the philosophical background to make that kind of judgment. Rorty was a writer (not necessarily qua philosopher) who I learned some things from. Just as one can learn some things from Marcel Proust, a writer who Rorty talks about in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

David Zimmerman said...

To S. Wallerstein:

Fair enough.... The end of of my attempt at weaning...from my narrowly philosophical perch.

One does take from authors what one can.

Cheers from the northeast corner of the northern hemisphere [Quebec City] to the southwest corner of the southern [Santiago].

s. wallerstein said...

David Zimmerman,

Cheers to you too.

Thanks also for explaining the two criteria of rationality and empirical science, which, in my opinion, even the liberal ironist would do well to adopt in his or her ethical judgments.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

I based my discussion of the Euthyphro on my recollection of it from a past reading many years ago, and my recollection may be a bit fuzzy. But my recollection (and I will have to find my copy of Plato’s dialogues buried somewhere in my philosophy library in the basement, which I do not have time to do at the moment) is that the dialogue does not end with a resolution of the question regarding how one determines what is moral/just. Yes, Socrates rejects the proposition that what is moral/just is what the gods designate as such because they so designate it, but rather they so designate it as such because it is moral/just. But then he proceeds to ask, if memory serves, what are the attributes of such propositions which set them apart as moral/just? The dialogue ends without an answer to this question. The implication I got from reading the dialogue years ago is that without discerning what those attributes are, the is no rational basis for designating a given proposition as moral or immoral. As I understand it, this is also your position. This is what I dispute and object to. I deny that a moral precept necessarily must be proved and/or defined before it can be deemed to be a true moral precept. I maintain that the precept that it is immoral to bash in the skull of a healthy, newborn human is per se immoral, and I do not have to prove it, or determine what about it renders it a true moral precept. It is self-evident. And this is true regardless that there have been some cultures, and may continue to be cultures, in which such conduct is acceptable. As you acknowledge, the task of determining what the attributes of such a proposition are which designate it as moral, versus other possible propositions, is very difficult. I submit that it is futile. And the failure to prove its truth does not invalidate its truth. We do not prove the basic axioms of Euclidean geometry, they are accepted without proof. Why can’t this also be true of certain normative judgments? Otherwise, you and those who share your philosophy regarding ethics, should forego making normative judgments in general, as well as on this blog, i.e., it would be immoral (not just imprudent) for Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, until you can provide the answer to the question, what distinguishes true moral propositions from false ones?

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc S:

Let me see if I can respond to your last two long messages.

As I see it, you are presenting a dilemma to naturalist subjectivists like me:

First Possibility: Some kind of meta-ethical objectivism is true, that is, moral properties are either metaphysically sui generis and intuitable properties [Rightness in itself, Wrongness in itself] or they are to be identified with or reduced to natural, empirically accessible, properties.

Logical implication [sensibly] claimed by you : Moral discourse, i.e. well-formed and grounded moral claims about human acts and practices, is sustainable and defensible and has a point.

Second possibility: All forms of meta-Ethical objectivism fail.

Logical implication claimed by you: Moral discourse, our ordinary judgments about right and wrong, are utterly without ease and point.... and anyone who continues to engage in that discourse is a hypocrite.

Frustrating though you might find it, this is a false dichotomy. Nor is it a genuine dilemma, with only one acceptable horn and implication....

The remaining possibility, unacknowledged in your alleged dichotomy, is a version of naturalist subjectivism that grounds moral rightness and wrongness in human attitudes that are filtered by robust enough constraints of non-moral rationality [e.g. factual accuracy and logical consistency] to provide some degree of rational grounding for the attitudes that this kind of view takes to constitute moral rightness and wrongness.

To be sure, this will be not as robust a grounding as the versions of meta-ethical objectivism would provide, if they were defensible. But some of us have concluded that they are not defensible, and that rationally constrained or filtered attitude-based morality is the best on offer.

Absent a genuine engagement with the dialectic that divides meta-ethical objectivists and subjectivists, there is no reason for anyone to accuse the latter of "hypocrisy" when we make heartfelt moral judgements about, e.g. the war in Ukraine.

Permit me to say that you have not yet genuinely engaged with that dialectic.

Short point: There is a meta-ethical alternative to objectivism that you have not yet taken seriously enough as a vindication of moral discourse.

Cheers.







Maec Susselman said...

David,

When you have the time, perhaps you can chew on the following:

1. If certain conduct is immoral for a human being to engage in, then it is appropriate to condemn such conduct should a human engage in it.

2. If certain conduct cannot be characterized as being moral or immoral, but its moral character is indeterminate, then it is not appropriate to condemn such conduct as immoral should a human engage in it.
3. There are no other possible characterizations of human conduct.

4. a. It is immoral for a human being to bash in the skull of a newborn, healthy human being, and therefore it is appropriate to condemn such conduct if engaged in by a human being.

b. It is neither moral nor immoral for a human being to bash in the skull of a newborn, healthy human being; rather, it is indeterminate, and therefore it is not appropriate to condemn such conduct as immoral if engaged in by a human being.

Which do you believe is true, either 4(a) or 4(b)?

If 4(a), can you explain on what basis?

If 4(b), then, if 100 human beings did this to 100 new born, healthy human infants, although they would all be subject to criminal prosecution, it would not be appropriate to condemn their conduct as immoral.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

I have just read your penultimate response to me.

What you have written does not address the example I am using. Neither factual accuracy (i.e., claims by white supremacists that African-Americans deserve to be treated differently than Caucasians, because the are genetically inferior), nor logical inconsistency rules out the example of whether it is morally wrong to bash in the head of a newborn healthy human child. There is nothing factually inaccurate about the proposition that it is not immoral to engage in such conduct, nor is it logically inconsistent. Therefore, if you believe that it is immoral, there must be some other basis.

Further, regarding the invasion of Ukraine, I would agree that Putin’s rationale that it was necessary to de-Nazify Ukraine is factually erroneous. But what if he said, “I just invaded Ukraine for the hell of it.” No factual inconsistency there. Nor would it be logically inconsistent. What about if he decides to use tactical nuclear weapons? Would that be immoral? Again, there would be no factual inaccuracy, nor logical inconsistency. According to your analysis, the use of tactical nuclear weapons could not be condemned as immoral.

LFC said...

Marc,

I haven't participated so far in this particular discussion partly because, unlike Prof Zimmerman, I don't have professional expertise in ethics (or philosophy more broadly). I don't think you are really accurately interpreting David Zimmerman's position and its implications, but he can speak for himself obviously.

With that out of the way, I'll briefly lay out my own view (which is close to DZ's, I think, but I'll put it in my own words). It is not necessary to believe in the truth of a normative judgment in order to make the normative judgment. Why? Because can one hold that normative judgments are neither true nor false but rather rational or irrational, or grounded in other moral judgments that one finds, on reflection, to be persuasive and reasonable and right as against the alternatives. One may have a set of reasonably coherent moral beliefs that one finds rational; that's not necessarily the same as holding that one's beliefs are true in either an analytic or a synthetic a priori sense.

For example, in order to state non-hypocritically that deliberately targeting civilians in war is wrong, I don't have to either prove or assume the truth of that proposition, because I don't think that truth versus falsity is a very helpful or illuminating way to think about propositions of that sort. Rather, the proposition that deliberately targeting civilians in war is wrong derives its force from an underlying commitment to the worth or value of human life, and that commitment itself is, I think, neither true nor false but rather a moral stance that one chooses to adopt, sometimes as part of a broader set of "metaphysical" (I suppose) or moral beliefs about the world and about humans.

As David Zimmerman points out in his comment @1:56 p.m., moral attitudes (and presumably moral beliefs) are properly subjected to rational constraints such as getting the facts right and being consistent with other attitudes (or beliefs) on similar or related matters.

Ultimately, though, I'm inclined to think that one makes a choice about which set of values to adhere to. The choice may be influenced by upbringing, environment, the norms of the society in which one lives, things one has read, how one assesses the facts, and so on, but it still can be viewed as a choice. You apparently think that that's not good enough, that one has to affirm that one's choice is grounded in truth; I don't think that's necessary. To be sure, the idea that there are moral truths grounded in natural law or divine revelation or whatever is a venerable idea, but I reject your claim (or what I understand to be your claim) that one must believe something like that in order to make normative judgments in a "non-hypocritical" way.

Lastly, this whole meta-ethical discussion is arguably of doubtful relevance to the discussion here of, say Ukraine/Russia, where most participants agree on the basic moral propositions but sometimes disagree on how to apply them to a specific situation. Put in fancier language, to discuss or "do" applied ethics one need not go into the grounds of morality, especially if the people with whom one is having the discussion share some basic moral beliefs, attitudes, and/or intuitions.

Look at it this way. You think bashing in the skull of an infant is objectively wrong. I think it's wrong (I don't use the word "objectively"). What difference does it make that you think it's objectively wrong and I think it's simply wrong? It makes no difference. We both agree that it's wrong. That you insist on an objective grounding for morality puts you in company with a long line of thinkers, but so what? In the end, we both agree that it's wrong.

Marc Susselman said...

LFC,

Actually, what you have written is more in line with my analysis than with David’s. My position is that one can make valid moral judgments without proving them, and without identifying what attributes the mora judgment has that nonmoral judgments do not have. This is a moral objectivist point of view. David, and the school of ethics he subscribes to, rejects this viewpoint. Only judgments which are not based on factual inaccuracies, and are not logically inconsistent, can be regarded as valid moral judgments. So, your assertion that. “deliberately targeting civilians in war is wrong derives its force from an underlying commitment to the worth or value of human life.” Can you prove that human life has an intrinsic worth or value that deserves to be respected? I think not. Is this view dictated by the accuracy of any facts? I think not. Is it dictated by logic? I think not. I agree with you, because it is s valid moral judgment in and of itself that does not have to be proved, nor explained by identifying how it differs from other propositons.

You state regarding the Ukraine/Russian conflict, “most participants agree on the basic moral propositions but sometimes disagree on how to apply them to a specific situation.” Where did they get their “basic moral propositions”? Did they obtain them by logical analysis? Did they obtain them by empirical observation? No, they intuited them. Even if they originally leaned them as children, assuming they were not based on religious beliefs, they earned them from others who intuited them. According to David and the school of ethics he subscribes to, there are no valid moral intuitions, per se. That is why I maintain, given this position, they cannot make normative judgements about the Russian/Ukrainian conflict without engaging in hypocrisy.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Part I

Your challenge is worth taking seriously.

"If objectivist theories are indefensible, then there is nothing left of morality worth embracing. But, the theoretical option you [DZ] favour, does not salvage nearly enough of morality's claimed authority to be worth the trouble. So, philosophers who have tried to defend response-dependent, qualified- attitude, ideal-observer, contractualist, constructivist and other versions of naturalist subjectivism, have been wasting their time. There is not enough "there there" to vindicate enough of the claimed authority of moral discourse.

"But, the theoretical option you [DZ] favour, does not salvage nearly enough of morality's claimed authority to be worth the trouble of formulating and working out the details. So, philosophers such as RB Brandt, Roderick Firth, Michael Smith, TM Scanlon, John Rawls and others, who have tried to defend response-dependent, qualified- attitude, ideal-observer, contractualist, constructivist and other versions of naturalist subjectivism have been wasting their time. There is not enough "there there" to vindicate enough of the claimed authority of moral discourse.

"The reason is plain: Once the rational constraints available to such theorists have been imposed upon the relevant idealized human responses that are supposed to constitute or construct the rightness and wrongness of actions and practices, there is simply no guarantee that there would be convergence in the approvals and endorsements of the epistemically and logically idealized responders.

"So, naturalist subjectivism is vulnerable to the spectre of a deep kind of moral relativism. That is, at the end of the day, there is nothing to rule out the possibility that there will be some idealized responders, as epistemically and logically competent as you please, who are utterly indifferent to, say, the suffering and death of the infant whose head is bashed in. That possibility would entail that the subjectivist would be committed to relativizing ascriptions of "right" and "wrong" to the approvals and disapprovals of these conflicting responses.

"The judgement 'bashing in the head of a human infant is morally wrong' would be grounded in the responses of those idealized subject who would respond negatively to the practice. However, given the possibility of non-convergence in the responses of even idealized agents, that very same judgement would count as false relative to the responses of idealized agents who would respond positively or with indifference.

"The judgement 'bashing in the head of a human infant is morally wrong' would be grounded in the responses of those idealized subject who would respond negatively to the practice. However, given the possibility of non-convergence in the responses of even idealized agents, that very same judgement would count as false relative to the responses of idealized agents who would respond positively or with indifference.

“Given the latter possibility, I [MS] conclude that the meta-ethical subjectivist have no non-hypocritical grounds for making confident moral judgements about the wrongness of painfully killing infants. The most you [DZ] and your ilk are entitled to say is something like this: 'Bashing... is wrong, not tout court, but only relative to the responses of those idealized agents who would respond negatively to the bashing...if they had all the facts in hand and were responding consistently. And such relativized moral judgments are not worth making."

That is what I take to be your challenge. So, the question becomes: Given the possibility of non-convergence in the responses of even idealized subjects, are the moral judgements implicitly relativized in the above fashion on the subjectivist construal worth making, without the fear of falling into hypocrisy?

I think that they are, and try to meet your challenge in Part II.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Part II

For one thing, in most active moral disputes, it is not clear at the outset who satisfies the idealized conditions of the subjectivist conditional. Therefore, we can view moral discourse, on the idealized subjectivist model, as an attempt to discover just whose
For one thing, in most active moral disputes, it is not clear at the outset who satisfies the idealized conditions of the subjectivist conditional. Therefore, we can view moral discourse, on the idealized subjectivist model, as an attempt to discover just whose responses in the dispute actually do satisfy the rational constraints built into the subjectivist model. That is not a waste of time.

How might this go? One party to a dispute says [e.g.] "Abortion in the first trimester is morally wrong because it involves the infliction of pain on the fetus." On the subjectivist account, this is to say "Anybody who had all the facts [etc] would respond negatively to abortion in the first trimester." The other party, who believes that abortion in the first trimester is morally permissible, can dispute the original judgment on the ground that first trimester fetuses are not yet able to feel pain. This kind of dialogue is well worth having. It can be viewed as an attempt to discover where the boundaries of attitudinal agreement about human actions and practices lie, where the boundaries of "our" moral community lie and where the boundaries of "their" moral
community lie.

What happens if we do discover that there are irreconcilable conflicts in the attitudes of even idealized subjects, so that we do not live in the same community of rightness- and wrongness-constituting responses of approval and disapproval? That is a really tough question.

The worse possibility is that our attitudes, filtered by our grasp of the facts [etc], are so important to us that we can find no way to live in peace with those whose attitudes, similarly filtered, conflict with ours. Retreat from each other into our own, attitude-defined, cloistered communities, is one recourse. If retreat is impossible, then is war the only recourse?

I hope not. The challenge is to find some modus vivendi short of retreat or war. some set of procedural principles that the conflicting parties can agree upon despite their conflicting responses on matters of substance. That is the dream of so-called "liberal neutrality." In the current climate I have to admit to a sense of despair over prospects for this "solution" to the problem.

To conclude:

I have tried to do two things here. 1. Sympathetically formulate Marc's worry about the implications of a subjectivist meta-ethics, which deflates the reach of claimed authority of moral judgements. 2. Offer some reasons for concluding that moral discourse has a point and purpose, even if the best we can hope for is the fall-back construal of moral authority that meta-ethical subjectivism offers.

David Zimmerman said...

Sorry for the editorial glitches in my Part I and Part II message to Marc... The follies of cutting and pasting.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

First, I want to thank you for taking my last challenge seriously and taking the time to write your extensive response. I thought you might just dismiss my analysis as the ravings of some crazy attorney who is self-righteous and does not know what he is talking about. Reading the first part of your response, at first I couldn’t figure out whom you were quoting and why did you not cite the source, until I realized that you were quoting yourself.

I believe, as you indicate, that moral subjectivists have a very difficult roe to hoe, so to speak, at arriving at some consensus regarding what some of the basic, valid moral judgments are. And you may never arrive at that consensus. Moral objectivism is more efficient, so to speak, and does not need to seek a logical analysis to justify its conclusions. The likelihood of broad consensus, notwithstanding some historical and cultural disparities, is more probable. LFC’s comment demonstrates this. He thought he was agreeing with your perspective, when, as I indicated in my response he was agreeing more with my perspective. He, and as he pointed out, many of the blog commenters opining about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, believe that the invasion, the wanton taking of human life accompanying it is morally wrong because it is morally wrong to indiscriminately kill civilians. As I stated, if push came to shove, they could not justify their basic belief that human life has inherent value which should not destroyed except to say that is what they believe. They could not justify it from a logical perspective because it is not subject to proof. It is a moral intuition, along the lines of G E. Moore. Millions of humans share that belief. So why not accept the legitimacy of moral intuition, if the alternative is a subjective analysis with inconclusive results. Even those who are opposed to abortion, and those who support choice, share a basic moral belief that human life has value and worth of protection. They differ on when human life actually begins. With regard to the moral questions surrounding the Ukraine/Russian conflict, even opponents of abortion at any time – including the first trimester – can agree that Russia’s indiscriminate taking of human life is morally wrong. And they do not have to provide a proof that it is morally wrong.

As a moral objectivist, I believe that in the case of abortion there are two competing moral precepts, and I believe they can both be satisfied. Women and men both have the right to make decisions about their bodies as they please (I support assisted suicide), as long as those decisions do not adversely affect the comparable right of other human beings. The right of pregnant women in this regard has to take into account the right of the human life which is developing in their womb. At whatever point when that development reaches the stage when the fetus could survive outside the womb, even if by artificial means, the fetus has developed into a human whose rights must be afforded protection. At the present level of scientific knowledge, that point is approximately 24 weeks, at the end of the second trimester. So Justice Blackmun got it pretty much correct. Allowing abortion up to the end of the 23rd week maximizes the moral rights of both the mother and the fetus, and I believe is justifiable from a moral objectivist standpoint.

(Continued)

Marc Susselman said...

In my proposed reductio ad absurdum argument (which, as Prof. Wolff pointed is not strictly speaking a reductio syllogism) I listed several propositions which I believe are valid as moral judgments without the necessity of proving their validity. They are valid because they are expressions of moral intuition. Moral subjectivist are uncomfortable with this for two reasons: (1) what if moral intuitions do not coincide; (2) we cannot endorse a proposition which cannot be proved. Regarding (1), as demonstrated by LFC’s comment, I do not believe that moral intuitions of people who do not suffer from a severe mental disorder will differ, the immorality of bashing in the skull of a newborn healthy human as an example. Regarding (2), we accept the axioms of Euclidean geometry as irrebuttably true without proof, why not moral intuitions?

There is an added advantage to moral objectivism. Accepting the moral intuitions as valid allows for expressing normative judgments about events in the world that moral subjectivism does not, because moral subjectivism has not reached any consensus as what counts as valid moral precepts. As I have stated in my comments, in the absence of such consensus, I do not see how one who subscribes to moral subjectivism can make normative judgments regarding, for example, Trump’s duplicity; the immorality of discrimination based on race; the use of excessive force by the police; etc., etc.

Thank you again for addressing the issues I raised. Got to leave now for an engagement.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

Thank you for your response to my gloss on your challenge to meta-ethical subjectivism.

I'll try to be brief in return.

You are correct that the claim to normative authority we make when we engage in wholehearted moral discourse would have a much firmer basis if some version of meta-ethical objectivism were true. The convergence of correct moral judgments would be guaranteed by the very truth conditions that such judgments would have on objectivist accounts.

If intuitionism a la GE Moore and WD Ross were correct, then moral rightness and goodness would be autonomous, sui generis properties detectable by some kind of a priori direct access, moral intuition. If some version of naturalist moral objectivism were true, then rightness and goodness could be identified with or reduced to ordinary empirically detectable properties of the natural world.

The question, then, is whether these forms of meta-ethical objectivism can be defended against the whole phalanx of objections that have been pressed against moral objectivists at least since Moore published Principia Ethica early in the 20th century. For, objectivists do have have to meet these objections. Meta-ethical objectivism, however attractive on its face, does not come for free; dialectical dues have to be paid.

This is probably no place for me to try to do justice to an exposition of the main worries about meta-ethical objectivism.
But briefly:

Intuitionism is plagued by the metaphysical problem of accounting for the nature of the "non-natural" properties of rightness and goodness. How are they supposed to fit into a non-mysterious ontology compatible with a broadly scientific view of the world? This is not a trivial worry. Nor is the epistemological problem of giving an account of what kind of access "intuition' is supposed to be. And then there is the related problem intuitionists have in accounting for conflicting intuitions about some action or practice. How to determine which is the correct one and which the incorrect one? Intuitionism needs an "error theory" which on its face it does not have. These worries have dogged non-naturalist moral objectivists for a long time.

As for naturalist moral objectivists:

Analytic naturalists, who claim a meaning relationship between "good" and/or "right" and some designator of a preferred natural property have to give good reasons for accepting their naturalistic analysis. Moore's own "open question" argument still has force against analytic naturalism.

Versions of naturalist objectivism that claim [non-analytic] property identity between rightness and/or goodness, on the one hand, and some natural property, on the other, have to give good reasons for supposing that such substantive identities do hold. In the case of other claims about property identities such as heat and mean kinetic energy, good reasons are forthcoming in the form of empirical explanatory power and the like. But with rightness? Who knows? The best some contemporary naturalist objectivists [e.g. Nick Sturgeon] can come up with is "wide reflective equilibrium" between judgements about rightness and about their preferred empirical property. But that seems no more than a kind of judgement coherentism, which does not get them beyond the circle of beliefs to the properties themselves, as instantiated in the natural world.

This is all-too- quick, I know. But here, I can do not more than try to convey the flavour of the main objections to the kind of view you embrace and its cousins.

In sum: Yes, moral discourse would have a much firmer basis if meta-ethical objectivism were true. However, it does not come for free. It has to earn our allegiance by overcoming formidable objections.

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc again:

I should not neglect your suggestion that basic moral judgments have much the same status as axioms in a priori endeavours such as mathematics. Metaphysical "platonism" is indeed alive and well in the philosophy of mathematics, replete with views about our a priori access to truths about numbers, so why not in meta-ethics?

One reason strong metaphysical realism thrives in the philosophy of mathematics is that taking numbers, functions and the like at face value ontologically seems to be justified by the need to posit their existence in the very formulation of physical theories, which deal, after all. with extensive magnitudes like mass. To be sure, not everyone agrees that the very doing of science requires positing the existence of numbers [e.g. Hartry Field], but it is close to the consensus view. So, the idea that numbers are metaphysically autonomous entities seems to be well grounded.

However, moral properties cannot claim to have the same indispensable explanatory role in an independent enterprise like science. Numbers ear their keep in the doing of physics. Rightness and goodness have no parallel indispensable explanatory role.

And that, briefly, is why rightness and goodness cannot claim the kind of secure status in our ontology that numbers can.

LFC said...

It's a fact that people have moral intuitions. The meta-ethical status of those intuitions seems to be part of what's at issue.

However, as I said earlier, one doesn't have to settle the status of intuitions in order to engage in a conversation involving applied moral reasoning, provided most of the people involved in the conversation share the same intuitions. I think Rawls operates on *roughly* that premise in A Theory of Justice, though he's not an intuitionist, and Walzer pretty much does the same in Just and Unjust Wars, which is more obviously applied ethics than TJ.

s. wallerstein said...

One thing I'm curious about.

Let's say moral objectivism is true (something I doubt), but anyway. If it's true, how do we know that our version of what is morally objective is true?

Plato was sure that the city he described in the Republic was objectively just, libertarian objective realists are sure that laissez faire capitalism is objectively just, those objective realists with authoritarian theories of child raising are sure children should submit to what their parents rule in order to be objectively "good" children, etc.

How do we know that we are right and they are wrong? Sure, we have strong intuitions, but they also have strong intuitions. How do we know that our intuitions are in touch with objective morality? Unless we believe that God is speaking to us in our intuitions, but from what I know, most of us here are atheists.

My intuitions are the product of my upbringing, the books I've read, friends I've conversed with, maybe genetic factors, the zeitgeist, etc. If I hadn't walked to school with Mike Cohen in high school, maybe I'd have other political ideas, if I hadn't Mr. Goetz as a high school history teacher, I probably never would have been exposed to radical leftwing ideas so young and maybe someone else would have convinced me to be a libertarian at such a young impressionable age, etc.

Marc Susselman said...

David,

Thank you for your further elucidation of the stumbling blocks facing objective moralism.

I will offer my response below, but before I do so I wish to keep in mind the six propositions which I listed in my so-call reductio ad absurdum argument:

1. It was not immoral or wrong for the Nazis to have exterminated millions of human beings, including 6,000,000 Jews.

2. It is not immoral or wrong to dismember a human being while the human being is still alive and conscious.

3. It is not immoral or wrong to take a human baby which has just been born and bash its skull in.

4. It is not immoral or wrong for one group of human beings to enslave another group of human beings based on their race and/or skin color and force them to perform manual labor against their will without being compensated beyond being provided food and shelter.

5. It is not immoral or wrong to torture animals and cause them pain.

6. There is no rational basis for holding any human being responsible for any crime, including when the human being admits to having tortured, raped and then killed a human female, because such conduct is not wrong or immoral.

It seems to me that we want to be able to have a basis for rejecting propositions such as the above; that it is in fact critical that we as a species be able to legitimately reject such propositions.

In order to do so, however, there has to be a difference between valid moral judgments/propositions, and judgments/propositions which are neither moral nor immoral, but are neutral or indeterminate.

One cannot sensibly say that her choice of wallpaper was morally wrong. It may have been wrong in its lack of taste, or lack of aesthetic appeal, but it cannot be morally wrong.

Nor can we say of the pit bull that mauled the young child that the pit bull’s conduct was morally wrong.

Here’s the rub. Do we want a world populated by homeo sapiens in which normative judgments have legitimacy, or a world in which there are no legitimate moral judgments, but only indeterminate judgments which qualify as neither moral nor immoral? If we want the former, then we have to have a mechanism for determining when moral judgment can properly and appropriately be expressed.

In order for a proposition to qualify as a normative judgment, it must be such that if one engages in conduct that qualifies as being immoral, that it is appropriate to condemn the conduct as immoral. This requires that the basis for determining what such judgments are may not be based on mere preference or sense of aesthetics. It has to be such that in saying the particular conduct was wrong, that it deserves to be condemned because it is/was wrong – morally wrong. We need to be able to say of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and in the process deliberately killing thousands of men, women and children, as a military strategy, Putin’s conduct was morally wrong and deserves to be condemned. It is not enough to say that it was wrong because it displeased us, or because it was not our preference.

LFC, that is what I view as the deficiency with your perspective. It is essential that the meta-ethical status of the moral judgments we make must be established as normative, judgments, deserving condemnation, and not just what like-minded people agree would have been preferable. It is not enough that people have the same intuitions, but that they be recognized as moral intuitions,

(Continued)

Marc Susselman said...

Addressing the stumbling blocks which David indicates confront moral objectivists. First, there is the question of how the properties of rightness and goodness (of being moral) “supposed to fit into a non-mysterious ontology compatible with a broadly scientific view of the world?” Why should they fit in to an ontology based on science? The are not scientific propositions, nor would we want them to be. They are in a category of their own. We do not say of scientific propositions that, for example the extermination of the dinosaurs by a meteor was an immoral event. The ontology or moral judgments is of a kind not amenable to scientific analysis or justification. In any event, the propositions which would emerge from a subjective moralist perspective cannot escape the same criticism. Any proposition which purports to be a proposition about morals will not fit into the scientific ontology. Value judgments have no place in the ontology of science. But value judgments are the essence of moral analysis.

The next stumbling block – how to determine which intuitions are correct and which incorrect. In this regard I believe we must distinguish between judgments regarding what constitutes immoral conduct vs. moral conduct, with the former being easier to discern and identify. I submit that there would be little dispute regarding the six examples of immoral conduct cited above. However, moral conduct does not simply consist in refraining from immoral conduct. We would not say of someone who refused to be an active member of the Nazi party, who refrained from dismembering live individuals, who declined to own slaves, etc., that their conduct was moral. To qualify as moral more active agency is called for, and with it the risks of retaliation – protesting Nazi policies; intervening to prevent the dismemberment of living human being; actively condemning slavery, etc. Here I disagree with s. wallerstein. For objective moralism to be valid it does not require that it identify every intuition which constitutes moral conduct. It suffices to identify immoral conduct and then assert its active antithesis as being moral. Moreover, if difficulty in identifying which moral intuitions are valid is a stumbling block for moral objectivism, it is no less a stumbling block for moral subjectivism, since differences of opinion may prevent reaching a consensus on what attributes identify moral conduct.

My primary criticism of moral subjectivism vis a’ vis moral objectivism is this – I believe it is circular and generates a continuous regression until ultimately it identifies a moral attribute which is itself nothing more than a moral intuition. Of any attribute about which thee is a consensus that it is an attribute of moral conduct, the question can be asked, why this attribute, to which the answer will still be that its proponent has an intuition that it is a moral attribute.

If we throw up our hands and say the enterprise of identifying moral judgments is ultimately futile, which ever school one subscribed too, then we must be prepared to accept that our criticism of Putin, of Trump, of John C. Calhoun, etc., can be no more than an expression of our preferences, for which we have no right to condemn someone’s conduct because it does not conform to our preferenes.

Eric said...

Marc Susselman wrote:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2022/03/lets-try-something-new.html?showComment=1648666473390#c1809801398107614179

"Taking up your proposal, I would be interested in your response to the following reductio ad absurdum syllogism:

All core human morality is simply the product of the forces of Darwinian evolution.

None of the ethical precepts which have evolved as a result of the process of Darwinian evolution can properly or rationally be regarded as “right” or “correct”; and nor can their negations be regarded as “wrong” or “immoral.”

Therefore:

It was not immoral or wrong for the Nazis to have exterminated millions of human beings, including 6,000,000 Jews.

It is not immoral or wrong to dismember a human being while the human being is still alive and conscious.

It is not immoral or wrong to take a human baby which has just been born and bash its skull in.

It is not immoral or wrong for one group of human beings to enslave another group of human beings based on their race and/or skin color and force them to perform manual labor against their will without being compensated beyond being provided food and shelter.

It is not immoral or wrong to torture animals and cause them pain.

There is no rational basis for holding any human being responsible for any crime, including when the human being admits to having tortured, raped and then killed a human female, because such conduct is not wrong or immoral.


Since the above conclusions are facially absurd, at least one of the premises, and perhaps both, is/are erroneous."

LFC said...

I wrote a longish comment but have decided not to post it. All I'll say is that, going back to DZ's "map" of meta-ethics upthread, it seems to me that both MS and DZ are cognitivists, albeit of different varieties. So maybe we're exaggerating the differences a little bit here.

I think part of how worried or exercised one gets about the logical status of normative statements, or how interesting or uninteresting one finds the whole topic, may be a matter of temperament. I'll leave it at that.

Eric said...

I haven't read most of the thread, and much of Prof Zimmerman's comments are several graduate degrees over my head. That said ...

MS, you are universalizing your own values: "Since the above conclusions are facially absurd...."

While probably everyone reading the blog comments here agrees that these acts you list are wrong, we cannot be taken to be representative of all beings in all times and all places. What we judge today to be wrong is not necessarily (or, to use your word, objectively) wrong for all. That's the difference between moral judgments and natural phenomena. Moral judgments depend entirely on the dispositions of the observers. Sans observer, there can be no moral judgment. Natural phenomena occur independently of observation.

What is good for the wolf is not necessarily good for the lamb.
From the perspective of the person being tortured, torture is wrong. From the perspective of the torturer, perhaps not.
(BBC commissioned an international poll in 2006 asking whether torture might ever be justifiable, eg in a ticking bomb situation. "43% of those questioned in Israel; 42% in Iraq; 36% of Americans; and 32% in India believe that some degree of torture should be allowed if it provides information that saves innocent lives.")

A couple of comments with regard to the specific issue of infanticide. First, your phrasing of the act is hardly neutral ("bash in the skull"). Second, as far as I am aware, infanticide is said to have been practiced since time immemorial. I don't know that we can confidently say it has been universally and invariably judged to be wrong. I would highly doubt that it has, in fact. (Your retort that 'yes, but it should be judged wrong' would be an example of you universalizing your own values.) There are certainly situations in which some might argue that killing a healthy newborn could be an understandable, or even a moral, decision. (Other children in the family are starving and there isn't enough food as it is. Family is being hunted and the baby is crying. The baby is the Romanov heir apparent. Etc.)

Eric said...

MS, one of the errors it seems to me that you make is assuming that "core human morality" will lead to universally agreed on interpretations of the morality of the situations you mention.

An alternative is that there are certain core intuitions about right and wrong but that your situations are not adequate to testing for them.

The tendency for us to develop certain "moral intuitions" may be genetically encoded, and shared with other organisms. Frans de Waal has written a lot for lay audiences about this based on his work with nonhuman primates. There is also a growing body of evidence from studies involving rats and other mammals that would seem to support this conclusion.

Eric said...

Marc Susselman: There is no rational basis for holding any human being responsible for any crime, including when the human being admits to having tortured, raped and then killed a human female, because such conduct is not wrong or immoral.

There's an interview of Robert Sapolsky discussing the illusion of free will that you should take a look at. (I have suggested it here before. I don't agree with all of his points, but the argument he makes relevant to this particular question helps point in a more useful direction than what you are suggesting.)

Interviewer: "Does that mean absence of responsibility and blame as a concept? Does it mean you would like to get rid of both of these things?"

Sapolsky: "Absolutely. Does that mean, and by the way, that also gets rid of praise. Does this mean murderers should be allowed to run around on the streets because you can't blame them? Of course not! If the brakes on a car are not working, you don't allow the car to be driven. It's going to hit somebody and kill them. What you either do is you fix the brakes, or if your behavioral neuroendocrinology is not at the point yet where you know how to fix those broken brakes, you lock the car up in a garage. And that's great. You've protected society from that car. But you don't sit there and say, 'That car deserves not to be able to take a nice ride in a park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

'Deserve,' 'blame,' 'responsibility,' 'justice,' 'retribution' — none of those words make any sense at all for making sense of a car whose brakes don't work. And you look at a human whose lousy biological luck has produced someone who is broken in a very damaging way as well, and they're no different from a car with a broken brake. It's infinitely more complicated broken brakes, and thus we're infinitely further from being able to fix it; but it's the same exact thing.

If you think it is dehumanizing to turn us into machines with broken brakes, that's a helluva lot better than sermonizing us into having evil souls."

In other words, there can be a utilitarian value in taking actions to keep people from raping, torturing, and murdering that has nothing to do with what any god allegedly proclaimed to be immoral.

Marc Susselman said...

Eric,

You have missed the entire point of the exchange between myself and Prof. Zimmerman.

So, do you believe that there are circumstances under which it is not immoral to enslave other people based on their race? And you believe that there are circumstances under which it is not immoral to deliberately slaughter animals and cause them pain (not, mind you, to slaughter them is as painless a manner for food)?

Of course one can conjure up scenarios in which some of the examples I offer could be morally justified, and I addressed them in a prior comment on another post. The predicate of my dismemberment example is that the victim has not committed any crime, is not threatening to commit any crime, has not knowledge about a potential crime, and is a totally innocent victim of someone’s sadism. Are you claiming that under some circumstances this would not be immoral?

If you reject this exercise based on your conviction that all moral statements are relative, then you should for here on in refrain from making normative judgments in any context, on any medium, regarding any subject, because unless there are legitimate moral propositions, then any normative judgment you make is not more than an expression of your preference, and noting more.

Eric said...

Marc Susselman,

What I personally believe with regard to these siutations isn't relevant. What's at issue is whether there are, or have been, people who have believed to be moral these things that we today would likely call immoral.

Comments I make in this space involving normative judgments apply to a community of people who share much in terms of culture. Your arguments are about Homo sapiens across all time and in all places universally. Two very different things.

LFC said...

Why is it illegitimate to state a moral "preference"?

Let's say X is someone who thinks that the statements "I like strawberry ice cream" and "murder is wrong" stand on the same semantic, logical, or other footing.

In a discussion about ice cream, it would not be illegitimate for X to say "I like strawberry ice cream," so why, in a discussion of murder, would it be illegitimate for X to say "murder is wrong"? The fact that X views this as a "preference" rather than something else should not deprive X of the ability or prerogative or right to voice her/his/their opinion, should it?

X should have the prerogative to say "targeting civilians deliberately is wrong" irrespective of whether X views that proposition as a statement of preference or a statement of revealed and divinely sanctioned truth or a statement of obviously correct and "objective" moral intuition or a self-evident statement rooted in natural law or a statement that can be validated with reference to naturalist subjectivism or as anything else. Istm there are no valid grounds for labeling someone's participation in a discussion as "illegitimate" solely because you don't like or agree with their stance on the logical status of normative propositions.

Marc Susselman said...

LFC,

It is not a question of the right or ability of an individual to say what his/her preferences are. S/he can say whatever the F- s/he wants. But it makes no sense to condemn someone else’s conduct based only on a preference. It makes no sense to say of Putin, “I condemn his invasion of Ukraine” if all this means is “I condemn his invasion of Ukraine because I prefer that he had not done it, and I don’t like it.” Condemnation of another’s conduct entails a normative judgment that is much stronger than merely expressing a preference. If there are no valid moral precepts, then all condemnations of conduct boil down to expressions of preference, and it makes no sense to condemn another’s conduct simply because it does not meet with one’s preference, and you don’t like it. It would make no sense to condemn the extermination of 6,000,000 people by the Nazis simply because we don’t “like” it. If you don’t get this, then I give up.

Marc Susselman said...

Eric,

So I watched a good part of the Sapolsky interview which you provided the link to and I thank you for providing it. I had watched other videos by him dealing with his work with primates, and he is a very knowledgeable and entertaining speaker.

His discussion in the video you linked to is, I admit, fascinating. His primary expertise is in the area of neurobiology and the interview is about the validity, or invalidity, in the belied in free will. Sapolsky rejects the existence of free will in humans because every action and every decision that a human makes is determined by their neuro impulses, over which they have no control. Consequently, Sapolsky maintains that there is no rational basis for attributing blame or praise to anyone’s conduct, because they have no control over it, and no one is really responsible for their actions.

Putting aside the view of causation upon which his opinion is based, and whether it is accurate, the implications of his analysis for law and the assumption of personal responsibility upon which the law is based, at first blush would appear catastrophic. If an individual charged with a crime had no ability to avoid the crime because of his neurological make-up, then it makes no sense, Sapolsky maintains, to punish them for their criminal conduct. Similarly, my assertions regarding moral precepts assume the existence of free will and individual responsibility, and therefore, since neither really exists, my assertions are meaningless. Sapolsky indicates that he has even testified as an expert witness at criminal trials to convince juries that it is unfair to convict an criminal defendant because the defendant had no ability to not commit the crime s/he has been charged with.

There is a flaw in Sapolsky’s analysis, however. It is not a flaw which I find intellectually satisfying, but it is a flaw nonetheless. If he is correct, that criminal defendants do not have free will, and therefore should not be held responsible for their actions, it is not only true of the criminal defendant, it is also true of all of the rest of us, including the jurors and the judge. Since the jurors also do not have fee will, then his testifying as an expert that the defendant should not be punished because s/he lacks free will, presumes that the jurors and the judge have free will. But according to Sapolsky, they don’t, and nothing he tells them from the witness stand can alter that. If they convict the defendant, it will be because they did not have the free will to acquit the defendant. And the judge does not have free will not to give the defendant the sentence s/he is inclined to mete out. In fact, there was a case in which the defendant argued that he should not be punished for the crime the jury convicted him of because he could not have avoided committing the crime. The judge responded, “You’re right. You could not avoid what you did. I also do not have free will, and am sentencing you to 10 years in prison.”

As I say, I do not find this answer intellectually satisfying, but it does relieve me of any sense of guilt regarding those who have been convicted of crimes they had no choice but to commit, because everything is determined, including their conviction and sentence.

I need to give more thought to the philosophical underpinning of Sapolsky’s view of causation, but right now I am going to exercise my free will and return to writing the legal brief which I have to file in the Michigan Court of Claims later today.

Michael said...

Putting aside the view of causation upon which his opinion is based, and whether it is accurate, the implications of his analysis for law and the assumption of personal responsibility upon which the law is based, at first blush would appear catastrophic.

Depends on whom you ask! I think it is more common to think of free-will skepticism as "catastrophic," but there are interesting exceptions. (I say "free-will skepticism" rather than simply "determinism" because, IMO, while determinism is seriously problematic with regard to belief in free will, so is indeterminism!)

As Sapolsky points out (in a video Eric linked a while back), free-will skepticism (and further, denial) can pull the rug out from under the impulse to castigate yourself and other people for their "wickedness" and "shortcomings." This echoes Spinoza, who (seemingly echoing the Stoics) conceives of intellectual blessedness as a state of equanimity and acceptance of the strict, unbending necessity that pervades all of existence. He banishes remorse and regret as well as pride from the enlightened psychology, inasmuch as these attitudes require us to falsely interpret certain events in the world as expressions of free will which could have proceeded otherwise.

Many philosophers would find Spinoza's attitude horrifyingly self-delusive, or simply horrifying. I'm thinking of Sartre's idea of "bad faith," as well as Kant's dismissal of "compatibilism" (or the effort to reconcile determinism with commonsense and/or healthy-minded moral practices) as a "wretched subterfuge." I'm also thinking of William James, who became severely depressed when he found himself unable to reconcile the scientific worldview with belief in free will. (He seemed to eventually "snap out of it" somewhat by declaring, "My first act of free will is to believe in free will.")

Einstein, on the other hand, says this: "In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that 'a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,' has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place."

I find this one of the most fascinating philosophical forks in the road.

Also, regarding this:

If an individual charged with a crime had no ability to avoid the crime because of his neurological make-up, then it makes no sense[...] to punish them for their criminal conduct.

I think this is very much open to doubt, but it also points the way toward a more humane view of the purpose of punishment. If you accept determinism, then punishment for the sheer sake of retribution - the idea that criminals qua criminals deserve to suffer - probably has to go. But punishment for the sake of controlling and containing threats to our welfare, punishment for the sake of preventing future crime - these would seem perfectly defensible, for the same reason that wearing sunblock would be defensible.

David Zimmerman said...

Oh dear... Are we now going to have a long exchange on the problem[s] of free will and moral responsibility.

Fair warning: that is my other area [aside from meta-ethics] of philosophical "expertise." So, brace yourselves....

JUST KIDDING! [Maybe we should give this thread a rest.]

s. wallerstein said...

Professor Zimmerman,

From my point of view at least your philosophical expertise is very welcome and very enlightening. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about free will and moral responsibility.

David Zimmerman said...

To S. Wallerstein:

You are very kind.

The points made so far on free will and moral responsibility have been apt and intelligent. Let me figure out if I have anything to contribute.

Cheers.

Marc Susselman said...

John Searle offers the best defense of free will which I have found, but does it go far enough to preserve personal responsibility?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rZfSTpjGl8

David Zimmerman said...

To Marc:

I am not sure that I have the energy right now to comment on Searle's Youtube video, but couple of points:

He does not really offer a defense of free will. All he really does is lay out the dilemma.

Horn One: The overwhelming sense that a lot of the time it is genuinely up thus what we do when we decide between act A and B.

Horn Two: On the most reasonable view of how things operate in the {macroscopic] natural world, nothing just happens... there is always an explanation for why X is the case in terms of antecedent sufficient causes that bring about X.. The explanation may be accessible to us at any given time, but it is there in reality.

Searle's point: Both horns seem to be true, but they are incompatible. Something has to give... But which horn?

That is about all he does in the interview.... Except to badmouth one view in the dialectic, i.e. "compatibilism," the view that exercises of free will are quite compatible with the existence of causal explanations of freely willed actions.

Now, to articulate a plausible version of compatibilism, much less to defend it against incompatibilist objections, is a huge task, which I hesitate to try here. The basic strategy is to articulate the difference between cases in which an agent is in the grip of various kinds of compulsion and those ordinary cases in which she makes a decision based on her assessment of the best reasons for doing A rather than B. The idea is that a choice is free and responsibility-grounding if it issues from an agent's "reasons-responsive" psychological capacities.

Searle thinks this idea is a "cop-out," which does not deliver the robust kind of free will involved in the first horn, and he may be right. But I think that we ought to give reason-responsive compatibilism a real hearing.

A spirited and forceful defense of the basic idea can be found in Daniel Dennett's, "Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having."

David Zimmerman said...

Damn spell checker!

First Horn: ...genuinely up to us.....

David Zimmerman said...

Second horn: ...may NOT be accessible...

Damn carelessness.

Michael said...

To echo S.W., thanks for your terrific contributions to this thread, Prof. Zimmerman. If you have the energy and inclination, I'd be interested to get a sense of the main lines of response philosophers have offered on any of these points - which is where my dealings with the free will controversy leave off:

(1) To borrow a line from Emil Cioran: "The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are." I find this a powerful point. My tendency is to say: Our beliefs and desires (and their neurological correlates) seem to account for our "free" choices in a way that should be generally satisfying to the compatibilist - albeit with the disclaimer that our beliefs and desires themselves have causal antecedents!

Other than simply tolerating this disclaimer, and continuing to speak of "free" choices as those that harmonize with - and are even (for all we know) causally necessitated by - our beliefs and desires, what lines of response are available to the compatibilist?

(2) What's the status and significance of the principle that "ought" implies "can"? There seems to be very little room to doubt it, but it also seems to imply that determinism (if correct) would more-or-less directly negate any "ought" statement! After all:

1. If "ought" implies "can," then (e.g.) "I ought not to lie" implies "I can (i.e. have the ability to) not lie."
2. If determinism is true, it follows that if I lied yesterday, then it is false that I failed to do what I ought to have done. (Because I could not have acted otherwise.)
3. More generally, if determinism is true, then it can never be true that I failed to do what I ought to have done. (So, all "ought" statements would be false.)

(3) How do free-will theorists respond to the worry that indeterminism would undermine responsibility? Here's Carnap on this:

"Think for a moment of a human being at the instant of making a decision. If, at this point, there is the type of indeterminacy exhibited by a quantum jump, then the decision made at that point would be equally random. Such randomness is of no help in strengthening the meaning of the term 'free choice.' A choice like this would not be a choice at all, but would be a chance, haphazard decision, as though a decision between two possible courses of action were made by flipping a penny. Fortunately, the range of indeterminacy in quantum theory is extremely small. If it were much greater, there might be times when a table would suddenly explode, or a falling stone would spontaneously move horizontally or back up in the air. [...] To the extent that they [i.e. 'random processes which may exist in the human organism'] influence choices, they would simply be adding haphazardry to the choices. There would be less choice than otherwise, and an even more destructive argument could be made against the possibility of free will."

(4) Was P.F. Strawson too quick to speak dismissively of "the obscure and panicky metaphysics of libertarianism" (and related views)? What are some of the more "obscure and panicky" views that typically come to mind at this point, and are any of them considered live options? (I've seen mentions of Kant and German Idealism in this connection, but I don't know nearly enough to say whether these are of "merely antiquarian" interest!)

My reading leaves off right about here. If you have any pointers you want to throw my way, even if just some authors/titles, it'd be much appreciated. (No worries if not!)

David Zimmerman said...

Ah...not my day for proofreading:

The sub-title of Dennett's book is "The Varieties of free Will Worth WANTING.

s. wallerstein said...

This video has more to do with the topic of the pros and cons objectivism than with free will,
but here philosophers Dan Kaufman, Robert Gressis and Kevin Currie-Knight argue (from minute 45 on) about whether our morality is just a question of tastes (the word "preferences" was used in this thread in a similar sense), two say "yes" and one "says" no.

Not a technical discussion, by the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXvlCUD0KA0