Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Music on My Mind
Peter Hollens (with the Oregon State Chamber Choir), "Sogno di Volare (Theme from Civilization VI)".
Politicization
Aikin and Talisse have an interesting discussion of politicization of tragedies at "3 Quarks Daily". Unfortunately, it has some of the serious flaws of Couto and Kahane's "Disaster and Debate": a strange flattening of all discussion into the same category, an odd failure to consider worries that are often explicitly raised in the same contexts as the one they are considering, that weird selectivity that sometimes suggests very strongly that they are in fact trying to gerrymander boundaries so that their preferred political responses get an advantage over others. A few points on their particular version of the argument.
(1) Aikin and Talisse suggest that the three reasons why you might think politicization of a tragedy is wrong are reasons concerned with etiquette, deliberation, and personality. I take it that this is a typology rather than an essential classification, which has an advantage of flexibility over Couto and Kahane, but which also makes it more difficult to see what they are talking about. For instance, their brief comment on etiquette-based reasons for thinking politicization of tragedy wrong is that they amount "to the claim that one has shown insufficient regard for others’ feelings." The idea is that you should avoid exacerbating grief and anger when people are vulnerable. Their example of this, however, which is the argument that after a tragedy is a time for unity rather than debate, has no obvious connection with feelings at all (it is a claim that could be made even setting aside all consideration of grief and anger), nor does the label 'etiquette' help much here, since most of etiquette in the proper sense has nothing directly to do with "regard for others' feelings". Some forms of etiquette are quite clearly a form of self-protection, for instance, others are designed to make social interactions easier for most people, others are designed to attenuate argument into potentially more constructive channels for social interactions, others are designed to make it clear that the people involved are involved in a shared project, and so forth. 'Etiquette' may just be a loose label, although it would fit their example; they seem to have the idea that the basic reason here is that making the tragedy political could take an already hot pot and make it boil over. But if that were the case, their response to it would be inadequate, because we do not in fact allow just any and every kind of expression of grief and anger, regardless of tragedy. It would generally be regarded as unacceptable for people to work out their grief and anger by shooting up a market, or by assaulting people physically in the streets, or by at least some verbal harassment behaviors. The only question is to what else this should extend. So it's not really a response to the hot-pot kind of worry "that it dictates how those criticized should grieve." Well, yes, that's one way you could put it; all that says is that the reason, whatever precisely it is, says that people should not act a certain way when grieving, which is just the topic of discussion itself.
(2) This objection to the etiquette group of reasons, whatever precisely they may be, does bear further examination. Aikin and Talisse say:
This is much, much too fast. Note how quickly things are collapsed into each other: outrage and grief may be "best expressed" (where did the 'best' come from -- it's obvious it's a way they may be expressed, because that's the general topic of discussion, but doesn't jsut throwing in the 'best' here look like Aikin and Talisse rigging the description to make their conclusion easier?) by "having discussions about how future instances may be averted". OK, so this takes the politicization charge to be equivalent to a denial that we should ever respond to tragedies by having discussions about how to avoid them. Is this really what people generally mean by 'politicization'? They give an example from Sanders, who perhaps is where they get the word 'discussions' from, but Sanders explicitly is talking about policy discussions that go after individuals and organizations. (Where Aikin and Talisse get the claim that she is saying that "the blame is only on the shooter in that instance", I don't know, since she explicitly leaves open the possibility of further discussions later; what she says is that only the shooter has "blood on their hands". It's particularly odd since the briefing they quote is literally the day after the Las Vegas shooting, a shooting about which we still know very little, and about which we knew nothing for sure at that time, and the part they quote is linked to a very specific kind of question about what policies should be taken in response, to which her primary response is that before you can talk about policies prevention you need to know the facts about what happened.) So the sense of 'discussions' here is hazy; their example is talking about a very specific kind of discussion, but the claim made by Aikin and Talisse is most plausible (and only non-question-begging) if we are talking about a very extensive variety of discussions. But consider two possible responses to a shooting tragedy:
"I wonder if this could have been prevented by making silencers illegal. What do you think? Do you think we should do that?"
and
"You see, this is why we need to make silencers illegal; people who sell silencers have blood on their hands."
Both of these are moves you could make in "discussions about how future instances may be averted". They both raise exactly the same question: Should silencers be illegal? But are they equally examples of politicizing a situation? If you asked most people, I am fairly sure that most people would not consider the first to be politicizing the situation at all. The second is very definitely an example of what most people mean by politicizing it.
There is a fundamental equivocation running throughout the discussion. The topic at hand is politicized discussion. But what Aikin and Talisse defend is discussion on topics that could be considered political. This makes their job easy since most public discussions on serious matters deal with matters that could be considered political in one way or another, so they can treat the 'politicization' claim as equivalent to trying to shut down all discussion. But this is not the way people generally talk about politicization, and it does not seem that their modification improves the argument, because it seems it prevents them from actually addressing the kinds of worries people might really have.
(3) One of the weird features of the argument by Aikin and Talisse is the lack of recognition that one of the things people explicitly are worrying about in the context of raising worries about politicization is the use of an event to smear one's political opponents with a broad and very negative brush. This is a very weird gap, since it's not as if smearing people is an unheard-of practice in partisan politics, and it is not as if it cannot have very bad effects if it interacts with a lot of anger and grief. After the 2017 Congressional baseball shootings, a number of Democrats raised the worry about politicization, and for a very obvious reason: the shooter was attempting to assassinate Republican legislators, was a Bernie Sanders supporter, and was concluded after investigation to be engaged in a deliberate act of anti-Republican terrorism. What was being attempted by Democrats who insisted that we not politicize the situation was to head off any attempt to have all Democrats tarred with that brush. One of the "discussions about how future instances may be averted" that we could very well have had after that shooting was what to do about Democrats. (Because, of course, Aikin and Talisse would have to say, political causes require discussions about politics and "in point of fact" discussions about how to prevent the assassination of Republicans by Democrats may be the "best" way for Republicans to work through anger and grief.) Those kinds of discussions come up. They are not discussions any reasonable person with a concern for civil society ever wants to become widespread, because they always end very, very badly for everyone. People have good reasons not to want tragedies to be used as the foundations of smear campaigns, prior even to entering discussion. And it is generally considered reasonable to arrange one's etiquette of discussion so that this is not a danger.
(4) The second family of reasons that they consider is based on deliberation. "In these instances," they say, "the charge of politicizing a tragedy amounts to the claim that the politicizer is taking advantage of the outrage and other strong emotions prompted by a tragedy to subvert the slower but more reliable deliberative processes of critical discussion." Their discussion shares all the problems found in Couto and Kahane, and another one as well. They say, commenting on an example from McConnell:
But this quite clearly elides two different things. Suppose our current laws are very unreasonable and not at all the products of reasonable deliberative processes. What would this change about the argument being used? Nothing at all. If you are going to change them, the argument is still going to be that it needs to be done with respect for reasonable deliberative processes. After all, you wouldn't be making things more rational and deliberative if you didn't; you'd just be exchanging one unreasonably chosen policy for another. The reasonableness of existing policies is not precisely what's at issue; what's at issue is the reasonable way of changing them. These are two completely distinct evaluations. And while maybe, maybe, you could argue that unreasonable laws are more acceptable to change without regard for reasonable deliberative process, the very existence of deliberation-based politicization charges, and the common existence at that, indicates that this is not widely held and needs to be argued. Really, what seems to have happened is that Aikin and Talisse have gotten their wires crossed: they are supposed to be arguing (I imagine) that reasonable deliberative processes don't exclude strong emotions in cases where the existing policies are unreasonable, but instead they end up arguing that reasonable deliberative processes are not something to which one can appeal if existing policies are unreasonable.
(5) The third family discussed by Aikin and Talisse "focuses on the motive of the target of the charge". This corresponds more or less to the 'cynical reading' of Couto and Kahane. As with Couto and Kahane, they completely fail to do justice to worries about bad faith and manipulation, and, contrary to their clearly stated assumption, these worries don't magically vanish depending on your political views, although it is no doubt true that you are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt with regard to good faith to people whose political views you already consider reasonable.
(6) Their overall diagnosis is very, very odd, although it explains many of the more bizarre moves they make:
This diagnosis is, of course, what is tripping them up and why, for instance, they don't notice the illicit shift in their argument that's discussed under (4), which in light of this diagnosis can be seen as reinterpreting a point about process as if it were a point about premises. They think that claiming that someone is politicizing something is a charge that they are operating from irrelevant premises. And, having read their essay several times, I have no idea why they think this is true; it seems to me so very strange to regard 'politicization' as a label for a particular kind of fallacy of irrelevance. Claiming that someone is politicizing something is quite obviously an ethical criticism rather than a logical one. If you really insisted on considering it in terms of informal logic, it would be less like ignoratio elenchi and more like poisoning the well, which is an ethical criticism that your ends in arguing are malicious. The really weird thing is that they at one point come close to recognizing something like such a view: "although the concept of 'politicization' looks like a norm of discussion that we should abide for the sake of conducting proper argument about, say, gun regulation, the concept functions differently in the vernacular". Norms of discussion for the sake of conducting proper argument are why, for instance, poisoning the well is something to avoid. But they have never at any point shown that it functions differently in the vernacular; they don't consider worries about smearing at all, and they dismiss worries about bad faith without argument, although both of these are clearly connected to norms of discussion, and they both explicitly come up "in the vernacular" in these contexts. Literally all three of the kinds of examples that they give of the charge "in the vernacular", etiquette, deliberation, and personality, are most naturally treated as having a connection with norms of discussion, even on their own characterizations -- norms about regard for the feelings of others, norms about giving priority to reasonable deliberative processes, norms about not letting the loudest voices be determinative. The standard form of argument that they use -- arguing that where you draw the line depends on your politics, which is, if their argument works, going to be true for absolutely everyone -- doesn't in fact address the reason for drawing the line at all, which even "in the vernacular" seems to be associated in people's mind with the suggestion that other people are arguing unreasonably; thus it doesn't seem that it's even the right kind of argument for what they are trying to argue.
(7) The most obvious argument against Aikin and Talisse on this point is that their line of reasoning leads directly to absurd results. Consider this situation, a real-life situation, although I've stripped out specific details because I'm only interested in the general kind of case. A man murders a child; this man had entered the country illegally and was still undocumented. The case gets taken up by groups who want a large-scale crackdown on illegal immigration, expressed in very harsh terms due to the anger and grief over the murder of the innocent child, and proposing very strict policies in handling all such cases. According to Aikin and Talisse, they can't at all be accused of politicizing a tragedy because this would be "nothing more than a tactic for dismissing their position" on illegal immigration; outrage and grief over the death of a child can perfectly well be worked out by vehement argument for harsh policies and you can't argue that it fails to show appropriate respect for the death of the child without begging the question; there is no way actually to argue with them that we should wait to consider these policies more coolly because according to Aikin and Talisse any attempt to do so assumes beforehand that they are wrong; you can't raise the worry that the loudest voices are just using the case to stampede people in the way they want them to go; there is no concern in Aikin and Talisse for the possibility that the outrage could overflow so that legal immigrants could be smeared as well; Aikin and Talisse have in fact hermetically sealed them from all criticism, treating all criticism of their behavior as if it begs the question against them by assuming that not just their premises but their behavior is wrong. So much protection for people deliberately using emotional events to ramp up the rhetoric only gives political incentive to intensify the rhetoric whenever you think you can get something out of it.
Aikin and Talisse would disagree (I hope) with any policy to investigate the Democratic party as an organization potentially serving as a ground for terrorism; but if, after the Hodgkinson attempt to assassinate a significant number of Republican legislators, Republicans had started advocating policies to engage in a large-scale anti-terrorist investigation against Democrats, what would Aikin and Talisse be able to say? It's a case with political causes that are directly connected with Democratic views; investigating certain kinds of organizations as a potential breeding-ground for terrorism is something we already do in cases with political causes; terrorism is rare enough that, except for a few cases, these investigations are often done on the basis of a single instance. It's something people could demand. (And I know people personally who have tried to insist that the NRA should be treated in such a way after a mass shooting, without there being even the justification of any personal link between the shooter and the organization, so there are people who will certainly try to push this line as far as they can.) Any such proposal would obviously (and almost certainly rightly) be seen by Democrats as an attempt to use the tragedy to stampede people in a particular direction in order to break Democratic political power; Aikin and Talisse have ruled such worries just dependent on personal political views. Democrats would certainly disagree with such a policy, but Aikin and Talisse have shut down all attempt to protest it as maliciously motivated, as an attempt to short-circuit deliberative discussion, or as a violation of respect in the face of tragedy. In reality, Democrats are politically powerful enough to be able to block anything that the Republicans might do in this direction, thus giving the Republicans an incentive to accept that the situation should not be politicized in this way (Republicans would likely not gain anything from it, and could lose a great deal), but what could Aikin and Talisse protest if they decided to charge ahead anyway? They've turned it into a disagreement with no process of adjudication. And what of groups that don't have the clout of the Democratic party and thus can't force their opponents to recognize that their attempt to use a situation for partisan ends won't get anywhere? There seems no way to maintain the stability of civil discussion given the arguments Aikin and Talissue have proposed: it seems one should draw the conclusion from their arguments that you can argue against premises, but not against ways of arguing. But some ways of arguing are quite corrosive, and bad news for everybody. And to be sure, charges of politicization, whatever else they may be, are a tactic; there are at least some cases where they are very plausibly a self-protective tactic against precisely such corrosiveness. It seems ill-advised to remove such a protection without something to put in its place. And I see no indication of any such thing anywhere in the discussion.
(1) Aikin and Talisse suggest that the three reasons why you might think politicization of a tragedy is wrong are reasons concerned with etiquette, deliberation, and personality. I take it that this is a typology rather than an essential classification, which has an advantage of flexibility over Couto and Kahane, but which also makes it more difficult to see what they are talking about. For instance, their brief comment on etiquette-based reasons for thinking politicization of tragedy wrong is that they amount "to the claim that one has shown insufficient regard for others’ feelings." The idea is that you should avoid exacerbating grief and anger when people are vulnerable. Their example of this, however, which is the argument that after a tragedy is a time for unity rather than debate, has no obvious connection with feelings at all (it is a claim that could be made even setting aside all consideration of grief and anger), nor does the label 'etiquette' help much here, since most of etiquette in the proper sense has nothing directly to do with "regard for others' feelings". Some forms of etiquette are quite clearly a form of self-protection, for instance, others are designed to make social interactions easier for most people, others are designed to attenuate argument into potentially more constructive channels for social interactions, others are designed to make it clear that the people involved are involved in a shared project, and so forth. 'Etiquette' may just be a loose label, although it would fit their example; they seem to have the idea that the basic reason here is that making the tragedy political could take an already hot pot and make it boil over. But if that were the case, their response to it would be inadequate, because we do not in fact allow just any and every kind of expression of grief and anger, regardless of tragedy. It would generally be regarded as unacceptable for people to work out their grief and anger by shooting up a market, or by assaulting people physically in the streets, or by at least some verbal harassment behaviors. The only question is to what else this should extend. So it's not really a response to the hot-pot kind of worry "that it dictates how those criticized should grieve." Well, yes, that's one way you could put it; all that says is that the reason, whatever precisely it is, says that people should not act a certain way when grieving, which is just the topic of discussion itself.
(2) This objection to the etiquette group of reasons, whatever precisely they may be, does bear further examination. Aikin and Talisse say:
In point of fact, outrage and grief may be best expressed and worked through by having discussions about how future instances may be averted. If the tragedy in question has political causes, then politics is a perfectly appropriate component of grieving.
The key is that the charge of politicizing that tragedy, then, has its purchase only if one thinks that the political considerations brought out in the grief are misguided or irrelevant.
This is much, much too fast. Note how quickly things are collapsed into each other: outrage and grief may be "best expressed" (where did the 'best' come from -- it's obvious it's a way they may be expressed, because that's the general topic of discussion, but doesn't jsut throwing in the 'best' here look like Aikin and Talisse rigging the description to make their conclusion easier?) by "having discussions about how future instances may be averted". OK, so this takes the politicization charge to be equivalent to a denial that we should ever respond to tragedies by having discussions about how to avoid them. Is this really what people generally mean by 'politicization'? They give an example from Sanders, who perhaps is where they get the word 'discussions' from, but Sanders explicitly is talking about policy discussions that go after individuals and organizations. (Where Aikin and Talisse get the claim that she is saying that "the blame is only on the shooter in that instance", I don't know, since she explicitly leaves open the possibility of further discussions later; what she says is that only the shooter has "blood on their hands". It's particularly odd since the briefing they quote is literally the day after the Las Vegas shooting, a shooting about which we still know very little, and about which we knew nothing for sure at that time, and the part they quote is linked to a very specific kind of question about what policies should be taken in response, to which her primary response is that before you can talk about policies prevention you need to know the facts about what happened.) So the sense of 'discussions' here is hazy; their example is talking about a very specific kind of discussion, but the claim made by Aikin and Talisse is most plausible (and only non-question-begging) if we are talking about a very extensive variety of discussions. But consider two possible responses to a shooting tragedy:
"I wonder if this could have been prevented by making silencers illegal. What do you think? Do you think we should do that?"
and
"You see, this is why we need to make silencers illegal; people who sell silencers have blood on their hands."
Both of these are moves you could make in "discussions about how future instances may be averted". They both raise exactly the same question: Should silencers be illegal? But are they equally examples of politicizing a situation? If you asked most people, I am fairly sure that most people would not consider the first to be politicizing the situation at all. The second is very definitely an example of what most people mean by politicizing it.
There is a fundamental equivocation running throughout the discussion. The topic at hand is politicized discussion. But what Aikin and Talisse defend is discussion on topics that could be considered political. This makes their job easy since most public discussions on serious matters deal with matters that could be considered political in one way or another, so they can treat the 'politicization' claim as equivalent to trying to shut down all discussion. But this is not the way people generally talk about politicization, and it does not seem that their modification improves the argument, because it seems it prevents them from actually addressing the kinds of worries people might really have.
(3) One of the weird features of the argument by Aikin and Talisse is the lack of recognition that one of the things people explicitly are worrying about in the context of raising worries about politicization is the use of an event to smear one's political opponents with a broad and very negative brush. This is a very weird gap, since it's not as if smearing people is an unheard-of practice in partisan politics, and it is not as if it cannot have very bad effects if it interacts with a lot of anger and grief. After the 2017 Congressional baseball shootings, a number of Democrats raised the worry about politicization, and for a very obvious reason: the shooter was attempting to assassinate Republican legislators, was a Bernie Sanders supporter, and was concluded after investigation to be engaged in a deliberate act of anti-Republican terrorism. What was being attempted by Democrats who insisted that we not politicize the situation was to head off any attempt to have all Democrats tarred with that brush. One of the "discussions about how future instances may be averted" that we could very well have had after that shooting was what to do about Democrats. (Because, of course, Aikin and Talisse would have to say, political causes require discussions about politics and "in point of fact" discussions about how to prevent the assassination of Republicans by Democrats may be the "best" way for Republicans to work through anger and grief.) Those kinds of discussions come up. They are not discussions any reasonable person with a concern for civil society ever wants to become widespread, because they always end very, very badly for everyone. People have good reasons not to want tragedies to be used as the foundations of smear campaigns, prior even to entering discussion. And it is generally considered reasonable to arrange one's etiquette of discussion so that this is not a danger.
(4) The second family of reasons that they consider is based on deliberation. "In these instances," they say, "the charge of politicizing a tragedy amounts to the claim that the politicizer is taking advantage of the outrage and other strong emotions prompted by a tragedy to subvert the slower but more reliable deliberative processes of critical discussion." Their discussion shares all the problems found in Couto and Kahane, and another one as well. They say, commenting on an example from McConnell:
And, as we saw with the etiquette version of the politicization charge, the deliberative version also has its critical edge only against the backdrop of some particular assessment of the facts and values about the event in question. That is, McConnell’s charge of politicizing the tragedy sticks only if one agrees that the existing policies are the products of reasonable deliberative processes, and that proposed deviations are likely to be ill-considered. But, of course, the reasonableness of existing policies is precisely what’s at issue.
But this quite clearly elides two different things. Suppose our current laws are very unreasonable and not at all the products of reasonable deliberative processes. What would this change about the argument being used? Nothing at all. If you are going to change them, the argument is still going to be that it needs to be done with respect for reasonable deliberative processes. After all, you wouldn't be making things more rational and deliberative if you didn't; you'd just be exchanging one unreasonably chosen policy for another. The reasonableness of existing policies is not precisely what's at issue; what's at issue is the reasonable way of changing them. These are two completely distinct evaluations. And while maybe, maybe, you could argue that unreasonable laws are more acceptable to change without regard for reasonable deliberative process, the very existence of deliberation-based politicization charges, and the common existence at that, indicates that this is not widely held and needs to be argued. Really, what seems to have happened is that Aikin and Talisse have gotten their wires crossed: they are supposed to be arguing (I imagine) that reasonable deliberative processes don't exclude strong emotions in cases where the existing policies are unreasonable, but instead they end up arguing that reasonable deliberative processes are not something to which one can appeal if existing policies are unreasonable.
(5) The third family discussed by Aikin and Talisse "focuses on the motive of the target of the charge". This corresponds more or less to the 'cynical reading' of Couto and Kahane. As with Couto and Kahane, they completely fail to do justice to worries about bad faith and manipulation, and, contrary to their clearly stated assumption, these worries don't magically vanish depending on your political views, although it is no doubt true that you are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt with regard to good faith to people whose political views you already consider reasonable.
(6) Their overall diagnosis is very, very odd, although it explains many of the more bizarre moves they make:
We have seen that the charge of politicization is a political version of the allegation that one is taking advantage of the emotions of a vulnerable audience to press for a favored conclusion whose support does not depend on emotions. It is hence the allegation that one is reasoning from irrelevant premises. The problem, as we’ve argued, is that despite our agreement that we should not argue from irrelevant considerations, in the cases where the charge of politicization are most prevalent, we disagree about what the relevant considerations are.
This diagnosis is, of course, what is tripping them up and why, for instance, they don't notice the illicit shift in their argument that's discussed under (4), which in light of this diagnosis can be seen as reinterpreting a point about process as if it were a point about premises. They think that claiming that someone is politicizing something is a charge that they are operating from irrelevant premises. And, having read their essay several times, I have no idea why they think this is true; it seems to me so very strange to regard 'politicization' as a label for a particular kind of fallacy of irrelevance. Claiming that someone is politicizing something is quite obviously an ethical criticism rather than a logical one. If you really insisted on considering it in terms of informal logic, it would be less like ignoratio elenchi and more like poisoning the well, which is an ethical criticism that your ends in arguing are malicious. The really weird thing is that they at one point come close to recognizing something like such a view: "although the concept of 'politicization' looks like a norm of discussion that we should abide for the sake of conducting proper argument about, say, gun regulation, the concept functions differently in the vernacular". Norms of discussion for the sake of conducting proper argument are why, for instance, poisoning the well is something to avoid. But they have never at any point shown that it functions differently in the vernacular; they don't consider worries about smearing at all, and they dismiss worries about bad faith without argument, although both of these are clearly connected to norms of discussion, and they both explicitly come up "in the vernacular" in these contexts. Literally all three of the kinds of examples that they give of the charge "in the vernacular", etiquette, deliberation, and personality, are most naturally treated as having a connection with norms of discussion, even on their own characterizations -- norms about regard for the feelings of others, norms about giving priority to reasonable deliberative processes, norms about not letting the loudest voices be determinative. The standard form of argument that they use -- arguing that where you draw the line depends on your politics, which is, if their argument works, going to be true for absolutely everyone -- doesn't in fact address the reason for drawing the line at all, which even "in the vernacular" seems to be associated in people's mind with the suggestion that other people are arguing unreasonably; thus it doesn't seem that it's even the right kind of argument for what they are trying to argue.
(7) The most obvious argument against Aikin and Talisse on this point is that their line of reasoning leads directly to absurd results. Consider this situation, a real-life situation, although I've stripped out specific details because I'm only interested in the general kind of case. A man murders a child; this man had entered the country illegally and was still undocumented. The case gets taken up by groups who want a large-scale crackdown on illegal immigration, expressed in very harsh terms due to the anger and grief over the murder of the innocent child, and proposing very strict policies in handling all such cases. According to Aikin and Talisse, they can't at all be accused of politicizing a tragedy because this would be "nothing more than a tactic for dismissing their position" on illegal immigration; outrage and grief over the death of a child can perfectly well be worked out by vehement argument for harsh policies and you can't argue that it fails to show appropriate respect for the death of the child without begging the question; there is no way actually to argue with them that we should wait to consider these policies more coolly because according to Aikin and Talisse any attempt to do so assumes beforehand that they are wrong; you can't raise the worry that the loudest voices are just using the case to stampede people in the way they want them to go; there is no concern in Aikin and Talisse for the possibility that the outrage could overflow so that legal immigrants could be smeared as well; Aikin and Talisse have in fact hermetically sealed them from all criticism, treating all criticism of their behavior as if it begs the question against them by assuming that not just their premises but their behavior is wrong. So much protection for people deliberately using emotional events to ramp up the rhetoric only gives political incentive to intensify the rhetoric whenever you think you can get something out of it.
Aikin and Talisse would disagree (I hope) with any policy to investigate the Democratic party as an organization potentially serving as a ground for terrorism; but if, after the Hodgkinson attempt to assassinate a significant number of Republican legislators, Republicans had started advocating policies to engage in a large-scale anti-terrorist investigation against Democrats, what would Aikin and Talisse be able to say? It's a case with political causes that are directly connected with Democratic views; investigating certain kinds of organizations as a potential breeding-ground for terrorism is something we already do in cases with political causes; terrorism is rare enough that, except for a few cases, these investigations are often done on the basis of a single instance. It's something people could demand. (And I know people personally who have tried to insist that the NRA should be treated in such a way after a mass shooting, without there being even the justification of any personal link between the shooter and the organization, so there are people who will certainly try to push this line as far as they can.) Any such proposal would obviously (and almost certainly rightly) be seen by Democrats as an attempt to use the tragedy to stampede people in a particular direction in order to break Democratic political power; Aikin and Talisse have ruled such worries just dependent on personal political views. Democrats would certainly disagree with such a policy, but Aikin and Talisse have shut down all attempt to protest it as maliciously motivated, as an attempt to short-circuit deliberative discussion, or as a violation of respect in the face of tragedy. In reality, Democrats are politically powerful enough to be able to block anything that the Republicans might do in this direction, thus giving the Republicans an incentive to accept that the situation should not be politicized in this way (Republicans would likely not gain anything from it, and could lose a great deal), but what could Aikin and Talisse protest if they decided to charge ahead anyway? They've turned it into a disagreement with no process of adjudication. And what of groups that don't have the clout of the Democratic party and thus can't force their opponents to recognize that their attempt to use a situation for partisan ends won't get anywhere? There seems no way to maintain the stability of civil discussion given the arguments Aikin and Talissue have proposed: it seems one should draw the conclusion from their arguments that you can argue against premises, but not against ways of arguing. But some ways of arguing are quite corrosive, and bad news for everybody. And to be sure, charges of politicization, whatever else they may be, are a tactic; there are at least some cases where they are very plausibly a self-protective tactic against precisely such corrosiveness. It seems ill-advised to remove such a protection without something to put in its place. And I see no indication of any such thing anywhere in the discussion.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Philosophers and Petitions
Agnes Callard has a good comment at "The Stone" on the problems with philosophers signing petitions:
There are reasons why someone might sign a petition -- to get something on a ballot, to register an administrative complaint, and the like. You can tell a lot about a petition simply by asking what practical problem it addresses and how it is proposing to solve it -- indeed this is the only serious standard of evaluation for a petition, by its nature, since all petition is for the purpose of petitioning. (One of the most amusing kind of protests I have seen from the petitioning crowd is that people don't petition to persuade; but the notion of petitioning depends for its coherence on petitio, requesting or applying for a particular kind of behavior. There is no sense in which you are genuinely showing 'support' for anything by signing a petition unless you are signing it in order either to change things or to prevent some change.) But certainly it is true that most academic petitions are not of this sort, and their value thereby reduces entirely to whatever argument they offer with the signatures stripped out. I would actually go beyond Callard and argue that the argument represented in a petition is almost always extremely poor; the arguments that are put on petitions are often quite generic and based on widespread prejudices more than serious study, because they are formulated with the end of getting signatures rather than with the end of giving a rational account of things. You get better ideas and arguments by avoiding petitions.
I am not saying that philosophers should refrain from engaging in political activity; my target is instead the politicization of philosophy itself. I think that the conduct of the profession should be as bottomless as its subject matter: If we are going to have professional, intramural discussions about the ethics of the profession, we should do so philosophically and not by petitioning one another. We should allow ourselves the license to be philosophical all the way down.
“But I need to get people to see that excluding certain voices is not the way to create an inclusive intellectual environment.” Then argue for it! If you strip the list of signatures off your petition, you’ll find that you have an argument on your hands. The argument was there all along, but only when shorn of the appeal to authority does it invite counterargument — as opposed to counterpetitioning. Philosophers value having opponents worth listening to; we shouldn’t be trying to sort people into teams of the like-minded.
There are reasons why someone might sign a petition -- to get something on a ballot, to register an administrative complaint, and the like. You can tell a lot about a petition simply by asking what practical problem it addresses and how it is proposing to solve it -- indeed this is the only serious standard of evaluation for a petition, by its nature, since all petition is for the purpose of petitioning. (One of the most amusing kind of protests I have seen from the petitioning crowd is that people don't petition to persuade; but the notion of petitioning depends for its coherence on petitio, requesting or applying for a particular kind of behavior. There is no sense in which you are genuinely showing 'support' for anything by signing a petition unless you are signing it in order either to change things or to prevent some change.) But certainly it is true that most academic petitions are not of this sort, and their value thereby reduces entirely to whatever argument they offer with the signatures stripped out. I would actually go beyond Callard and argue that the argument represented in a petition is almost always extremely poor; the arguments that are put on petitions are often quite generic and based on widespread prejudices more than serious study, because they are formulated with the end of getting signatures rather than with the end of giving a rational account of things. You get better ideas and arguments by avoiding petitions.
Poor Middle-Aged Summer!
August
by Helen Jackson
Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects' aimless industry.
Pathetic summer seeks by blazonry
Of color to conceal her swift decrease.
Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece
A blossom, and lay bare her poverty.
Poor middle-aged summer! Vain this show!
Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset
One meadow with a single violet;
And well the singing thrush and lily know,
Spite of all artifice which her regret
Can deck in splendid guise, their time to go!
Jackson is most famous for Ramona, a bestselling novel that attempted to draw attention to the mistreatment of Native Americans in the American Southwest in the late nineteenth-century.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Fortnightly Book, August 11
These are the blazing days of summer, sunfire burning away all taste for work until there is nothing left but the ash of lassitude, and while I probably have some extra time in the next two weeks, I don't want to commit myself to any sort of highly involved work for the fortnightly book. So I've been giving some thought about what to do.
A few years back, MrsD had a readalong Louis Hémon's classic about French Canada, Maria Chapdelaine, in the original French (her reflection post here). I read along at the time, although I lagged behind enough not to be able to do any serious participation. But not too long after that I happened to pick up the best-known English translation, by William H. Blake, and it has been sitting in one of my bookpiles ever since. So Maria Chapdelaine in Blake's English translation will be the next book.
Louis Hémon did not have a spectacular life, nor did he have an extensive acquaintance with Canada. He was a French journalist; he had wanted to go into diplomatic service in the Far East, and had trained for that, but the French diplomatic service wanted to send him to Algeria, and that's the only reason he went into journalism. In that career he spent some time in London, and did reasonably well for some years, but eventually became bored and restless, and went to Québec because he had heard that employment was good there. His entire time in Canada would be less than two years. During the time he was working out the ideas for Maria Chapdelaine he was doing odd jobs on farms and, for a while, helped with laying track for the railroad. He sent the manuscript off to his sister in France to see if she could get it serialized. She did in fact -- it was published in 1914. But Hémon never knew that because he was run over by a train in July of 1913 at the age of thirty-two. (Nobody knew who he was, and they were only able to identify his body because he happened to be carrying a postal receipt at the time.) Maria Chapdelaine became quite popular, but most editions have been based on the published version, not the manuscript, and the published versions had been helpfully edited by the French editors to make the French more French (a true reporter, Hémon had filled much of his text with Quebecoisisms, or whatever the appropriate word for specifically the phrases and expressions of the Québécois). This includes Blake's 1921 translation. Such is the long reach of the editorial hand.
But it's the story itself that seems to have caught the interest of so many over so many years, about the young woman, Maria Chapdelaine, living on the frontier and faced with a choice among three suitors who represent three very different directions for French Canada, and thus three very different futures.
A few years back, MrsD had a readalong Louis Hémon's classic about French Canada, Maria Chapdelaine, in the original French (her reflection post here). I read along at the time, although I lagged behind enough not to be able to do any serious participation. But not too long after that I happened to pick up the best-known English translation, by William H. Blake, and it has been sitting in one of my bookpiles ever since. So Maria Chapdelaine in Blake's English translation will be the next book.
Louis Hémon did not have a spectacular life, nor did he have an extensive acquaintance with Canada. He was a French journalist; he had wanted to go into diplomatic service in the Far East, and had trained for that, but the French diplomatic service wanted to send him to Algeria, and that's the only reason he went into journalism. In that career he spent some time in London, and did reasonably well for some years, but eventually became bored and restless, and went to Québec because he had heard that employment was good there. His entire time in Canada would be less than two years. During the time he was working out the ideas for Maria Chapdelaine he was doing odd jobs on farms and, for a while, helped with laying track for the railroad. He sent the manuscript off to his sister in France to see if she could get it serialized. She did in fact -- it was published in 1914. But Hémon never knew that because he was run over by a train in July of 1913 at the age of thirty-two. (Nobody knew who he was, and they were only able to identify his body because he happened to be carrying a postal receipt at the time.) Maria Chapdelaine became quite popular, but most editions have been based on the published version, not the manuscript, and the published versions had been helpfully edited by the French editors to make the French more French (a true reporter, Hémon had filled much of his text with Quebecoisisms, or whatever the appropriate word for specifically the phrases and expressions of the Québécois). This includes Blake's 1921 translation. Such is the long reach of the editorial hand.
But it's the story itself that seems to have caught the interest of so many over so many years, about the young woman, Maria Chapdelaine, living on the frontier and faced with a choice among three suitors who represent three very different directions for French Canada, and thus three very different futures.
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
Introduction
Opening Passage:
Summary: Belinda is a young woman who lives with her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, who as a woman of the world prides herself on being a 'catch-matchmaker', having set up all her other nieces with very nicely lucrative marriages. She sends Belinda to the lively and witty Lady Delacour so that she can get a better sense of the world. The association with Mrs. Stanhope, however, will cause her some problems; everyone assumes that Belinda is herself a worldly girl out to seize some money-laden bachelor with money, including the handsome and somewhat frivolous Clarence Hervey, who otherwise gets along well with her. She discovers very quickly that Lady Delacour's marriage is less than ideal, with both Lady Delacour and Lord Delacour constantly engaged in a kind of petty warfare with each other, and that Lady Delacour herself, despite being friendly and charming, often stretches the bounds of propriety with her friend Mrs. Freke (who likes dressing up as a man and doing shocking things for no other reason than that it is a "frolic" and bit of fun). It takes a bit longer for Belinda to discover a more serious secret: Lady Delacour is so frivolous and even superficial in her ways because she is hiding the fact that she is dying from cancer, and she would rather go out mocking the world than being pitied by it. Due to gossip, both malicious and unthinking, Belinda is several times suspected of rather seriously bad things by Hervey, by Lady Delacour, and by others, and will have to protect her reputation, and perhaps win through to a marriage that whether or not it is a good marriage in Stanhope terms, will be one that is genuinely good.
Just summarizing the plot makes it sound like the heart of the story is the potential romance between Belinda and Hervey, but in fact the novel is a story about the friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, two very different people who like each other and -- slowly, and occasionally with difficulty -- learn how to do each other the best good. While Hervey and other episodes take up quite a bit of the book, they are all occasions for the development of their friendship. A great deal of the work can be read as revolving around the theme of how our relationships with others are a considerable part of how good we are and how good are lives can be. Belinda and Lady Delacour both grow through their friendship, of course. In some ways the marriage between Lord and Lady Delacour is an even better example. They don't hate each other; they've just both, through foolishness and pride, descended into a cycle of pettiness. When, through Belinda's help, they reconcile, things change considerably. The exact same people, with the same strengths and weaknesses, the same decencies and flaws, are infinitely better in a healthy marriage, which amplifies their strengths, than they were in a degenerating one, which amplified their flaws. And I think that's very much it: our friendships, our marriages, even at times our relationships of mere acquaintance, take what we are and amplify either the good or the bad in us, sometimes subtly and sometimes in ways that make a vast difference.
Favorite Passage: Mrs. Freke conversing with Belinda:
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
Opening Passage:
Mrs. Stanhope, a well-bred woman, accomplished in that branch of knowledge which is called the art of rising in the world, had, with but a small fortune, contrived to live in the highest company. She prided herself upon having established half a dozen nieces most happily, that is to say, upon having married them to men of fortunes far superior to their own. One niece still remained unmarried—Belinda Portman, of whom she was determined to get rid with all convenient expedition. Belinda was handsome, graceful, sprightly, and highly accomplished; her aunt had endeavoured to teach her that a young lady’s chief business is to please in society, that all her charms and accomplishments should be invariably subservient to one grand object—the establishing herself in the world:
“For this, hands, lips, and eyes were put to school,
And each instructed feature had its rule.”
Mrs. Stanhope did not find Belinda such a docile pupil as her other nieces, for she had been educated chiefly in the country; she had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity. Her character, however, was yet to be developed by circumstances.
Summary: Belinda is a young woman who lives with her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, who as a woman of the world prides herself on being a 'catch-matchmaker', having set up all her other nieces with very nicely lucrative marriages. She sends Belinda to the lively and witty Lady Delacour so that she can get a better sense of the world. The association with Mrs. Stanhope, however, will cause her some problems; everyone assumes that Belinda is herself a worldly girl out to seize some money-laden bachelor with money, including the handsome and somewhat frivolous Clarence Hervey, who otherwise gets along well with her. She discovers very quickly that Lady Delacour's marriage is less than ideal, with both Lady Delacour and Lord Delacour constantly engaged in a kind of petty warfare with each other, and that Lady Delacour herself, despite being friendly and charming, often stretches the bounds of propriety with her friend Mrs. Freke (who likes dressing up as a man and doing shocking things for no other reason than that it is a "frolic" and bit of fun). It takes a bit longer for Belinda to discover a more serious secret: Lady Delacour is so frivolous and even superficial in her ways because she is hiding the fact that she is dying from cancer, and she would rather go out mocking the world than being pitied by it. Due to gossip, both malicious and unthinking, Belinda is several times suspected of rather seriously bad things by Hervey, by Lady Delacour, and by others, and will have to protect her reputation, and perhaps win through to a marriage that whether or not it is a good marriage in Stanhope terms, will be one that is genuinely good.
Just summarizing the plot makes it sound like the heart of the story is the potential romance between Belinda and Hervey, but in fact the novel is a story about the friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, two very different people who like each other and -- slowly, and occasionally with difficulty -- learn how to do each other the best good. While Hervey and other episodes take up quite a bit of the book, they are all occasions for the development of their friendship. A great deal of the work can be read as revolving around the theme of how our relationships with others are a considerable part of how good we are and how good are lives can be. Belinda and Lady Delacour both grow through their friendship, of course. In some ways the marriage between Lord and Lady Delacour is an even better example. They don't hate each other; they've just both, through foolishness and pride, descended into a cycle of pettiness. When, through Belinda's help, they reconcile, things change considerably. The exact same people, with the same strengths and weaknesses, the same decencies and flaws, are infinitely better in a healthy marriage, which amplifies their strengths, than they were in a degenerating one, which amplified their flaws. And I think that's very much it: our friendships, our marriages, even at times our relationships of mere acquaintance, take what we are and amplify either the good or the bad in us, sometimes subtly and sometimes in ways that make a vast difference.
Favorite Passage: Mrs. Freke conversing with Belinda:
“You read, I see!—I did not know you were a reading girl. So was I once; but I never read now. Books only spoil the originality of genius: very well for those who can’t think for themselves—but when one has made up one’s opinion, there is no use in reading.”
“But to make them up,” replied Belinda, “may it not be useful?”
“Of no use upon earth to minds of a certain class. You, who can think for yourself, should never read.”
“But I read that I may think for myself.”
“Only ruin your understanding, trust me. Books are full of trash—nonsense, conversation is worth all the books in the world.”
“And is there never any nonsense in conversation?”
“What have you here?” continued Mrs. Freke, who did not choose to attend to this question; exclaiming, as she reviewed each of the books on the table in their turns, in the summary language of presumptuous ignorance, “Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments—milk and water! Moore’s Travels—hasty pudding! La Bruyère—nettle porridge! This is what you were at when I came in, was it not?” said she, taking up a book in which she saw Belinda’s mark: “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations. Poor thing! who bored you with this task?”
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
On Mullins on Simplicity
Tap asked for my thoughts on Ryan Mullins's criticism of the doctrine of divine simplicity. I have been having conversations about this subject for over twenty years now, and it's very much as if some recent critics of divine simplicity, like Mullins, are trapped in amber; none of the arguments are in any way new or unanswered, nor do any of them show any signs of serious research on the question. Mullins does get one very crucial thing correct that critics often don't -- that 'simplicity' in this context just means 'not composite' -- but then immediately we get this little jab:
Anyone who does not know that proponents of divine simplicity take it to be directly connected with both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the unity of God, both of which are very obviously major biblical teachings, and have consistently done so on both the Jewish and the Christian sides for well over a thousand years now, does not know enough about the doctrine to be talking about it. (The "strong rhetoric" to which Mullins refers is the claim that denial of divine simplicity leads to idolatry or atheism if consistent. He makes it sound as if this were just some arbitrary thing people said. Did it never occur to him to consider why anyone would say that?) And what is very, very noticeable that nowhere in his essay does Mullins at any point do what should be the first step for any serious criticism of a major position: he never looks at why the doctrine is held in the first place. The closest he comes is trying to tie it, very vaguely and noncommittally, to perfect being theology -- which is not at all a standard reason for it. The doctrine of simplicity did not become a major position because people said that God is a perfect being and then said, "And I guess one model you could have of a perfect being is that it's not composed out of anything more fundamental." Indeed, talk of God as "perfect being" is a very, very late development that originally presupposed the doctrine of simplicity; there is no word in Greek or Latin that is the direct correlate of our word "perfect", although there are circumlocutions for things that we might classify with that word. "Perfectus" in Latin means 'complete', or more strictly, 'completed'; this was also one of the original meanings of the word "perfect" in English (technically still is, although mostly confined to certain kinds of longstanding expressions). When Aquinas in the thirteenth century asked whether it was appropriate to call God perfect, he had to draw a very careful distinction about the different things you could mean if you said God was complete, and a key step to ruling it admissible was that it could not be taken to mean (as it would usually be taken to mean in applying the term to creatures) that God could also be incomplete in the sense of partial, because that violated the doctrine of simplicity. We call God 'perfect' because there was a sense of the word consistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity, not vice versa.
So Mullins is starting entirely the wrong way around. He should instead start with the doctrine of creation. God is the uncreated Creator of other things. It is this that serves as the foundation for the theological doctrine of simplicity, and the basic line of thought is that given by the great Saadia Gaon: when we look at creatures and ask what in them indicates that they were created, shows their status as creatures, we do find such indicators. These are things like mutability, dependence, and composition. So God, who is uncreated, must lack these telltale markers of things that are made, and thus must be noncomposite -- simple. In addition, the term 'simple' is historically a relative term, in the sense of admitting of more and less; you can find any number of people arguing that the soul is more simple than the body, for instance, or that the saints by divine grace are made more simple, all in this sense of noncompositeness; the idea is that the soul is more unified than the body, less divisible into parts and therefore more properly called 'one'. And since God has none of the divisibility into parts, none of the composition that indicates createdness, He is least composite and therefore most simple.
That is it. That is the essential idea of divine simplicity. Mullins makes a very big show of how complicated and difficult the doctrine is to understand; this is obvious nonsense, as you can find laymen in practically any large Presbyterian or Catholic church who can fully and completely understand the point that God, being unmade and unmakeable, is not in any way made out of anything. Complications only arise when you are no longer asking what the doctrine of simplicity itself means and start asking how this or that already complicated topic relates to it. It's not an accident that Mullins runs to talk of properties: there is no generally accepted theory of properties, literally none at all, so any discussion of properties is necessarily complicated in order to pin down what you are talking about; therefore any discussion of simplicity and properties is necessarily complicated. But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not in any way downstream from any account of divine 'properties', in whatever of the many, many senses of that term you are using it. It's likewise not surprising that he builds another criticism out of the application of simplicity to freedom and necessity; these are very complicated topics. There's nothing wrong with seeing what a simple position implies about a complicated topic; but it is very, very absurd to complain that applying a simple position to a complicated topic gets complicated.
Another example of complicating the basic position by applying it to something complicated is his reliance on the notion of identity. Identity is a notoriously difficult subject in analytic philosophy; of all equivalence relations, identity is the one we least understand. It is also a concept that is fairly new. Mullins says:
This is not "the classical understanding of God"; this is a translation, a reconstruction, of the classical understanding within a specific vocabulary, that of analytic philosophy. And the problem is that it seems to be based on an assumption that the Latin word "identitas" means "identity" in the analytic sense. This is a very false assumption, because "identitas" is a looser and weaker word, not a stronger and stricter word, than the word "identity" in colloquial sense. It just means 'sameness', in most of the senses we would give the word 'same'. The primary application of the word is in saying that things are the same kind of thing, but it can also cover other kinds of sameness. When people did theology in Greek and Latin they had no word at all for the "very strong" sense of identity to which Mullins is pointed. They could talk about it, but it required some complicated circumlocutions. And it was not the sense in which 'sameness' was used when talking about divine simplicity, in saying, for instance, that in God wisdom and power are the same. (Aquinas, for instance, pretty clearly denies that the "very strong" sense of sameness is the right one in this context.) One of the most influential texts in the Latin West on discussions of the doctrine is Augustine's De Trinitate; in his brief comments on the point, Augustine's analogy for divine simplicity is the unity of the virtues. In a fully virtuous person, even though "prudence" and "justice" and "fortitude" and the like are not synonymous words, justice will be prudent, courageous, etc.; this way in which all the virtue-terms applied to a fully virtuous person in some sense include all the others is the closest we come to something like divine simplicity, the main difference is that we can't be prudent, etc., except by acquiring these bit by bit, whereas for God, to be God is already to be wise, good, etc. Try to translate the unity of virtues analogy into standard analytic identity-talk and you get gibberish. That is a warning sign that the new terms are bringing baggage with them that the original terms might not carry.
In any case, Mullins's divine freedom argument against simplicity depends entirely on the "very strong" sense; Premise 8, for instance, requires strict transitivity, despite the fact that, historically, theologians and philosophers have denied that strict transitivity applies to the kind of sameness talked about in divine simplicity. Mullins does suggest that certain common arguments require it, but I think a closer examination of those arguments than Mullins gives would show that (1) he is confusing general implications of simplicity itself with transitivity of specific properties; (2) he is dropping, as he does all the way through, the notion of compositeness as a sign of createdness; and (3) the arguments generally have perfectly acceptable analogues in Augustine's virtue analogy despite the latter clearly requiring the rejection of strict transitivity. To put it in fashionable theological terminology, all one requires for a doctrine of divine simplicity is 'perichoresis'; but perichoresis does not imply that one thing can always be directly substituted for another in every context.
***
While not my main point, it's perhaps worth noting that even assuming the application of identity, the argument is not as straightforward as he suggests, since it is known that even the strong form of identity, even in ordinary cases, only allows intersubstitution within the same modal context; if we are talking about things that are described in different modal contexts, things get immensely more complicated, and you can't assume that something like Premise 8 would apply. And as it would be obviously false to say that terms like divine necessity and Creator have no modalities, and very implausible to say that they share exactly the same modalities, you would need to establish that claims about them could be formulated in the same modal context before you could use a premise like Premise 8. Otherwise it would be exactly like claiming that, because the real temperature measured by a Celsius scale and the real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale are exactly the same real temperature, therefore Celsius scales are Fahrenheit scales. 'Real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale' and 'real temperature measured by a Celsius scale' are modally different descriptions. Mullins completely muddles this in his discussion of what he calls the "Modal Mystery strategy", assuming rather than establishing a unitary modal context that makes it so that the modal term 'necessity' is not shifting meanings in the different uses.
Mullins also obscures the matter by ambiguous use of terms. The puzzle about freedom that he tries to develop can't arise if we are using 'freedom' in an intransitive way: 'God is free'. There is no problem whatsoever with claiming that this is necessarily true or that God is necessarily free. The puzzle only arises if we are talking about freedom transitively so that it is taking a non-necessary object. But while it is obviously the case that God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing is not necessary, this is obviously because 'God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing' is a mixed description that depends on something that's not God. 'God being free' and 'God freely doing X' do not share exactly the same modal context; the one is entirely about God Himself, but the latter is about God only relative to X. "1+1=2" is necessary, but "this apple I am picking up and this other apple I am picking up are two apples" is, strictly speaking, not, because it is neither necessary that there be apples nor that I pick them up; it is a mixed description that partly depends on something that's neither a 1 nor a 2 nor a mathematical operation. It would be absurd to claim that talking about necessary numbers in terms using contingent apples makes numbers contingent or apples necessary. And equally obviously, a description that includes a creature is not intersubstitutable with a description that does not.
These are different versions of points that are also made by both Lenow and Feser in their contributions.
What doctrine is this that elicits such strong rhetoric? Perhaps you think the answer has something to do with Jesus Christ, or a major biblical teaching. Surprisingly, the answer has nothing to do with either.
Anyone who does not know that proponents of divine simplicity take it to be directly connected with both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the unity of God, both of which are very obviously major biblical teachings, and have consistently done so on both the Jewish and the Christian sides for well over a thousand years now, does not know enough about the doctrine to be talking about it. (The "strong rhetoric" to which Mullins refers is the claim that denial of divine simplicity leads to idolatry or atheism if consistent. He makes it sound as if this were just some arbitrary thing people said. Did it never occur to him to consider why anyone would say that?) And what is very, very noticeable that nowhere in his essay does Mullins at any point do what should be the first step for any serious criticism of a major position: he never looks at why the doctrine is held in the first place. The closest he comes is trying to tie it, very vaguely and noncommittally, to perfect being theology -- which is not at all a standard reason for it. The doctrine of simplicity did not become a major position because people said that God is a perfect being and then said, "And I guess one model you could have of a perfect being is that it's not composed out of anything more fundamental." Indeed, talk of God as "perfect being" is a very, very late development that originally presupposed the doctrine of simplicity; there is no word in Greek or Latin that is the direct correlate of our word "perfect", although there are circumlocutions for things that we might classify with that word. "Perfectus" in Latin means 'complete', or more strictly, 'completed'; this was also one of the original meanings of the word "perfect" in English (technically still is, although mostly confined to certain kinds of longstanding expressions). When Aquinas in the thirteenth century asked whether it was appropriate to call God perfect, he had to draw a very careful distinction about the different things you could mean if you said God was complete, and a key step to ruling it admissible was that it could not be taken to mean (as it would usually be taken to mean in applying the term to creatures) that God could also be incomplete in the sense of partial, because that violated the doctrine of simplicity. We call God 'perfect' because there was a sense of the word consistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity, not vice versa.
So Mullins is starting entirely the wrong way around. He should instead start with the doctrine of creation. God is the uncreated Creator of other things. It is this that serves as the foundation for the theological doctrine of simplicity, and the basic line of thought is that given by the great Saadia Gaon: when we look at creatures and ask what in them indicates that they were created, shows their status as creatures, we do find such indicators. These are things like mutability, dependence, and composition. So God, who is uncreated, must lack these telltale markers of things that are made, and thus must be noncomposite -- simple. In addition, the term 'simple' is historically a relative term, in the sense of admitting of more and less; you can find any number of people arguing that the soul is more simple than the body, for instance, or that the saints by divine grace are made more simple, all in this sense of noncompositeness; the idea is that the soul is more unified than the body, less divisible into parts and therefore more properly called 'one'. And since God has none of the divisibility into parts, none of the composition that indicates createdness, He is least composite and therefore most simple.
That is it. That is the essential idea of divine simplicity. Mullins makes a very big show of how complicated and difficult the doctrine is to understand; this is obvious nonsense, as you can find laymen in practically any large Presbyterian or Catholic church who can fully and completely understand the point that God, being unmade and unmakeable, is not in any way made out of anything. Complications only arise when you are no longer asking what the doctrine of simplicity itself means and start asking how this or that already complicated topic relates to it. It's not an accident that Mullins runs to talk of properties: there is no generally accepted theory of properties, literally none at all, so any discussion of properties is necessarily complicated in order to pin down what you are talking about; therefore any discussion of simplicity and properties is necessarily complicated. But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not in any way downstream from any account of divine 'properties', in whatever of the many, many senses of that term you are using it. It's likewise not surprising that he builds another criticism out of the application of simplicity to freedom and necessity; these are very complicated topics. There's nothing wrong with seeing what a simple position implies about a complicated topic; but it is very, very absurd to complain that applying a simple position to a complicated topic gets complicated.
Another example of complicating the basic position by applying it to something complicated is his reliance on the notion of identity. Identity is a notoriously difficult subject in analytic philosophy; of all equivalence relations, identity is the one we least understand. It is also a concept that is fairly new. Mullins says:
On the classical understanding of God, theologians will say that all of God’s essential properties are identical to each other, and identical to the divine nature, which is identical to God’s existence. The identity claim here is very strong, and can be easily missed. This is because we use the word “identity” in rather loose ways in contemporary English.
This is not "the classical understanding of God"; this is a translation, a reconstruction, of the classical understanding within a specific vocabulary, that of analytic philosophy. And the problem is that it seems to be based on an assumption that the Latin word "identitas" means "identity" in the analytic sense. This is a very false assumption, because "identitas" is a looser and weaker word, not a stronger and stricter word, than the word "identity" in colloquial sense. It just means 'sameness', in most of the senses we would give the word 'same'. The primary application of the word is in saying that things are the same kind of thing, but it can also cover other kinds of sameness. When people did theology in Greek and Latin they had no word at all for the "very strong" sense of identity to which Mullins is pointed. They could talk about it, but it required some complicated circumlocutions. And it was not the sense in which 'sameness' was used when talking about divine simplicity, in saying, for instance, that in God wisdom and power are the same. (Aquinas, for instance, pretty clearly denies that the "very strong" sense of sameness is the right one in this context.) One of the most influential texts in the Latin West on discussions of the doctrine is Augustine's De Trinitate; in his brief comments on the point, Augustine's analogy for divine simplicity is the unity of the virtues. In a fully virtuous person, even though "prudence" and "justice" and "fortitude" and the like are not synonymous words, justice will be prudent, courageous, etc.; this way in which all the virtue-terms applied to a fully virtuous person in some sense include all the others is the closest we come to something like divine simplicity, the main difference is that we can't be prudent, etc., except by acquiring these bit by bit, whereas for God, to be God is already to be wise, good, etc. Try to translate the unity of virtues analogy into standard analytic identity-talk and you get gibberish. That is a warning sign that the new terms are bringing baggage with them that the original terms might not carry.
In any case, Mullins's divine freedom argument against simplicity depends entirely on the "very strong" sense; Premise 8, for instance, requires strict transitivity, despite the fact that, historically, theologians and philosophers have denied that strict transitivity applies to the kind of sameness talked about in divine simplicity. Mullins does suggest that certain common arguments require it, but I think a closer examination of those arguments than Mullins gives would show that (1) he is confusing general implications of simplicity itself with transitivity of specific properties; (2) he is dropping, as he does all the way through, the notion of compositeness as a sign of createdness; and (3) the arguments generally have perfectly acceptable analogues in Augustine's virtue analogy despite the latter clearly requiring the rejection of strict transitivity. To put it in fashionable theological terminology, all one requires for a doctrine of divine simplicity is 'perichoresis'; but perichoresis does not imply that one thing can always be directly substituted for another in every context.
***
While not my main point, it's perhaps worth noting that even assuming the application of identity, the argument is not as straightforward as he suggests, since it is known that even the strong form of identity, even in ordinary cases, only allows intersubstitution within the same modal context; if we are talking about things that are described in different modal contexts, things get immensely more complicated, and you can't assume that something like Premise 8 would apply. And as it would be obviously false to say that terms like divine necessity and Creator have no modalities, and very implausible to say that they share exactly the same modalities, you would need to establish that claims about them could be formulated in the same modal context before you could use a premise like Premise 8. Otherwise it would be exactly like claiming that, because the real temperature measured by a Celsius scale and the real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale are exactly the same real temperature, therefore Celsius scales are Fahrenheit scales. 'Real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale' and 'real temperature measured by a Celsius scale' are modally different descriptions. Mullins completely muddles this in his discussion of what he calls the "Modal Mystery strategy", assuming rather than establishing a unitary modal context that makes it so that the modal term 'necessity' is not shifting meanings in the different uses.
Mullins also obscures the matter by ambiguous use of terms. The puzzle about freedom that he tries to develop can't arise if we are using 'freedom' in an intransitive way: 'God is free'. There is no problem whatsoever with claiming that this is necessarily true or that God is necessarily free. The puzzle only arises if we are talking about freedom transitively so that it is taking a non-necessary object. But while it is obviously the case that God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing is not necessary, this is obviously because 'God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing' is a mixed description that depends on something that's not God. 'God being free' and 'God freely doing X' do not share exactly the same modal context; the one is entirely about God Himself, but the latter is about God only relative to X. "1+1=2" is necessary, but "this apple I am picking up and this other apple I am picking up are two apples" is, strictly speaking, not, because it is neither necessary that there be apples nor that I pick them up; it is a mixed description that partly depends on something that's neither a 1 nor a 2 nor a mathematical operation. It would be absurd to claim that talking about necessary numbers in terms using contingent apples makes numbers contingent or apples necessary. And equally obviously, a description that includes a creature is not intersubstitutable with a description that does not.
These are different versions of points that are also made by both Lenow and Feser in their contributions.
Friday, August 09, 2019
Edith Stein
Today was the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein, martyr. We don't know exactly when she died; we know that she was sent to Auschwitz on August 7, 1942, and probably died in the gas chambers with her sister Rosa a couple of days later.
[Edith Stein, "The Hidden Life and Epiphany", The Hidden Life, Collected Works of Edith Stein (Volume IV), ed. Dr. L. Gelber and Michael Linssen, O.C.D, ICS, 1992.]
As were the hearts of the first human beings, so down through the ages again and again human hearts have been struck by the divine ray. Hidden from the whole world, it illuminated and irradiated them, let the hard, encrusted, misshapen matter of these hearts soften, and then with the tender hand of an artist formed them anew into the image of God. Seen by no human eye, this is how living building blocks were and are formed and brought together into a Church first of all invisible. However, the visible Church grows out of this invisible one in ever new, divine deeds and revelations which shed their light in ever new epiphanies. The silent working of the Holy Spirit in the depths of the soul made the patriarchs into friends of God. However, when they came to the point of allowing themselves to be used as his pliant instruments, he established them in an external visible efficacy as bearers of historical development, and awakened from among them his chosen people.
[Edith Stein, "The Hidden Life and Epiphany", The Hidden Life, Collected Works of Edith Stein (Volume IV), ed. Dr. L. Gelber and Michael Linssen, O.C.D, ICS, 1992.]
Thursday, August 08, 2019
Evening Note for Thursday, August 8
Thought for the Evening: Perversion in the Context of Humanitarian Traditions
All humanitarian traditions, like medicine, law, and clerical ministry, are by their nature oriented to human common good. These traditions involve using many skills and instrumentalities in order to provide some care for human beings as such. These skills and instrumentalities, however, do not have the humanitarian end of the tradition as their own immediate ends, and this creates the possibility of a perverse use of the skills and instrumentalities of a humanitarian tradition for non-humanitarian ends. Recognizing and understanding these perversions seems to be of considerable importance to many ethical problems, so it seems worthwhile to try to be more clear about what perversion of medicine, etc., is. All human obligation is tied to human common good; since humanitarian traditions are among the major cooperative means for creating, developing, and protecting good shared in common, their integrity is directly related to moral life.
'Perversion' by its nature indicates an inconsistency of a particular kind. Roughly, we can say that,
(1) Given that humanitarian traditions have for their ends some major aspect of human common good,
(2) where some skill or instrumentality has as its natural context such a humanitarian tradition,
(3) it is impossible for it to be good for this skill or instrumentality to be used in a way in itself contrary to the end of the humanitarian tradition.
(This is analogous to the sense of perversion used in so-called perverted faculty arguments. See Edward Feser, "In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument," Neo-Scholastic Essays, St. Augustine's Press [South Bend, IN: 2015] pp. 378-415.)
'Natural context' here is sometimes straightforward and sometimes more tricky. The most obvious case of a medical skill being used within the humanitarian tradition of medicine as its natural context is the case of its being used by a doctor acting as a doctor. Since medicine is a very large tradition, we would obviously have analogous cases for nurses, pharmacists, medical technicians, and the like. More difficult are cases in which we have someone with medical skills who is not explicitly working as a doctor or whatever else may be relevant. In such cases I'm inclined to think that the origination of the skill within the humanitarian tradition is enough to make the humanitarian tradition its natural context, but there are bound to be gray areas and difficult lines on this point, and very little study as been done in what it means (for instance) for a medical skill to be medical if it's used by someone not intending to use it medically. Nonetheless, we should not let such potential marginal ambiguities disguise the fact that the central cases are quite clear. A pharmacist acting in his role as a pharmacist, using his knowledge of pharmaceuticals and his skill as a pharmacist in compounding drugs to poison people is engaged in a perverse action, a perversion of his skills, within the humanitarian tradition of medicine.
Perversions are not simply failures, nor are they accidental misfires; if a pharmacist accidentally poisons someone, this may, if avoidable, be a sign of incompetence, but it is not a perversion of the skill. If we think of the whole set of skills, practices, methods, and instruments and the like that are formed to serve the ends of medicine as 'the medical panoply', medical perversion is the deliberate use of the medical panoply in ways that are inconsistent with the ends of medicine it has been proposed to serve. This also makes it different from mere repurposing -- if we use a skill in a new way, it's not the original purpose of the skill that is relevant but the ends of medicine that are the standard that have to be met. If the new purposes to which the skill are put are still consistent with the ends of medicine, it is not a perverse use of the skill but simply a new development of it.
Medicine provides the clearest and most obvious cases, as it often does in talking about humanitarian traditions due to its age, relatively consistent history, and complexity, but the same kind of reasoning would also apply to law and spiritual ministry; some (although not all) of the gravest immoralities associated with these are perversions of skills, practices, etc., whose natural context is these humanitarian traditions. The account also extends to kinds of humanitarian traditions that are spottier than these three big ones -- cases where the humanitarian tradition is sometimes more virtual than actual, where consistent maintenance of them as humanitarian traditions has sometimes failed, like education or journalism or politics; the primary difference is that they will have more of the marginal cases noted above. Where professions grow up within humanitarian traditions (which is common), the professional ethics associated with each profession will often be greatly concerned with avoiding perversions within the context of that humanitarian tradition, and the moral growth of a profession is often related to its development of means to limit, correct, and avoid ways in which professional means can be perverted to ends inconsistent with the humanitarian tradition.
Previous Evening Notes on Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions
- Prima Facie Duties and Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions and Cliental Privilege
Various Links of Interest
* Russell Sparkes talks about G. K. Chesterton's fight against the eugenics movement. (ht)
* Andreas Kapsner, The Stories of Logics (PDF)
* Jonathan Greig, Nicholas of Methone and Thomas Aquinas on Participation in Their Critiques of Proclus' Elements of Theology, Proposition 23
* Gregory DiPippo on Raphael's Transfiguration of Christ
* Agnes Callard reflects on the relation between aesthetics and ethics.
* Michael Pakaluk and Catherine Ruth Pakaluk discuss the Gospel of Mark. Michael Pakaluk's recent translation of the Gospel, The Memoirs of St. Peter, is quite good.
* The original watercolors for The Little Prince
Currently Reading
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
Augustine, The Trinity
All humanitarian traditions, like medicine, law, and clerical ministry, are by their nature oriented to human common good. These traditions involve using many skills and instrumentalities in order to provide some care for human beings as such. These skills and instrumentalities, however, do not have the humanitarian end of the tradition as their own immediate ends, and this creates the possibility of a perverse use of the skills and instrumentalities of a humanitarian tradition for non-humanitarian ends. Recognizing and understanding these perversions seems to be of considerable importance to many ethical problems, so it seems worthwhile to try to be more clear about what perversion of medicine, etc., is. All human obligation is tied to human common good; since humanitarian traditions are among the major cooperative means for creating, developing, and protecting good shared in common, their integrity is directly related to moral life.
'Perversion' by its nature indicates an inconsistency of a particular kind. Roughly, we can say that,
(1) Given that humanitarian traditions have for their ends some major aspect of human common good,
(2) where some skill or instrumentality has as its natural context such a humanitarian tradition,
(3) it is impossible for it to be good for this skill or instrumentality to be used in a way in itself contrary to the end of the humanitarian tradition.
(This is analogous to the sense of perversion used in so-called perverted faculty arguments. See Edward Feser, "In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument," Neo-Scholastic Essays, St. Augustine's Press [South Bend, IN: 2015] pp. 378-415.)
'Natural context' here is sometimes straightforward and sometimes more tricky. The most obvious case of a medical skill being used within the humanitarian tradition of medicine as its natural context is the case of its being used by a doctor acting as a doctor. Since medicine is a very large tradition, we would obviously have analogous cases for nurses, pharmacists, medical technicians, and the like. More difficult are cases in which we have someone with medical skills who is not explicitly working as a doctor or whatever else may be relevant. In such cases I'm inclined to think that the origination of the skill within the humanitarian tradition is enough to make the humanitarian tradition its natural context, but there are bound to be gray areas and difficult lines on this point, and very little study as been done in what it means (for instance) for a medical skill to be medical if it's used by someone not intending to use it medically. Nonetheless, we should not let such potential marginal ambiguities disguise the fact that the central cases are quite clear. A pharmacist acting in his role as a pharmacist, using his knowledge of pharmaceuticals and his skill as a pharmacist in compounding drugs to poison people is engaged in a perverse action, a perversion of his skills, within the humanitarian tradition of medicine.
Perversions are not simply failures, nor are they accidental misfires; if a pharmacist accidentally poisons someone, this may, if avoidable, be a sign of incompetence, but it is not a perversion of the skill. If we think of the whole set of skills, practices, methods, and instruments and the like that are formed to serve the ends of medicine as 'the medical panoply', medical perversion is the deliberate use of the medical panoply in ways that are inconsistent with the ends of medicine it has been proposed to serve. This also makes it different from mere repurposing -- if we use a skill in a new way, it's not the original purpose of the skill that is relevant but the ends of medicine that are the standard that have to be met. If the new purposes to which the skill are put are still consistent with the ends of medicine, it is not a perverse use of the skill but simply a new development of it.
Medicine provides the clearest and most obvious cases, as it often does in talking about humanitarian traditions due to its age, relatively consistent history, and complexity, but the same kind of reasoning would also apply to law and spiritual ministry; some (although not all) of the gravest immoralities associated with these are perversions of skills, practices, etc., whose natural context is these humanitarian traditions. The account also extends to kinds of humanitarian traditions that are spottier than these three big ones -- cases where the humanitarian tradition is sometimes more virtual than actual, where consistent maintenance of them as humanitarian traditions has sometimes failed, like education or journalism or politics; the primary difference is that they will have more of the marginal cases noted above. Where professions grow up within humanitarian traditions (which is common), the professional ethics associated with each profession will often be greatly concerned with avoiding perversions within the context of that humanitarian tradition, and the moral growth of a profession is often related to its development of means to limit, correct, and avoid ways in which professional means can be perverted to ends inconsistent with the humanitarian tradition.
Previous Evening Notes on Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions
- Prima Facie Duties and Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions and Cliental Privilege
Various Links of Interest
* Russell Sparkes talks about G. K. Chesterton's fight against the eugenics movement. (ht)
* Andreas Kapsner, The Stories of Logics (PDF)
* Jonathan Greig, Nicholas of Methone and Thomas Aquinas on Participation in Their Critiques of Proclus' Elements of Theology, Proposition 23
* Gregory DiPippo on Raphael's Transfiguration of Christ
* Agnes Callard reflects on the relation between aesthetics and ethics.
* Michael Pakaluk and Catherine Ruth Pakaluk discuss the Gospel of Mark. Michael Pakaluk's recent translation of the Gospel, The Memoirs of St. Peter, is quite good.
* The original watercolors for The Little Prince
Currently Reading
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
Augustine, The Trinity
'Centrism'
One of the things the past few years has made clear to me is that there are many, many supposedly intelligent people who nonetheless cannot grasp the elementary point that 'centrism' is a miscellaneous category; it is just the term we use in political matters for anything that doesn't definitely fit into 'left' or 'right'. This should be extraordinarily easy to figure out. 'Centrism' itself is a relative label (center compared to what?), designating what is neither definitely to the right or definitely to the left. It is why there are so very many people who count as centrists of some kind but almost all politics in modern liberal societies gets divided according to some local version of a left vs. right divide -- there is no stable position or set of positions that is 'centrism', even locally, but lots of different leftover positions. And centrists who self-identify as centrists always do so because they don't think that they count as typical 'left' or 'right'. 'Centrism' is capable of covering any number of very different positions.
It's an interesting question why this seems to be so difficult for people, even people who specialize in fields like political philosophy, political science, or history, where you would expect them at least to ask the question of how people get sorted into the category to begin with. I suspect it comes down to two things:
(1) Left-vs.-right talk makes these sound like substantive and stable options along a line. In reality, 'left' and 'right' are none of these things. Even the historical reason for talking about 'left' and 'right' has nothing to do with a line; it seems to trace to a historical accident about which side of the legislative chamber different factions happened to sit on at some point. The terminology stuck, and the reason for assigning people to 'left' or 'right' is just based on a crude sense of precedent -- those people are 'left' who seem to us most like the 'left' of the previous generation, and those people are 'right' who seem to us most like the 'right' of the previous generation. And this means that it wavers all over the place on particular details. Easy movement across borders, for instance, was a 'right' idea opposed by the 'left' that became a 'left' idea opposed by the 'right'. It's just the overall package that gives the labels. And 'left' and 'right' vary considerably according to society. The 'right' in Canada is very different from the 'right' in America.
In reality, politics has many dimensions. When we get to more serious analysis, this becomes obvious -- the alliance of certain fiscal and social positions is obviously due to historical accident, which is why primarily-fiscal and primarily-social factions of both the 'left' and the 'right' rarely get along very well. There is no obvious reason why someone who is 'left' on labor issues should always be 'left' on immigration issues, no obvious reason why being 'right' on marriage must always go with being 'right' on tax cuts. People get sorted into two groups just because binary contests are easier to follow than complicated ones (there are incentives for lumping as many of your opponents into a single group if possible, so that you have an Us faction and a Them faction), and because self-identification as 'left' and 'right' indicates a willingness to ally -- even with gritted teeth -- with other groups who already self-identify as such.
But the fact that we do sort people this way, and the fact that we can pretty easily identify some of the alliances at any given point of time, means that the way we use 'left' and 'right' makes it sound like these are definite positions along one and only one line. And if they were, then 'centrism' would presumably be the definite center of the line.
(2) The name tends toward a confusion of 'moderate' with 'centrist'. This is something you even find in dictionaries. I recently saw a tweet that said that 'centrism' was a false application of the Doctrine of the Mean to politics. This is an immensely stupid thing to say; Aristotle's account of the Doctrine of the Mean directly says that the moderate or mean is not the central point, because what counts as moderate depends on what the extremes are, and the real mean is typically closer to one of the extremes than the other. In addition, the claim requires assuming that left and right are unitary and the only real, stable, and definite directions in politics; this is entirely false. And it is simply not the general motivation for centrism. The most common motivation for centrism -- or at least the most significant in the history of centrisms -- is that people started on the 'left' or 'right', but something happened that made them unwilling to identify as definite allies of whichever one they were, without giving them reason to identify as definite allies of the other side. Alienation, not moderation, is their primary and explicit reason. (Indeed, one of the most widely recognized experiences in contemporary politics in liberal societies is how thoroughly alienating disputes between 'left' and 'right' are; people complain about it all the time. The sense of having no real place in the standard political discussion is a widespread result of the way modern societies work.) Perhaps another common motivation is a mix-and-match of different positions, so that on any one issue they would be classifiable as 'left' and 'right', but not always or even usually the same. There is nothing about the classification that makes this impossible; you could only rule it out if you thought, again, that 'left' and 'right' were substantive and stable options giving direction to a single line.
In reality, of course, everybody everywhere should usually be moderate according to the reasoning of a reasonable person; while probably very few are, I suppose most people at least assume that they are so, and most of the rest are assuming that they have some reasonable emergency justification for extreme measures. Given this, it is inevitable that people on the 'left' and 'right' will often think that 'centrism' is gibberish -- an attempt at finding a middle ground between being reasonable and being unreasonable. But this is an imposed interpretation, and not a discovered fact.
It's an interesting question why this seems to be so difficult for people, even people who specialize in fields like political philosophy, political science, or history, where you would expect them at least to ask the question of how people get sorted into the category to begin with. I suspect it comes down to two things:
(1) Left-vs.-right talk makes these sound like substantive and stable options along a line. In reality, 'left' and 'right' are none of these things. Even the historical reason for talking about 'left' and 'right' has nothing to do with a line; it seems to trace to a historical accident about which side of the legislative chamber different factions happened to sit on at some point. The terminology stuck, and the reason for assigning people to 'left' or 'right' is just based on a crude sense of precedent -- those people are 'left' who seem to us most like the 'left' of the previous generation, and those people are 'right' who seem to us most like the 'right' of the previous generation. And this means that it wavers all over the place on particular details. Easy movement across borders, for instance, was a 'right' idea opposed by the 'left' that became a 'left' idea opposed by the 'right'. It's just the overall package that gives the labels. And 'left' and 'right' vary considerably according to society. The 'right' in Canada is very different from the 'right' in America.
In reality, politics has many dimensions. When we get to more serious analysis, this becomes obvious -- the alliance of certain fiscal and social positions is obviously due to historical accident, which is why primarily-fiscal and primarily-social factions of both the 'left' and the 'right' rarely get along very well. There is no obvious reason why someone who is 'left' on labor issues should always be 'left' on immigration issues, no obvious reason why being 'right' on marriage must always go with being 'right' on tax cuts. People get sorted into two groups just because binary contests are easier to follow than complicated ones (there are incentives for lumping as many of your opponents into a single group if possible, so that you have an Us faction and a Them faction), and because self-identification as 'left' and 'right' indicates a willingness to ally -- even with gritted teeth -- with other groups who already self-identify as such.
But the fact that we do sort people this way, and the fact that we can pretty easily identify some of the alliances at any given point of time, means that the way we use 'left' and 'right' makes it sound like these are definite positions along one and only one line. And if they were, then 'centrism' would presumably be the definite center of the line.
(2) The name tends toward a confusion of 'moderate' with 'centrist'. This is something you even find in dictionaries. I recently saw a tweet that said that 'centrism' was a false application of the Doctrine of the Mean to politics. This is an immensely stupid thing to say; Aristotle's account of the Doctrine of the Mean directly says that the moderate or mean is not the central point, because what counts as moderate depends on what the extremes are, and the real mean is typically closer to one of the extremes than the other. In addition, the claim requires assuming that left and right are unitary and the only real, stable, and definite directions in politics; this is entirely false. And it is simply not the general motivation for centrism. The most common motivation for centrism -- or at least the most significant in the history of centrisms -- is that people started on the 'left' or 'right', but something happened that made them unwilling to identify as definite allies of whichever one they were, without giving them reason to identify as definite allies of the other side. Alienation, not moderation, is their primary and explicit reason. (Indeed, one of the most widely recognized experiences in contemporary politics in liberal societies is how thoroughly alienating disputes between 'left' and 'right' are; people complain about it all the time. The sense of having no real place in the standard political discussion is a widespread result of the way modern societies work.) Perhaps another common motivation is a mix-and-match of different positions, so that on any one issue they would be classifiable as 'left' and 'right', but not always or even usually the same. There is nothing about the classification that makes this impossible; you could only rule it out if you thought, again, that 'left' and 'right' were substantive and stable options giving direction to a single line.
In reality, of course, everybody everywhere should usually be moderate according to the reasoning of a reasonable person; while probably very few are, I suppose most people at least assume that they are so, and most of the rest are assuming that they have some reasonable emergency justification for extreme measures. Given this, it is inevitable that people on the 'left' and 'right' will often think that 'centrism' is gibberish -- an attempt at finding a middle ground between being reasonable and being unreasonable. But this is an imposed interpretation, and not a discovered fact.
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Transfiguration
Hear and listen, you covetous one: the Apostle explains to you in another place more clearly this that he said, "Let no man seek his own, but another's." He says of himself, "Not seeking my own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved." This Peter understood not yet when he desired to live on the mount with Christ. He was reserving this for you, Peter, after death. But now He says Himself, "Come down, to labour in the earth; in the earth to serve, to be despised, and crucified in the earth. The Life came down, that He might be slain; the Bread came down, that He might hunger; the Way came down, that life might be wearied in the way; the Fountain came down, that He might thirst; and do you refuse to labour? 'Seek not your own.' Have charity, preach the truth; so shall you come to eternity, where you shall find security."
Augustine, Sermon 28.6.
Monday, August 05, 2019
In Sooth, the Heavens are Splendid to the Eye
Sonnet to an Evening in August
by Kashiprasad Ghosh
The mellowing glory of the setting sun
Is pouring over Ganga's golden stream;
As when a lofty poet's thoughts have run
Wild and extatic by the soft, sweet dream
Of Fancy many-hued:—the dazzling light
Of genius true and poesy divine
Within his bosom beams in splendour bright,
And makes his every thought resplendent shine.
The variegated streaks, which glow afar,
Appear as if, in his ethereal track,
Arun, who drives the Sun's refulgent car,
Had from his radiant pinions flung them back.
In sooth, the heavens are splendid to the eye;
August! indeed august thine evening sky!
Ghosh, also known as Kasiprasad Ghoshe, was a Bengali poet who largely wrote in English; he was also the editor of the Hindu Intelligencer, an English-language newspaper published in Calcutta.
Saturday, August 03, 2019
On Anti-Vaccination Conscientious Objection
At The Atlantic, Eula and Mavis Biss have an absurd article on anti-vaccination conscientious objection; the answer to the title question, "Are Anti-vaxxers Conscientious Objectors?" (which I presume was given by the editor) is obviously "Yes", and in fact, the article itself points out that they have always been considered one of the major classes of conscientious objectors for as long as the phrase 'conscientious objector' has been around. But of course, what the argument is trying to do is play games with the name 'conscientious objector', gerrymandering it so that, if you squint at the word 'conscientious' in just the right way, they won't count. Because exactly what we need in these volatile times is to undermine a major safeguard against large-scale medical programs being used as an instrument of government abuse of power.
The word-game proceeds by a set of equivocations. They say:
They will later have to face the problem that people in these circumstances don't seem to treat conscience as a source of knowledge but as a source of belief; they will get around this by proposing, in a completely ad hoc way, that people are confusing knowledge with firmly held belief. In reality, of course, when we are talking about 'conscientious objection' everyone recognizes that we are talking about belief to begin with -- the whole point of recognizing a category for conscientious objectors is to take into account the fact that people have strongly held religious and moral beliefs. But what they are trying to do with this apparently arbitrary intrusion of 'knowledge' into the mix is found in the last sentence. You see, when you engage in conscientious objection, you aren't asking other people for permission to opt out of them doing things to you.
The particular thing they have in their sights is the so-called 'philosophical exemption'. Now, it doesn't take any elaborate investigation to show that the adjective here is not being used in a technical or formal way but in the colloquial way in which people talk about their philosophy of life and similar such things. The real point of the exemption is to recognize that people could have moral reasons for objecting that are not strictly religious. But Biss and Biss, of course, decide they will take the term in a full formal way:
Even in the sense in which they are using, this is a muddled bit of reasoning. Philosophy may be "working out what can be held true in conversation with others", but it doesn't follow from this that it specifically requires working it out in conversation with this or that group of people (Biss and Biss have certainly done nothing to show that anti-vaxxers aren't conversing about it, for the obvious reason they can't -- the reason it has become a large-scale problem is that anti-vaxxers converse about it at great length with each other, which has led to this being an actual movement and not just a few random people). And unless you hold that philosophy can't actually find the truth it's supposedly working out, nothing prevents your philosophical conversation from leading to what Biss and Biss, at least, would consider "rigidly held beliefs". And even if they did not, it is an entirely different question whether we should have laws requiring people to explain themselves on the matter, one that can only be determined on political and legal grounds, not on the definition of the word 'philosophy'.
They then introduce the Kantian account of conscientiousness, as if anti-vaxxers have any particular reasons to be Kantians. But the real equivocation is here:
Note what they do not say, even though someone would naturally tend to assume it: they do not say that the last sentence follows from the Kantian account of conscience given. It in fact does not. Any Kantian account of such matters is not going to look primarily at consequences but at maxims -- roughly what in ordinary conversation we call intent. Consequences are largely irrelevant in a Kantian account of anything. And because the Kantian approach is to fit maxims to moral law, to act with intent that is appropriate to being a rational being as such, there is no sense in which we 'prioritize' duties in a Kantian account -- either we have it as a duty or we don't, either this is one of the circumstances in which we must do it as our duty or it isn't. What they are doing is using a Kantian account to argue that we should examine our motivations, and then splicing a different account of conscience onto it to get their preferred conclusion.
This becomes much more obvious when one recognizes that their repeated insistence throughout on conversation is not particularly consistent with Kantianism. There is indeed a very fundamental sense in which conscience can be considered social in Kant's account, but it is not in the sense of "working out what can be held true in conversation with others" or, as they later put it "work out what counts as fulfilling our duties to others with everyone in our community". (In moral matters that would be what Kant calls heteronomy, and is very much not consistent with what he would regard as conscientiousness.) It is in something like the sense that when you act in moral matters you are effectively doing so as a rational being, and therefore are making moral decisions for everyone, not just yourself, so your moral decisions have to be suitable for everyone. But a Kantian account would also very much have to say that you should sometimes stand your ground on a moral matter, no matter what anyone else might say.
How would anti-vaxxers be assessed in Kantian terms? I don't know. Since it matters a great deal what they are actually intending, and anti-vaxxers probably intend quite a wide range of things, it would depend on the case. Protecting the vulnerable from disease is universalizable, so it would certainly be a duty. But it would also certainly be an imperfect (i.e., incomplete) duty, not on its own telling you exactly what you have to do in order to do it. Vaccinations are not universal rational options that all rational beings have access to; it's in principle possible that there could be medical methods massively more effective than vaccines, so it's an empirical matter whether they are among the most effective ways to protect people from disease; from both of which it will follow that there is no specific duty to vaccinate. It still may be that fulfilling your duty to protect the vulnerable requires vaccination; but this, of course, is precisely what is usually at issue in this case. (Mavis Biss is a quite competent Kant scholar; nothing directly attributed to Kant in the article is wrong. Perhaps Mavis Biss has a much stronger view than usual about what is involved in imperfect duties, or of the way in which community functions in a Kantian context, or something else. That is possible. But the problem is that we seem to move in and out of a Kantian context without warning or indication that it is even being done, which is, again, equivocation.)
Thus Biss and Biss are pretty clearly not appealing to Kant because they are proposing (here, at least) a Kantian view of the anti-vaccination movement, but to show -- well, I don't know what; perhaps that they are more thoughtful than the rubes. It's unclear to me whether they think that Kant is the source of the individualistic view of conscience that they are opposing -- they say a few things that possibly could be interpreted that way, but really Kant is just thrown into the argument, and that whole part of the discussion doesn't seem to contribute anything to the actual argument beyond the self-examination point, which didn't need his authority to be made.
When we step back and look at the argument overall, it becomes clear that they take exemptions for conscientious objectors to be exemptions "from our obligations to others"; this is a very serious misunderstanding of conscientious objection exemptions, which are given so that we can fulfill our obligations to others, and which do not preclude conscientious objectors from fulfilling their obligations to others. This is obvious in every other case of conscientious objection; it's not suddenly untrue here. And all of the word-games in the article mean that Biss and Biss never really argue that the anti-vaxxers are doing anything wrong. They don't argue that our obligations actually must be fulfilled by vaccinations in particular; they don't argue that anyone actually has the account of conscience they are opposing; they don't in fact argue that their account of conscience as having the particular social component that their argument requires is a correct one. Now, I'd have no problem with this, except that they made such an extraordinary fuss about the claim that philosophy was "not a matter of declaring rigidly held beliefs, but of working out what can be held true in conversation with others", and yet here we find them very much not engaging in any kind of dialogue or conversation with anyone, doing nothing but forcefully declaring their beliefs -- whether rigidly held, I cannot say, but there's nothing in the article to make it possible to say that they are not.
Vaccination is one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time, and the value of what it has contributed to the health of the human race is perhaps rivaled only by improved sanitary conditions for the sick and antibiotics. But vaccination in general is also quite intrusive and, what is worse, somewhat indefinite in the extent of its intrusiveness. Talking about conscientious objection to vaccination is often made to sound like it's protesting over getting a small handful of doses, but the CDC's recommended vaccination schedule involves various vaccines adding up to over a hundred doses over a lifetime. (Most people who would characterize themselves as having had all their vaccinations really mean that their parents made sure that they had all the vaccines legally required at the time for schoolchildren, and perhaps a few others afterward. More zealous people do regular flu shots, and probably a few others as they happen to come up for traveling or in medical consultations or what have you. No doubt a few people are as entirely thorough as they can honestly be. But we could add any number of other vaccinations to the list, depending on any number of medical discoveries or newly recognized threats. There is no particular number that is the number of vaccines we should have.)
Vaccination also requires a fairly significant amount of trust in doctors, and in vaccine supply lines, and in medical researchers. Critics of the anti-vaccination movement tend to be good at arguing for the value of vaccines in the abstract; but the movement has largely built on a loss of trust by certain populations in significant portions of the actual medical establishment.
And even if none of this were true, large-scale medical programs by their nature generally need voluntary participation anyway; depending on the kind of program, it's sometimes just voluntary participation of the community generally, but vaccination doesn't work that way. It's the sort of thing you might want to be required; but actively imposing it on people against their will is not actually going to help things in the long run. The standard way of getting around this problem is exactly the one we use: make it legally required, but allow fairly generous exemptions. That way most people will do it both freely and as a duty. One can improve it even more by making it even easier to keep up with vaccinations; that's basically what we do with flu shots. Misinformation, of which there is certainly a lot, can be fought by better information campaigns. It's entirely possible to be insistent on the importance of vaccinations while also recognizing that honest and decent people can have worries that need to be addressed; and respect for conscientious objection is a recognition of the importance of consent and patient autonomy, which are pillars of modern medical ethics. Conscientious objection is entirely the wrong point about which to worry.
(I should perhaps note that Biss and Biss never actually give any legal recommendation. There's a sort of implication, at least an apparent one, that they think philosophical exemptions, or most philosophical exemptions, are illegitimate, and one could read the article as suggesting that they should be eliminated. But the authors never actually say this, and an alternative reading would be just that they are arguing for a regime of persuasion rather than legal coercion. If that's the case, it's not obvious what most of their argument does toward that end, and the argument they give seems actually more subversive of the notion of medical conscientious objection than that would suggest. But the argument given is at its strongest in the insistence that conscience is not purely individualistic but communal, and if you emphasized that aspect of it, you could very well argue that the argument's practical import is really that these things need to be 'discussed' (in some way).)
ADDED LATER: Related to this is this recent article on how much easier it is to get parents to agree to vaccinations if you just bother to answer their questions patiently and start giving them information early and well before the vaccination times come up.
The word-game proceeds by a set of equivocations. They say:
Today we tend to think of the conscience as an inner voice, or a form of moral intuition. It’s a little cricket whispering in your ear. Your mind talking to itself. The idea that the conscience is an inner source of knowledge has obvious appeal. If your own conscience can tell you what to do in morally significant situations, you don’t need to struggle with others to arrive at justifiable decisions.
They will later have to face the problem that people in these circumstances don't seem to treat conscience as a source of knowledge but as a source of belief; they will get around this by proposing, in a completely ad hoc way, that people are confusing knowledge with firmly held belief. In reality, of course, when we are talking about 'conscientious objection' everyone recognizes that we are talking about belief to begin with -- the whole point of recognizing a category for conscientious objectors is to take into account the fact that people have strongly held religious and moral beliefs. But what they are trying to do with this apparently arbitrary intrusion of 'knowledge' into the mix is found in the last sentence. You see, when you engage in conscientious objection, you aren't asking other people for permission to opt out of them doing things to you.
The particular thing they have in their sights is the so-called 'philosophical exemption'. Now, it doesn't take any elaborate investigation to show that the adjective here is not being used in a technical or formal way but in the colloquial way in which people talk about their philosophy of life and similar such things. The real point of the exemption is to recognize that people could have moral reasons for objecting that are not strictly religious. But Biss and Biss, of course, decide they will take the term in a full formal way:
Philosophy is not a matter of declaring rigidly held beliefs, but of working out what can be held true in conversation with others. In the Western tradition, going all the way back to Plato, philosophy is based on dialogue. But philosophical exemptions to vaccination laws excuse people from explaining themselves.
Even in the sense in which they are using, this is a muddled bit of reasoning. Philosophy may be "working out what can be held true in conversation with others", but it doesn't follow from this that it specifically requires working it out in conversation with this or that group of people (Biss and Biss have certainly done nothing to show that anti-vaxxers aren't conversing about it, for the obvious reason they can't -- the reason it has become a large-scale problem is that anti-vaxxers converse about it at great length with each other, which has led to this being an actual movement and not just a few random people). And unless you hold that philosophy can't actually find the truth it's supposedly working out, nothing prevents your philosophical conversation from leading to what Biss and Biss, at least, would consider "rigidly held beliefs". And even if they did not, it is an entirely different question whether we should have laws requiring people to explain themselves on the matter, one that can only be determined on political and legal grounds, not on the definition of the word 'philosophy'.
They then introduce the Kantian account of conscientiousness, as if anti-vaxxers have any particular reasons to be Kantians. But the real equivocation is here:
Thorough self-examination might not reveal to everyone the true stakes of a decision against vaccination: the risk of exposing infants, cancer patients, and other vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated to a life-threatening illness. But Kant’s logic still applies: Acting from a belief system that may run contrary “to a human duty which is certain in and of itself” is unconscientious. Conscience demands that the relatively healthy prioritize their duty to protect the vulnerable from disease.
Note what they do not say, even though someone would naturally tend to assume it: they do not say that the last sentence follows from the Kantian account of conscience given. It in fact does not. Any Kantian account of such matters is not going to look primarily at consequences but at maxims -- roughly what in ordinary conversation we call intent. Consequences are largely irrelevant in a Kantian account of anything. And because the Kantian approach is to fit maxims to moral law, to act with intent that is appropriate to being a rational being as such, there is no sense in which we 'prioritize' duties in a Kantian account -- either we have it as a duty or we don't, either this is one of the circumstances in which we must do it as our duty or it isn't. What they are doing is using a Kantian account to argue that we should examine our motivations, and then splicing a different account of conscience onto it to get their preferred conclusion.
This becomes much more obvious when one recognizes that their repeated insistence throughout on conversation is not particularly consistent with Kantianism. There is indeed a very fundamental sense in which conscience can be considered social in Kant's account, but it is not in the sense of "working out what can be held true in conversation with others" or, as they later put it "work out what counts as fulfilling our duties to others with everyone in our community". (In moral matters that would be what Kant calls heteronomy, and is very much not consistent with what he would regard as conscientiousness.) It is in something like the sense that when you act in moral matters you are effectively doing so as a rational being, and therefore are making moral decisions for everyone, not just yourself, so your moral decisions have to be suitable for everyone. But a Kantian account would also very much have to say that you should sometimes stand your ground on a moral matter, no matter what anyone else might say.
How would anti-vaxxers be assessed in Kantian terms? I don't know. Since it matters a great deal what they are actually intending, and anti-vaxxers probably intend quite a wide range of things, it would depend on the case. Protecting the vulnerable from disease is universalizable, so it would certainly be a duty. But it would also certainly be an imperfect (i.e., incomplete) duty, not on its own telling you exactly what you have to do in order to do it. Vaccinations are not universal rational options that all rational beings have access to; it's in principle possible that there could be medical methods massively more effective than vaccines, so it's an empirical matter whether they are among the most effective ways to protect people from disease; from both of which it will follow that there is no specific duty to vaccinate. It still may be that fulfilling your duty to protect the vulnerable requires vaccination; but this, of course, is precisely what is usually at issue in this case. (Mavis Biss is a quite competent Kant scholar; nothing directly attributed to Kant in the article is wrong. Perhaps Mavis Biss has a much stronger view than usual about what is involved in imperfect duties, or of the way in which community functions in a Kantian context, or something else. That is possible. But the problem is that we seem to move in and out of a Kantian context without warning or indication that it is even being done, which is, again, equivocation.)
Thus Biss and Biss are pretty clearly not appealing to Kant because they are proposing (here, at least) a Kantian view of the anti-vaccination movement, but to show -- well, I don't know what; perhaps that they are more thoughtful than the rubes. It's unclear to me whether they think that Kant is the source of the individualistic view of conscience that they are opposing -- they say a few things that possibly could be interpreted that way, but really Kant is just thrown into the argument, and that whole part of the discussion doesn't seem to contribute anything to the actual argument beyond the self-examination point, which didn't need his authority to be made.
When we step back and look at the argument overall, it becomes clear that they take exemptions for conscientious objectors to be exemptions "from our obligations to others"; this is a very serious misunderstanding of conscientious objection exemptions, which are given so that we can fulfill our obligations to others, and which do not preclude conscientious objectors from fulfilling their obligations to others. This is obvious in every other case of conscientious objection; it's not suddenly untrue here. And all of the word-games in the article mean that Biss and Biss never really argue that the anti-vaxxers are doing anything wrong. They don't argue that our obligations actually must be fulfilled by vaccinations in particular; they don't argue that anyone actually has the account of conscience they are opposing; they don't in fact argue that their account of conscience as having the particular social component that their argument requires is a correct one. Now, I'd have no problem with this, except that they made such an extraordinary fuss about the claim that philosophy was "not a matter of declaring rigidly held beliefs, but of working out what can be held true in conversation with others", and yet here we find them very much not engaging in any kind of dialogue or conversation with anyone, doing nothing but forcefully declaring their beliefs -- whether rigidly held, I cannot say, but there's nothing in the article to make it possible to say that they are not.
Vaccination is one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time, and the value of what it has contributed to the health of the human race is perhaps rivaled only by improved sanitary conditions for the sick and antibiotics. But vaccination in general is also quite intrusive and, what is worse, somewhat indefinite in the extent of its intrusiveness. Talking about conscientious objection to vaccination is often made to sound like it's protesting over getting a small handful of doses, but the CDC's recommended vaccination schedule involves various vaccines adding up to over a hundred doses over a lifetime. (Most people who would characterize themselves as having had all their vaccinations really mean that their parents made sure that they had all the vaccines legally required at the time for schoolchildren, and perhaps a few others afterward. More zealous people do regular flu shots, and probably a few others as they happen to come up for traveling or in medical consultations or what have you. No doubt a few people are as entirely thorough as they can honestly be. But we could add any number of other vaccinations to the list, depending on any number of medical discoveries or newly recognized threats. There is no particular number that is the number of vaccines we should have.)
Vaccination also requires a fairly significant amount of trust in doctors, and in vaccine supply lines, and in medical researchers. Critics of the anti-vaccination movement tend to be good at arguing for the value of vaccines in the abstract; but the movement has largely built on a loss of trust by certain populations in significant portions of the actual medical establishment.
And even if none of this were true, large-scale medical programs by their nature generally need voluntary participation anyway; depending on the kind of program, it's sometimes just voluntary participation of the community generally, but vaccination doesn't work that way. It's the sort of thing you might want to be required; but actively imposing it on people against their will is not actually going to help things in the long run. The standard way of getting around this problem is exactly the one we use: make it legally required, but allow fairly generous exemptions. That way most people will do it both freely and as a duty. One can improve it even more by making it even easier to keep up with vaccinations; that's basically what we do with flu shots. Misinformation, of which there is certainly a lot, can be fought by better information campaigns. It's entirely possible to be insistent on the importance of vaccinations while also recognizing that honest and decent people can have worries that need to be addressed; and respect for conscientious objection is a recognition of the importance of consent and patient autonomy, which are pillars of modern medical ethics. Conscientious objection is entirely the wrong point about which to worry.
(I should perhaps note that Biss and Biss never actually give any legal recommendation. There's a sort of implication, at least an apparent one, that they think philosophical exemptions, or most philosophical exemptions, are illegitimate, and one could read the article as suggesting that they should be eliminated. But the authors never actually say this, and an alternative reading would be just that they are arguing for a regime of persuasion rather than legal coercion. If that's the case, it's not obvious what most of their argument does toward that end, and the argument they give seems actually more subversive of the notion of medical conscientious objection than that would suggest. But the argument given is at its strongest in the insistence that conscience is not purely individualistic but communal, and if you emphasized that aspect of it, you could very well argue that the argument's practical import is really that these things need to be 'discussed' (in some way).)
ADDED LATER: Related to this is this recent article on how much easier it is to get parents to agree to vaccinations if you just bother to answer their questions patiently and start giving them information early and well before the vaccination times come up.
Friday, August 02, 2019
Dashed Off XVI
(Due to grading and a number of other things, the fortnightly book will be delayed another week instead of coming out tomorrow.)
We do not have introspective acquaintance with credences, nor are any behaviors so closely linked with beliefs as to give us credences indirectly; thus the only reason for accepting the existence of credences is the reason for using probability theory to describe belief.
A schedule should exist for a productive end, not for the sake of having a schedule.
We tend to divide curricula materially (deals with plants, deals with stars), but there are many situations in which it would make more sense to divide formally (applied linear algebra, applied probability theory, etc.).
free will as a transcendental condition of thinking in terms of possibilities (universals as another)
conservation laws as local principles for explicability arguments
felt contingency & the perceived almostness of some failures and successes
Befindlichkeit, Stimmung, and Geworfenheit as features of inquiry
Our entire conception of nature is of nature as being-able.
Inquiries are generally parts of larger inquiries, but there is no infinite regress in inquiries being proper parts of inquiries.
God is both theophany and prior to theophany.
Every mathematician converts to the phantasms in different ways.
Savage limits subjective Bayesianism to 'small worlds' in which all possibilities are known and well defined.
The grue problem is an issue of classification, not induction.
fashion as a cross between sculpture and theater
People are always confusing sincere tribal participation and sincere belief.
Norse mythology shows a recurring interest in the power of leftover things.
architecture : nonliving :: landscape gardening : vegetable nature (Schopenhauer)
"The present *interprets* the past to the future." Royce
Explanatory power is relative to sufficiency of reason.
lying as a failure to express mutual dignity
accounts of 'Nazi at the door' // accounts of how to respond to other evil situations (dealing with evil generally)
autonomy as instrument good (Tollefsen)
One creates a market tending to just price by establishing protections against fraud, duress, and emergency, and by making accurate information easily available.
You are usually not worthy to fight for a moral cause unless you are willing to do so even under the assumptions that your being on the right side is merely a matter of your good fortune, that your opponents outnumber and overpower you, and that you are less intelligent than at least some of your opponents.
An explanation of the predictable is at the same time an explanation of why a prediction can be accurate.
angelology as a theory of teaching
the Church as Christ's project -&;gt; Marian subprojects in the Church
Christ as Sovereign of all ends -> Mary as Mother of many ends
Unintended consequences are the Achilles' heel of most progressive politics.
modeling : conversion to phantasms :: experiment : sensory experience
hagiography as first-approximation hagiology
Constitutional puzzles are often constituted by the difference in answers that one gets extrapolating from similar cases versus deducing from principles.
the sacrament of matrimony as involving intrinsically efficacious signification (ex opere operato signifying) -- we are taught according to the sign even if we do not recognize the sign
ontological argument : contemplative life :: cosmological argument : active life
Sacramental grace is inherently prevenient, although it is not what people usually think of when talking about prevenient grace.
God has dignified human nature in the very creating of it.
"It is hard for us to realize that 'I am' is an active verb." Gilson
the habitude for logic (the 'reserve' or what is available to be actualized by definite logical operations, judgments, and the like)
estimative intentions as significations
Philosophers can reason their way to human rights individually, but widespread acceptance of and respect for human rights requires a religion affirming them.
"Absolutism mainly consists in commanding the purse of others." Rosmini
the 'ownership' most relevant to most rights is that of providential responsibility
"Experience is inherent in the very nature of the mind; experience is possible only in relation to a finality which gives it an orientation." Marcel
Where philosophers of mind say 'consciousness', substitute 'experience' and see the result.
Toolmaking beyond a certain level of sophistication is partly a linguistic skill - a reclassification of an item that can be articulated into requirements and implications.
Christian obsequies : resurrection :: formal betrothal : matrimony
temperance as the virtue of ambience-for-virtue
"Do we ask what cause is? To be sure, it is reason in action, i.e., a god." Seneca Ep 65
The anthropological notion of fetishism was an attempt to conflate Catholic and tribal religion under a diagnosis of primitive 'wishful thinking' or desire-worship (cf. de Brosses, Bosman, etc.).
market value, novelty value, nostalgia value, social value
usury as treating money as 'self-valorizing value' (Marx)
Every contract presupposes obligations that make it possible. These obligations might be derived from other contracts. But it is not possible to have an infinite regress in contracts; thus there must be obligations prior to any contract.
Simultaneity is a form of overlap. Overlap is not transitive.
temporal underlap
The test of civility is what would happen to society under general reciprocation.
For there to be a 'beyond the pale' there must be a definite fence.
Every age produces a form of false sanctity.
Where there is no honesty, there is no republic.
Things endure longer in folk physics, folk logic, folk epistemology, folk psychology, etc., if they give the appearance of practicality -- even if this appearance is in fact illusory.
scaling problems in welfare provision
hypocrisy as a folk-politics explanation
Historical comparison is often a normative judgment by its nature.
responsibility qua owner vs. responsibility qua principal agent
Often we classify things as 'prediction' when they are really just investigation of abstractions that could be used to predict.
no hidden taxes // no secret laws
Sometimes in talking about the passions we are talking about the feeling (what is sensed) and sometimes about the valuation (abstracted from the feeling).
St. Joseph is dikaios, righteous or just, because he is willing to do good to another even in response to being apparently wronged.
To marry is to take on a communal responsibility.
the analogy of the Nativity and the Dormition in the legends of the latter
Evangelism on the level of the whole Church is like forest-cultivation: many upfront cost and difficulties for rewards that are usually relatively very far in the future, although those rewards are very great.
diversification & long horizon as risk management approaches in inquiry
"A has a privilege to phi iff A has no duty to phi" can be right only if we have a duty not to do impossible things (i.e., impossibility, physical or otherwise, implies obligation not). 'A has a claim that B phi iff B has a duty to A to phi' is true only if ;claim' has nothing to do with recourse or appeal -- i.e., if you can have a claim even without means to claim it.
freedom from being obligated, being object of obligation, power to obligate (being subject of obligation), immunity from being obligated
A privilege to use a hammer is a claim for others not to use it in a way excluding your use.
It is obviously not true that to *say* 'P is true' is the same as to *say* 'P'; thus the deflationary approach has to be about what is asserted regardless of the words used, and to make assertion always and intrinsically concerned with truth, in the sense that what you have in asserting P is already to assert P to be true. This requires privileging 'true' over other modalities (e.g., asserting things to be possible or impossible). Thus the deflationist about truth must be a nondeflationist about assertion.
The equivalence scheme in deflationism presupposes that we already know how to assign truth values.
NB that Dooyeweerd does not assume that his fifteen modal aspects are exhaustive.
Orthodoxy is not merely an absence of heresy but immunity from it, an active resistance to it.
Dooyeweerdian aspects are related by
(1) dependence
----(a) functional: A requires B for its own full function
----(b) anticipatory: B gets its full meaning in facilitating C
(2) analogy
Spatial requires quantitative (spatial hasfunctional dependence); quantative requires spatial for full understanding of irrational numbers (quantitative has anticipatory dependence).
Petitionary prayer requires us to reflect on our lack.
the Aristotelian argument for action-by-contact for locomotion:
(1) All locomotion is by pushing, pulling, twirling, or carrying.
(2) Twirling and carrying are reducible to particular combinations of pulling and pushing.
(3) Both pulling and pushing require contact.
'Property dualism' is not a well-defined position, in part because there is no generally accepted account of properties.
Besides form and experimental matter, scientific theories may be distinguished by their manners of getting conclusions.
The notion of a field gives us reason to think activity is more fundamental than contact in the explanation of change.
Thought experiments in physics seem primarily to be a consistency guide.
"fashionable climates of thought are apt to be rationalised in metaphysical systems" Hesse
Determinism always requires an error theory.
the concept of wasting oneself in doing X (e.g., wasting oneself in pursuit of frivolous pleasure)
natural ends and the distinction between frivolous and nonfrivolous pleasure
the importance of distinguishing odd moral reasoning from bad moral reasoning
- some moral reasoning is right but pathway-odd; that is, it treats as central what is low priority
- some moral reasoning is odd because it is almost right but drops something important or relevant
- some moral reasoning is only odd because it is very unfamiliar and/or contrary to expectation
fictional entities with foundation in real things
Prediction is a very specialized form of gap-filling.
Civility arises out of authority.
experiments that confirm to be possible vs. experiments that confirm to be actual (these often seem conflated in psychology)
standard post-war reconciliation: Victors were right, defeated were admirable.
soul ) body ) honor ) property ) access rights
(1) A probability presupposes a division of possibilities.
(2) A division of possibilities requires a justifying ground.
(3) The justifying gorund can be a priori (rational) or a posteriori (empirical).
Punishment naturally raises questions of intercession.
technological artifact as extending mimesis of organs (Kapp)
"The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans." Andrew Ure
Machinery does not replace unskilled workers; it replaces workers because of their skills.
resemblance, contiguity, and causation as legal relations governing precedential reasoning
We do not have introspective acquaintance with credences, nor are any behaviors so closely linked with beliefs as to give us credences indirectly; thus the only reason for accepting the existence of credences is the reason for using probability theory to describe belief.
A schedule should exist for a productive end, not for the sake of having a schedule.
We tend to divide curricula materially (deals with plants, deals with stars), but there are many situations in which it would make more sense to divide formally (applied linear algebra, applied probability theory, etc.).
free will as a transcendental condition of thinking in terms of possibilities (universals as another)
conservation laws as local principles for explicability arguments
felt contingency & the perceived almostness of some failures and successes
Befindlichkeit, Stimmung, and Geworfenheit as features of inquiry
Our entire conception of nature is of nature as being-able.
Inquiries are generally parts of larger inquiries, but there is no infinite regress in inquiries being proper parts of inquiries.
God is both theophany and prior to theophany.
Every mathematician converts to the phantasms in different ways.
Savage limits subjective Bayesianism to 'small worlds' in which all possibilities are known and well defined.
The grue problem is an issue of classification, not induction.
fashion as a cross between sculpture and theater
People are always confusing sincere tribal participation and sincere belief.
Norse mythology shows a recurring interest in the power of leftover things.
architecture : nonliving :: landscape gardening : vegetable nature (Schopenhauer)
"The present *interprets* the past to the future." Royce
Explanatory power is relative to sufficiency of reason.
lying as a failure to express mutual dignity
accounts of 'Nazi at the door' // accounts of how to respond to other evil situations (dealing with evil generally)
autonomy as instrument good (Tollefsen)
One creates a market tending to just price by establishing protections against fraud, duress, and emergency, and by making accurate information easily available.
You are usually not worthy to fight for a moral cause unless you are willing to do so even under the assumptions that your being on the right side is merely a matter of your good fortune, that your opponents outnumber and overpower you, and that you are less intelligent than at least some of your opponents.
An explanation of the predictable is at the same time an explanation of why a prediction can be accurate.
angelology as a theory of teaching
the Church as Christ's project -&;gt; Marian subprojects in the Church
Christ as Sovereign of all ends -> Mary as Mother of many ends
Unintended consequences are the Achilles' heel of most progressive politics.
modeling : conversion to phantasms :: experiment : sensory experience
hagiography as first-approximation hagiology
Constitutional puzzles are often constituted by the difference in answers that one gets extrapolating from similar cases versus deducing from principles.
the sacrament of matrimony as involving intrinsically efficacious signification (ex opere operato signifying) -- we are taught according to the sign even if we do not recognize the sign
ontological argument : contemplative life :: cosmological argument : active life
Sacramental grace is inherently prevenient, although it is not what people usually think of when talking about prevenient grace.
God has dignified human nature in the very creating of it.
"It is hard for us to realize that 'I am' is an active verb." Gilson
the habitude for logic (the 'reserve' or what is available to be actualized by definite logical operations, judgments, and the like)
estimative intentions as significations
Philosophers can reason their way to human rights individually, but widespread acceptance of and respect for human rights requires a religion affirming them.
"Absolutism mainly consists in commanding the purse of others." Rosmini
the 'ownership' most relevant to most rights is that of providential responsibility
"Experience is inherent in the very nature of the mind; experience is possible only in relation to a finality which gives it an orientation." Marcel
Where philosophers of mind say 'consciousness', substitute 'experience' and see the result.
Toolmaking beyond a certain level of sophistication is partly a linguistic skill - a reclassification of an item that can be articulated into requirements and implications.
Christian obsequies : resurrection :: formal betrothal : matrimony
temperance as the virtue of ambience-for-virtue
"Do we ask what cause is? To be sure, it is reason in action, i.e., a god." Seneca Ep 65
The anthropological notion of fetishism was an attempt to conflate Catholic and tribal religion under a diagnosis of primitive 'wishful thinking' or desire-worship (cf. de Brosses, Bosman, etc.).
market value, novelty value, nostalgia value, social value
usury as treating money as 'self-valorizing value' (Marx)
Every contract presupposes obligations that make it possible. These obligations might be derived from other contracts. But it is not possible to have an infinite regress in contracts; thus there must be obligations prior to any contract.
Simultaneity is a form of overlap. Overlap is not transitive.
temporal underlap
The test of civility is what would happen to society under general reciprocation.
For there to be a 'beyond the pale' there must be a definite fence.
Every age produces a form of false sanctity.
Where there is no honesty, there is no republic.
Things endure longer in folk physics, folk logic, folk epistemology, folk psychology, etc., if they give the appearance of practicality -- even if this appearance is in fact illusory.
scaling problems in welfare provision
hypocrisy as a folk-politics explanation
Historical comparison is often a normative judgment by its nature.
responsibility qua owner vs. responsibility qua principal agent
Often we classify things as 'prediction' when they are really just investigation of abstractions that could be used to predict.
no hidden taxes // no secret laws
Sometimes in talking about the passions we are talking about the feeling (what is sensed) and sometimes about the valuation (abstracted from the feeling).
St. Joseph is dikaios, righteous or just, because he is willing to do good to another even in response to being apparently wronged.
To marry is to take on a communal responsibility.
the analogy of the Nativity and the Dormition in the legends of the latter
Evangelism on the level of the whole Church is like forest-cultivation: many upfront cost and difficulties for rewards that are usually relatively very far in the future, although those rewards are very great.
diversification & long horizon as risk management approaches in inquiry
"A has a privilege to phi iff A has no duty to phi" can be right only if we have a duty not to do impossible things (i.e., impossibility, physical or otherwise, implies obligation not). 'A has a claim that B phi iff B has a duty to A to phi' is true only if ;claim' has nothing to do with recourse or appeal -- i.e., if you can have a claim even without means to claim it.
freedom from being obligated, being object of obligation, power to obligate (being subject of obligation), immunity from being obligated
A privilege to use a hammer is a claim for others not to use it in a way excluding your use.
It is obviously not true that to *say* 'P is true' is the same as to *say* 'P'; thus the deflationary approach has to be about what is asserted regardless of the words used, and to make assertion always and intrinsically concerned with truth, in the sense that what you have in asserting P is already to assert P to be true. This requires privileging 'true' over other modalities (e.g., asserting things to be possible or impossible). Thus the deflationist about truth must be a nondeflationist about assertion.
The equivalence scheme in deflationism presupposes that we already know how to assign truth values.
NB that Dooyeweerd does not assume that his fifteen modal aspects are exhaustive.
Orthodoxy is not merely an absence of heresy but immunity from it, an active resistance to it.
Dooyeweerdian aspects are related by
(1) dependence
----(a) functional: A requires B for its own full function
----(b) anticipatory: B gets its full meaning in facilitating C
(2) analogy
Spatial requires quantitative (spatial hasfunctional dependence); quantative requires spatial for full understanding of irrational numbers (quantitative has anticipatory dependence).
Petitionary prayer requires us to reflect on our lack.
the Aristotelian argument for action-by-contact for locomotion:
(1) All locomotion is by pushing, pulling, twirling, or carrying.
(2) Twirling and carrying are reducible to particular combinations of pulling and pushing.
(3) Both pulling and pushing require contact.
'Property dualism' is not a well-defined position, in part because there is no generally accepted account of properties.
Besides form and experimental matter, scientific theories may be distinguished by their manners of getting conclusions.
The notion of a field gives us reason to think activity is more fundamental than contact in the explanation of change.
Thought experiments in physics seem primarily to be a consistency guide.
"fashionable climates of thought are apt to be rationalised in metaphysical systems" Hesse
Determinism always requires an error theory.
the concept of wasting oneself in doing X (e.g., wasting oneself in pursuit of frivolous pleasure)
natural ends and the distinction between frivolous and nonfrivolous pleasure
the importance of distinguishing odd moral reasoning from bad moral reasoning
- some moral reasoning is right but pathway-odd; that is, it treats as central what is low priority
- some moral reasoning is odd because it is almost right but drops something important or relevant
- some moral reasoning is only odd because it is very unfamiliar and/or contrary to expectation
fictional entities with foundation in real things
Prediction is a very specialized form of gap-filling.
Civility arises out of authority.
experiments that confirm to be possible vs. experiments that confirm to be actual (these often seem conflated in psychology)
standard post-war reconciliation: Victors were right, defeated were admirable.
soul ) body ) honor ) property ) access rights
(1) A probability presupposes a division of possibilities.
(2) A division of possibilities requires a justifying ground.
(3) The justifying gorund can be a priori (rational) or a posteriori (empirical).
Punishment naturally raises questions of intercession.
technological artifact as extending mimesis of organs (Kapp)
"The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans." Andrew Ure
Machinery does not replace unskilled workers; it replaces workers because of their skills.
resemblance, contiguity, and causation as legal relations governing precedential reasoning
Three Orders of Good Taste
Taste seems to comprize three orders or degrees in its universal comprehension.
The first is composed of those objects which immediately relate to the divinity, among which man claims the preeminence, when viewed in his highest character: witness the inexpressible charm which the natural virtuous affections of the soul inspire, when moved by some strong impulse, such as parental tenderness, filial piety, friendship, &c. &c. Do they not unite the moral sentiment to the divine?
The second is the immediate external effects of true taste, or moral virtue, in the social sphere; the order, beauty, and honour, which every object derives from its influence; and, of course, its sentiment must be intimately related to moral excellence.
The third and last degree is general ornament and honour, appearing in fashions, arts of decoration, &c. &c. objects which seeming not immediately to effect the interests of humanity, the taste they exhibit in this sphere appears as an uncertain light, sometimes bright and sometimes obscured ; or rather as refracted rays of taste, broken by the general love of novelty and superfluity; two principles which, though they are, to a certain degree, essential to exterior ornament, and the sentiment of true taste, are those in which taste always begins to corrupt....
Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty, &c., p. 39. Reynolds, whom I have briefly discussed before, takes beauty to be very closely related to moral good -- in fact, to be some appearance or suggestion of moral good perceived in a sensible object. An artist, of course, could make a beautiful object without being moral himself, but this would be because he was doing it by rules and guidelines gathered from other cases, and nobody can recognize it as beautiful if they cannot see any suggestion of the moral qualities of a mind in it. Good taste is a particular form of the love of virtue. This is a very strong view, of course; that aesthetics is related to ethics is certain enough, but Reynolds goes the next step and argues that the former is a particular expression of the latter.
Thursday, August 01, 2019
Liguori
Today is the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church. A child prodigy, he got his degree in law four years earlier than was normal (he had to get a special dispensation because he was under the legal minimum for it); it's said that he looked a little kid in his doctor's gown when receiving it, so that everyone laughed at him. He practiced law for about ten years. Then one day he was in the courtroom, counsel for one side of a lawsuit; he opened brilliantly, with a very clever argument, and sat down, certain that he was going to win the case. But instead of any sign of admiration from the rest of the courtroom, there was a pause of baffled silence -- crickets, as we say. Then the opposing counsel said, "All of what you've said is wasted breath; your argument is inconsistent with one of the documents in evidence." Alphonsus demanded to know which document, and it was handed to him. He knew the document. He had read it many times. And every single time until that moment he had read it incorrectly. Seeing it now, he was crushed, absolutely mortified. It was such an absurd mistake that he didn't see how anyone else could attribute it to anything except dishonesty or incompetence. Everyone -- including, it is said, the opposing counsel and the judge -- tried to console the young man, but it was no good. When he left the courtroom that day, he never returned to law. In fact, he became so depressed he stopped eating for several days. But eventually he came to see what had happened as God showing him his lack of humility, and as a result he became an Oratorian. He would go on to found the society that would eventually become known as the Redemptorists and become one of the greatest experts on canon law and moral theology in the history of the Church. It happened almost incidentally; his writings are vast, but very few of them were written before the age of fifty. It was also a very rocky road. Due to the politics of the day, St. Alphonsus died betrayed by almost every supporter he had, cut off by the Pope from his own order, deaf and nearly blind. He was ninety-one.
Jottings on Aristotelianism and the Labor Theory of Value
There is no single 'labor theory of value'; labor theories of value can be quite different depending on what aspect of labor they consider relevant. But labor theories in general will hold that in some sense the price of something is equivalent (by some measure) to the work required to have it (by some measure). More precise versions distinguish value in use and value in exchange; in Adam Smith's famous example, few things have greater value in use than water, which is one of the most useful and one of the most necessary things we know, but water has in most situations almost no value in exchange; it's not particularly useful for buying and selling. The conclusion can then be drawn that the correct measurement for value in exchange is quantity of labor (whatever the measure of quantity might be). It is a common view that the labor theory of value goes back to Aristotle, and that it is a standard position in Aristotelianism, but this is not, in fact, true. A few gestures toward the reason why.
(1) Aristotle does not have a labor theory of value because he has no specific theory of value of the relevant sort. He does have a sketched-out theory of commercial exchange; this theory recognizes that exchanges originally are based on mutually recognized value in use. Because direct exchange is often not practical (due to things like transportation, storage, timing), we move from direct exchange of particular useful thing for particular useful thing to indirect exchange, where we exchange indirectly using something that has general usefulness. Metals are durable and relatively easy to transport and exhange, and even if you yourself have no particular use for it, lots of other people do, so you can use it in further exchanges. This indirect exchange requires all sorts of measurements, protections, and guarantees, and out of this comes our system of using money. With the advent of coinage as a standardized form of something generally useful that is specifically devoted to serving as something generally useful in exchange, we begin to get the notion of money-accumulation. In this context we have household management (Aristotle's word will later give us the word 'economics', which literally means household management; Aristotle himself would regard what we call 'economics' as politics), if we keep money-making tied to real usefulness, and money-exchange, if we treat the two as separate.
(2) It follows from this that the labor theory of value does not actually make much sense in an Aristotelian context; value is established by ends, and so will vary as ends vary. Aristotle's criticism of money-exchange has no direct relation to questions of labor; rather, the criticism is that good money-making makes money for definite ends, but money-exchange does not. Money-exchange treats money as an end in itself, and thus is unnatural. The only real connection to labor to which Aristotle appeals is that good money-making is something that he sees arising not out of labor as such but out of skill. I suppose you could argue on this basis that Aristotle has a skill theory of value, but even this would not really be accurate -- skill comes up simply because skills are a central part of human life that by their very nature involve ends.
(3) Marx often comes up in attributing the labor theory of value to Aristotle, because Marx builds his own labor theory of value on Aristotle. But I think close attention to the relevant texts shows that Marx himself did not think Aristotle had a labor theory of value; he thinks Aristotle laid some of the groundwork for it, but that he failed to solve a particular problem, how to have equal exchange of unlike things, and Marx proposes the labor theory of value as a solution to this problem that Aristotle did not solve -- in effect, we are actually exchanging A and B in terms of their labor, so the exchange is made in terms of something that can be directly compared on each side. If I read Marx correctly, I think he takes it to be the case that Aristotle couldn't have had a labor theory of value because the existence of slavery in Greek society would have made arguing for it at best very complicated and perhaps impossible. And if this is so, I think he is right here -- Aristotle can't really say that labor admits of equal comparison by quantity because he thinks some labor is better than other labor by its very nature. Some labor is slavish, some labor is noble; some labor is suitable for a free person, some labor is not. In Marx's history of economics, the labor theory of value is the child of capitalism.
(4) If you wanted to find an Aristotelian labor theory of value, St. Thomas would probably be a better candidate than Aristotle himself. St. Thomas does explicitly at times link the value of something in exchange to labor. He also in a number of places uses examples explicitly based on labor -- for instance, he explains the proportional equality of justice in wages in terms of paying twice as much for twice as much time spent in labor. But St. Thomas is not a labor theorist, either, because he also thinks that share in the distribution of benefits is a matter of justice in exchange, and explicitly thinks that workmen should receive according to the quantity and quality of what they produce (which is not the same as the quantity of labor itself). And his account of why labor is relevant is that we price things according to the need we have to use them -- the farmer wouldn't trade a bushel of wheat for a sandal in general because the amount of labor that goes into a bushel of wheat is immense in comparison to that which goes into a pair of shoes, and if he were always laboring greatly to exchange very important things (like food, which is needed to live) for things that can be produced comparatively easily and are less important, he would not be meeting his needs in a reasonable way.
(1) Aristotle does not have a labor theory of value because he has no specific theory of value of the relevant sort. He does have a sketched-out theory of commercial exchange; this theory recognizes that exchanges originally are based on mutually recognized value in use. Because direct exchange is often not practical (due to things like transportation, storage, timing), we move from direct exchange of particular useful thing for particular useful thing to indirect exchange, where we exchange indirectly using something that has general usefulness. Metals are durable and relatively easy to transport and exhange, and even if you yourself have no particular use for it, lots of other people do, so you can use it in further exchanges. This indirect exchange requires all sorts of measurements, protections, and guarantees, and out of this comes our system of using money. With the advent of coinage as a standardized form of something generally useful that is specifically devoted to serving as something generally useful in exchange, we begin to get the notion of money-accumulation. In this context we have household management (Aristotle's word will later give us the word 'economics', which literally means household management; Aristotle himself would regard what we call 'economics' as politics), if we keep money-making tied to real usefulness, and money-exchange, if we treat the two as separate.
(2) It follows from this that the labor theory of value does not actually make much sense in an Aristotelian context; value is established by ends, and so will vary as ends vary. Aristotle's criticism of money-exchange has no direct relation to questions of labor; rather, the criticism is that good money-making makes money for definite ends, but money-exchange does not. Money-exchange treats money as an end in itself, and thus is unnatural. The only real connection to labor to which Aristotle appeals is that good money-making is something that he sees arising not out of labor as such but out of skill. I suppose you could argue on this basis that Aristotle has a skill theory of value, but even this would not really be accurate -- skill comes up simply because skills are a central part of human life that by their very nature involve ends.
(3) Marx often comes up in attributing the labor theory of value to Aristotle, because Marx builds his own labor theory of value on Aristotle. But I think close attention to the relevant texts shows that Marx himself did not think Aristotle had a labor theory of value; he thinks Aristotle laid some of the groundwork for it, but that he failed to solve a particular problem, how to have equal exchange of unlike things, and Marx proposes the labor theory of value as a solution to this problem that Aristotle did not solve -- in effect, we are actually exchanging A and B in terms of their labor, so the exchange is made in terms of something that can be directly compared on each side. If I read Marx correctly, I think he takes it to be the case that Aristotle couldn't have had a labor theory of value because the existence of slavery in Greek society would have made arguing for it at best very complicated and perhaps impossible. And if this is so, I think he is right here -- Aristotle can't really say that labor admits of equal comparison by quantity because he thinks some labor is better than other labor by its very nature. Some labor is slavish, some labor is noble; some labor is suitable for a free person, some labor is not. In Marx's history of economics, the labor theory of value is the child of capitalism.
(4) If you wanted to find an Aristotelian labor theory of value, St. Thomas would probably be a better candidate than Aristotle himself. St. Thomas does explicitly at times link the value of something in exchange to labor. He also in a number of places uses examples explicitly based on labor -- for instance, he explains the proportional equality of justice in wages in terms of paying twice as much for twice as much time spent in labor. But St. Thomas is not a labor theorist, either, because he also thinks that share in the distribution of benefits is a matter of justice in exchange, and explicitly thinks that workmen should receive according to the quantity and quality of what they produce (which is not the same as the quantity of labor itself). And his account of why labor is relevant is that we price things according to the need we have to use them -- the farmer wouldn't trade a bushel of wheat for a sandal in general because the amount of labor that goes into a bushel of wheat is immense in comparison to that which goes into a pair of shoes, and if he were always laboring greatly to exchange very important things (like food, which is needed to live) for things that can be produced comparatively easily and are less important, he would not be meeting his needs in a reasonable way.
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