An argument cannot apply itself.
bi: obsession with one aspect in such a way that one cannot accommodate the significance of other aspects; opposed to ming as blindness to clarity
Sustained political violence always depends on accessory enablers and post-hoc enablers.
Human nature is unhoned.
Shameless people will escalate harder against you than you can escalate against them. They need to be sidelined, not the focus of obsessive attrition. One sidelines them by focusing on what is more essential.
Going around actively trying to shame people is usually an injustice. The difficult question to answer is: When is it not? A necessary condition seems to be some kind of stakeholding, and it seems clear that what may be done depends on the kind of stakeholding.
Escalation only works under two conditions: (1) you have overwhelming advantage; (2) the other already doesn't want to be in the conflict either through first-order reluctance (don't want to be fighting this kind of conflict) or through second-order (don't want to be fighting at all), and can see a better alternative.
The most basic principle of government is: Actions in guise of authority must have a specific and appropriate ground of authority.
A problem with deterrence theories of punishment is that deterrence does not answer questions like, "Why not use the same punishments to deter other actions with bad consequences, like over-eating?" The only answer can be that some things are, independently, more punishment-worthy than others.
Reasoned discussion is the first and most basic form of politics. Any political view that does not recognize this is a form of political corruption. In this world, other methods and means may be necessary, but if they are not subordinated to reasoned discussion, they are simply an expression of might-makes-right.
Verecundia in Aquinas's sense should probably be more like a potential part than an integral part - kin to continentia. There is something in Temperance functionally filling that integral part place. (As Justice has doing good & avoiding evil, so Temperance has honoring the beautiful/graceful and avoiding/rejecting the disgraceful.)
convention marches vs protest marches
"The mind is the artisan and the steward of the Way." Xunzi
The sense of novelty is certainly linked to the sense of (im)plausibility, but neither is reducible to the other.
Shaming punishments are either exposures or harassments.
Shunning punishments: boycott, ban, banishment.
shaming punishments & issues of detraction
- actually a great many things pertaining to justice can be seen as restricting this and other kinds of punishment
All reasons for disestablishment of state churches seem to carry over and apply, with minimal change, to disestablishment of state schools.
intrinsic & extrinsic titles to penalty
opinions (properly speaking) vs opinion-like gestures
li as a way things are set in order
Dao is order that sets in order.
normification // classification
artificial normification converges on natural normification
"The noble uses authority; the petty uses force." Xunzi
There is no difference of significance between yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater and rigging up a machine or pulling a fire alarm to get the same effect; that the one is done by means of speech is incidental to the act and the reasons for prohibiting it.
Civilization in the broad sense is the tradition of reasoned interaction.
We are not structured so that it is easy for us to pursue being pleased; we are instead structured to pursue things, and then be pleased in attaining them.
The purpose of the police is not primarily to make the citizens do right or avoid wrong; it is primarily to be a middleman and buffer between citizens in matters that can lead to violence.
Nothing is worse for politics than trying to use political means to shortcircuit rational discussion.
The Bible itself records a history over centuries of continually reading the texts of previous ages more deeply.
aspects of the literal sense of Scripture
(1) local grammatical
(2) local historical
(3) unity of Scripture
(4) centrality of Christ
(5) ecclesially dispositive character
conjecture refinement processes
title to taxes & risk, loss, and service
(1) truth with authority
(2) objective presumption
--(2.1)inadvertent = madness in a broad sense
----(2.1.1) folly
----(2.1.2) madness proper
--(2.2) deliberate = lying
(underlying structure of "lunatic, liar, Lord arguments")
LLL arguments & defective causes
Apologetics draws on rhetoric rather than demonstration. It thus incorporates concerns of passion and character.
Sabbath rest symbolically teaches the imitation of God.
Paul Guldin's criticism of Cavalieri's proof by superposition of figure (Centrobaryca): 'Who will be the judge -- hand, eye, or intellect?'
Kitcher: "Central to the idea of rigorous reasoning is that it should contain no gaps, that it should proceed by means of elementary steps."
-- This obviously raises questions of what counts as a gap, and what counts as elementary. In fact, both of these can onlyl be determined relative to possible lines of criticism (the relativity of rigor).
experiential arguments based on affinity; based on revelation; based on hypothesis confirmation
"There is hope of the conversion of a nation of unbelievers; of the conversion of a nation of hypocrites none." Brownson
"I am as good as you, does very wll; but, you are as good as I, is quite another affair, and few will accept it, who have not the supernatural virtue of Christian charity." Brownson
"...to a philosopher and historian the madness and imbecility and wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events." Hume to Robertson (27 Nov 1768)
To remain free, a society must be thick with traditions.
Who flees the field will find it difficult to turn suddenly to fight.
mathematical existence proofs as arguments that something is good to be (or at least good to be posited)
Luck and genius are often kin.
'in' as the relation of part to its whole; 'out', of nonpart to whole
Principles of warfare are guards against stupidity, not methods of winning.
Every Mystery of Mary is a sign of a Mystery of Christ.
a quasi-ontological argument
(1) God morally ought to be.
(2) God canont be such that He morally ought to be unless He is such that He must be.
(3) Therefore God must be.
-- As with the atheistic argument from evil, the question of moment is the status of this ought.
If we can distinguish and speak of mathematical existence, axiological existence, metaphysical existence, etc., then divine existence should be something in which, so to speak, these kinds of existence are not divided.
Right to truth accounts of lying do not take into account the importance of fidelity to truth. (Cp. Chastek)
Truth can be said to have a sort of right to manifestation and defense. This seems connected both to our obligations to ourselves and others as rational, and also to divinity (since truth is an appurtenance of divinity).
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
Beda Venerabilis
Today is the feast of St. Beda of Jarrow, Doctor of the Church; he is, of course, most commonly known in English as the Venerable Bede.
[Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia: 2017) p. 1051.]
Bede's Death Song
tr. by Craig Williamson
Before he departs on that inescapable journey
Down death's road, no man is so wise
That he knows his own end, so clever or unconstrained
That he need not contemplate the coming judgment,
Consider what good or evil resides in his soul,
What rich reward or bounty of unblessings
Will be offered in eternity when his time runs out.
[Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia: 2017) p. 1051.]
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Evening Note for Thursday, May 24
Thought for the Evening: Rosmini on the Definition 'Rational Animal'
In Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science, Rosmini has some critical things to say about the Aristotelian definition of man as "rational animal". They more or less come down to three.
(1) 'Rational animal' understates the importance of volition to the human being, although the volitive and the intellective aspects of human nature are both important and are not the same. While it is true that the volitive follows on the intellective, "there is no proof that this happens necessarily and that the opposite involves absurdity" (p. 21).
(2) It would be more appropriate to call the human being an 'intellective animal' than a 'rational animal' because the intellect is more fundamental than reason, and all reasoning presupposes intellectual understanding.
(3) 'Man is a rational animal' implies that animal is the subject and rational is an attribute of the animal. The intellectual element in human nature, however, has to form part of the human subject so that it can't simply be abstracted away as a secondary or consequent element.
With regard to (1), I think Rosmini just has a different notion of volition than the Aristotelians do, since I'm quite sure Aquinas would deny Rosmini's claim that there is no proof that the intellectual and volitional are linked necessarily; having a will for Aquinas just means that you have an intellectual appetitus or tendency to act.
With regard to (2), Rosmini himself concedes that the scholastics tended to prefer using 'rational' of human beings to distinguish them from the more purely intellectual angels, and that this is potentially useful. And I suspect a Thomist could also say that using 'rational' here is analogous to saying that the object of the human mind is 'material being'; it's not exclusionary but identifying the primary and principal characteristic of the faculty.
The third is interesting, and I think there is probably something to it. As Rosmini goes on to note, the definition creates some complications for the scholastic in discussing how the soul, i.e., what makes you a living thing, is both a form of the body and the form of the human being; he points to the trouble Aquinas has to take in ST 1.76.1 as an example.
Rosmini gives two of his own proposed definitions:
(A) An intellectual, volitional, animal subject.
(B) "[A]n animal subject endowed with the intuition of indeterminate-ideal being and with the perception of corporeal-fundamental feeling, and acting in accordance with the animality and intelligence it possesses" (p. 26).
A scholastic response to (A) would likely be that it looses any sense of the unity of the human being. (B), although it is supposed to be essentially equivalent, avoids the obvious appearance of disunity by being more explicit about the relations among these. It depends on a number of Rosmini's own positions, though; 'the intuition of indeterminate-ideal being' is how Rosmini thinks of intellect, and 'the perception of corporeal-fundamental feeling' is more or less animal consciousness. Perhaps more seriously for the Aristotelian, Rosmini's definition is definitely dualistic; Rosmini is a much stronger dualist than any Aristotelian would be.
[Antonio Rosmini, Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science, Rosmini House (Durham: 1991).]
Various Links of Interest
* Ed Simon has a nice, if occasionally florid, look at the French revolutionary calendar, which was, of course, not the worst but one of the most symbolic ways in which people have attempted to erase the Catholic Church.
* Thony Christie looks at the twin histories of astronomy and astrology.
* Kenny Pearce is curating an online exhibition of Berkeley's Manuscript Introduction to PHK.
* On Pierre Hadot at "Knowledge Ecology"
* Philippe Hamou, Marin Mersenne, at the SEP
* The marginalia of John Stuart Mill online
* An interesting story about how DNA can be misleading in criminal forensics.
* Nathan Goldman reviews two books on Gershom Scholem.
* Charles Camosy on Alfie Evans.
* Claire Lehmann, The War on Dignity
* An interesting look at five kinds of Bible cultures in the United States.
* Ben Taub, The Spy Who Came Home
* Ivanoe Privitera, Aristotle and the Papyri: The Direct Tradition. It's always worth remembering how tenuous our hold on the thought of the past is.
* David Graeber, 'I had to guard an empty room': the rise of the pointless job.
* Emily Thomas on Catharine Trotter Cockburn.
* An interactive map of medieval trade route networks.
* David Whidden, The Alleged Feudalism of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and the Benedictine Concepts of Obedience, Honor, and Order. Quite important, if you ever do anything with Anselm; the suggestion, which you still find, that Anselm's mindset (or his theology) is feudal has been known to be problematic for a while -- Anselm didn't live in a fully feudal society, rarely uses feudal terminology and probably never understands it in a feudal sense even when there is overlap, and is pretty clearly drawing most of his thought from Benedictine thought and practice. Whidden's paper is a nice exploration of some of these points with particular concepts important to Anselm's thought.
* Owen C. King, Pulling Apart Well-Being at a Time and the Goodness of a Life
* Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale, A Perceptual Theory of Hope
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, The Self-Propelled Island
Antonio Rosmini, Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science
Christopher Tollefsen, Lying and Christian Ethics
Neil Oliver, A History of Scotland
In Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science, Rosmini has some critical things to say about the Aristotelian definition of man as "rational animal". They more or less come down to three.
(1) 'Rational animal' understates the importance of volition to the human being, although the volitive and the intellective aspects of human nature are both important and are not the same. While it is true that the volitive follows on the intellective, "there is no proof that this happens necessarily and that the opposite involves absurdity" (p. 21).
(2) It would be more appropriate to call the human being an 'intellective animal' than a 'rational animal' because the intellect is more fundamental than reason, and all reasoning presupposes intellectual understanding.
(3) 'Man is a rational animal' implies that animal is the subject and rational is an attribute of the animal. The intellectual element in human nature, however, has to form part of the human subject so that it can't simply be abstracted away as a secondary or consequent element.
With regard to (1), I think Rosmini just has a different notion of volition than the Aristotelians do, since I'm quite sure Aquinas would deny Rosmini's claim that there is no proof that the intellectual and volitional are linked necessarily; having a will for Aquinas just means that you have an intellectual appetitus or tendency to act.
With regard to (2), Rosmini himself concedes that the scholastics tended to prefer using 'rational' of human beings to distinguish them from the more purely intellectual angels, and that this is potentially useful. And I suspect a Thomist could also say that using 'rational' here is analogous to saying that the object of the human mind is 'material being'; it's not exclusionary but identifying the primary and principal characteristic of the faculty.
The third is interesting, and I think there is probably something to it. As Rosmini goes on to note, the definition creates some complications for the scholastic in discussing how the soul, i.e., what makes you a living thing, is both a form of the body and the form of the human being; he points to the trouble Aquinas has to take in ST 1.76.1 as an example.
Rosmini gives two of his own proposed definitions:
(A) An intellectual, volitional, animal subject.
(B) "[A]n animal subject endowed with the intuition of indeterminate-ideal being and with the perception of corporeal-fundamental feeling, and acting in accordance with the animality and intelligence it possesses" (p. 26).
A scholastic response to (A) would likely be that it looses any sense of the unity of the human being. (B), although it is supposed to be essentially equivalent, avoids the obvious appearance of disunity by being more explicit about the relations among these. It depends on a number of Rosmini's own positions, though; 'the intuition of indeterminate-ideal being' is how Rosmini thinks of intellect, and 'the perception of corporeal-fundamental feeling' is more or less animal consciousness. Perhaps more seriously for the Aristotelian, Rosmini's definition is definitely dualistic; Rosmini is a much stronger dualist than any Aristotelian would be.
[Antonio Rosmini, Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science, Rosmini House (Durham: 1991).]
Various Links of Interest
* Ed Simon has a nice, if occasionally florid, look at the French revolutionary calendar, which was, of course, not the worst but one of the most symbolic ways in which people have attempted to erase the Catholic Church.
* Thony Christie looks at the twin histories of astronomy and astrology.
* Kenny Pearce is curating an online exhibition of Berkeley's Manuscript Introduction to PHK.
* On Pierre Hadot at "Knowledge Ecology"
* Philippe Hamou, Marin Mersenne, at the SEP
* The marginalia of John Stuart Mill online
* An interesting story about how DNA can be misleading in criminal forensics.
* Nathan Goldman reviews two books on Gershom Scholem.
* Charles Camosy on Alfie Evans.
* Claire Lehmann, The War on Dignity
* An interesting look at five kinds of Bible cultures in the United States.
* Ben Taub, The Spy Who Came Home
* Ivanoe Privitera, Aristotle and the Papyri: The Direct Tradition. It's always worth remembering how tenuous our hold on the thought of the past is.
* David Graeber, 'I had to guard an empty room': the rise of the pointless job.
* Emily Thomas on Catharine Trotter Cockburn.
* An interactive map of medieval trade route networks.
* David Whidden, The Alleged Feudalism of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and the Benedictine Concepts of Obedience, Honor, and Order. Quite important, if you ever do anything with Anselm; the suggestion, which you still find, that Anselm's mindset (or his theology) is feudal has been known to be problematic for a while -- Anselm didn't live in a fully feudal society, rarely uses feudal terminology and probably never understands it in a feudal sense even when there is overlap, and is pretty clearly drawing most of his thought from Benedictine thought and practice. Whidden's paper is a nice exploration of some of these points with particular concepts important to Anselm's thought.
* Owen C. King, Pulling Apart Well-Being at a Time and the Goodness of a Life
* Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale, A Perceptual Theory of Hope
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, The Self-Propelled Island
Antonio Rosmini, Anthropology as an Aid to Moral Science
Christopher Tollefsen, Lying and Christian Ethics
Neil Oliver, A History of Scotland
Philosophers on the Irish Eighth
Ireland is currently on the verge of a referendum to consider whether the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which was originally passed a quarter of a century ago and recognizes the right to life of unborn children, should be repealed. Given how much support for abortion has receded elsewhere, and how much the notion of rights has expanded in that quarter of a century, I'm not sure there's more here than modern Ireland's perpetual characteristic of only arriving at a party when everyone else has begun to get tired and go home, but we'll see what happens.
In any case, I finally got around to looking at the recent statement put out by a number of philosophers on the question, and it is a good example of how completely useless philosophers can be on these kinds of issues. The statement says:
If we accept that personhood is indeed "a complex philosophical question that has no straightforward answer", why would we also think it is even relevant to the question of whether one should retain a constitutional amendment that doesn't even use the word 'person'? The Amendment in question reads, "The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." I don't see anything explicitly about personhood here. And why anyone should spend one's time on questions that have "no straightforward answer" when discussing constitutional issues is beyond me.
The obvious reason it's brought up (besides its being something the philosophers in question think they can sound clever discussing) is that it is being assumed that that what is not a person is not entitled to constitutional protection. Put precisely that way, it's obviously false -- every constitution provides protections to things that are not persons -- but presumably, by 'entitled to constitutional protection' what they really mean is 'having a right worth acknowledging by a constitution' -- in this case, a right to life. Taken so, the key issue would be what a right to life is (which would tell us, without bare assumption, what kind of thing it could apply to), not what a person is, but in an era in which people discuss whether rivers and ecosystems and chimpanzees and species can be said to have rights, they've decided to stake their whole and entire claim on personhood, as if they all just woke up from having been frozen in the eighties.
In so doing they (unsurprisingly, perhaps) make a further common mistake of philosophers discussing matters like this, namely, they assume that if personhood is relevant it must be a metaphysical rather than a forensic and practical notion of personhood. Here is an argument that gets used, in different variations, in considering animal rights: "Persons have rights; but the assumption that animals with such-and-such characteristics are not persons is a matter that can be controverted; supposing even that we are at an impasse and there is 'no straightforward answer', the law should, to the extent practically possible, play it safe in matters of rights and assume that rights are more rather than less widely spread, particularly given the atrocities in which law can be complicit if it decides to start dictating what is not a person." This is obviously itself going to be a controversial argument in many cases, but as arguments go, it is perfectly sensible, and could be easily adapted to this situation. And while it depends on the notion of personhood, it does not depend on any metaphysics about personhood; what it depends on is a notion of law and its purposes, and is arguing that, given that notion of law and its purposes, we should legally count animals of such-and-such characteristics as persons for those legal purposes.
Or take another line of argument. "There is practical reason to have laws against fetal homicide, namely, that if one doesn't then, even aside from assumptions of fundamental rights, it becomes very difficult to do justice to parents. The easiest legal way to make laws against fetal homicide work, however, is to treat the fetus legally as a person existing under particular conditions." No doubt there would be people who would disagree with such an argument, but it's a perfectly appropriate argument for legal purposes. Law is a practical field. One does not need the finer points of metaphysics to do it. And here we have an argument for attributing personhood that does not require any metaphysics at all; it depends not on the metaphysics of personhood but on the practical question of what the easiest way to do justice to a third party would be. The concept of 'legal person' or 'juridical person' is not a secret; it's widely known. So why would one assume that the metaphysical notion of personhood would be a necessary, and not just a sufficient condition, for treating something as having rights, even if one connected rights directly to personhood in the traditional way?
It gets worse. They go on to say:
This is entirely wrong. Neither Augustine nor Aquinas are talking about personhood when they discuss these matters; they are talking about the standard view of what is involved in conception of a human being. The standard biological view in their day regarded human conception as an extended process over time; it was literally a sort of cooking process as the materials developed in the heat of the womb. Quickening, i.e., the point at which the fetus begins to move, plays no role at all in the thought of Aquinas. The only time Aquinas mentions the 40 to 90 day point he is talking about Aristotle's view, not his own (he never, as far as I am aware, commits definitely to any particular timetable at all). Quickening did not begin to have much of a presence in discussions of conception at all until the early modern period, and then it was a purely legal device for deciding how serious the penalties should be in various legal cases (e.g., if someone harmed a pregnant woman and caused her to miscarry). And, again, prior to the egg-and-sperm model, the dominant view of conception was that it was a process lasting several weeks; it shows nothing but historical ignorance to frame the discussion during this period as personhood arriving weeks "after conception". Augustine treats as the key characteristic not movement but sensation. This level of non-research in people trying to pull out their credentials in order to influence a political situation is embarrassing. What good is your status as a "professional philosopher" if you are going around making statements about texts that you've never bothered to read?
It gets even worse:
This is not how constitutions work. This is not how constitutions have ever worked. There is no serious theory of constitutions that would take this as a reasonable principle. Did not a single philosopher signing this document pause enough to ask, "And what would be the result if this were applied in contexts involving slavery, or mistreatment of minorities?" Is every one of the signatories so ignorant of history that they completely missed the fact that constitutions are built not on "highly plausible restrictions" that "more or less everyone can agree with" but (at most) on compromises that give concessions to as many major groups as possible, because you can't practically build a constitution entirely out of prior agreements? Do they honestly think that most constitutions in the free world are built entirely out of things that are "highly plausible" and that "more or less everyone" originally agreed with? That the purpose of a constitution is just a formality to summarize what practically everyone accepts anyway? Constitutions cannot do one of the things they are morally supposed to do -- protect the rights of the vulnerable -- on the principle given; constitutions are not in fact ever written on the basis of the principle given; and the principle quite obviously shows up here only in order to get the conclusion that they want.
Schopenhauer, I think, says somewhere that arguments are not like cabs; you cannot ride them to your preferred destination and then get off. Apparently none of these philosophers have learned that lesson yet; or else (more likely), they just decided to sign without any regard for the rationality of the argument, because they already agreed with the conclusion. The whole thing is just awful sophistry.
In any case, I finally got around to looking at the recent statement put out by a number of philosophers on the question, and it is a good example of how completely useless philosophers can be on these kinds of issues. The statement says:
What has not been discussed much is whether a 12-week old foetus is a person entitled to constitutional protection. What makes this particularly problematic is that the issue hinges on a complex philosophical question that has no straightforward answer, namely ‘What is a person and when does a person begin?’
If we accept that personhood is indeed "a complex philosophical question that has no straightforward answer", why would we also think it is even relevant to the question of whether one should retain a constitutional amendment that doesn't even use the word 'person'? The Amendment in question reads, "The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." I don't see anything explicitly about personhood here. And why anyone should spend one's time on questions that have "no straightforward answer" when discussing constitutional issues is beyond me.
The obvious reason it's brought up (besides its being something the philosophers in question think they can sound clever discussing) is that it is being assumed that that what is not a person is not entitled to constitutional protection. Put precisely that way, it's obviously false -- every constitution provides protections to things that are not persons -- but presumably, by 'entitled to constitutional protection' what they really mean is 'having a right worth acknowledging by a constitution' -- in this case, a right to life. Taken so, the key issue would be what a right to life is (which would tell us, without bare assumption, what kind of thing it could apply to), not what a person is, but in an era in which people discuss whether rivers and ecosystems and chimpanzees and species can be said to have rights, they've decided to stake their whole and entire claim on personhood, as if they all just woke up from having been frozen in the eighties.
In so doing they (unsurprisingly, perhaps) make a further common mistake of philosophers discussing matters like this, namely, they assume that if personhood is relevant it must be a metaphysical rather than a forensic and practical notion of personhood. Here is an argument that gets used, in different variations, in considering animal rights: "Persons have rights; but the assumption that animals with such-and-such characteristics are not persons is a matter that can be controverted; supposing even that we are at an impasse and there is 'no straightforward answer', the law should, to the extent practically possible, play it safe in matters of rights and assume that rights are more rather than less widely spread, particularly given the atrocities in which law can be complicit if it decides to start dictating what is not a person." This is obviously itself going to be a controversial argument in many cases, but as arguments go, it is perfectly sensible, and could be easily adapted to this situation. And while it depends on the notion of personhood, it does not depend on any metaphysics about personhood; what it depends on is a notion of law and its purposes, and is arguing that, given that notion of law and its purposes, we should legally count animals of such-and-such characteristics as persons for those legal purposes.
Or take another line of argument. "There is practical reason to have laws against fetal homicide, namely, that if one doesn't then, even aside from assumptions of fundamental rights, it becomes very difficult to do justice to parents. The easiest legal way to make laws against fetal homicide work, however, is to treat the fetus legally as a person existing under particular conditions." No doubt there would be people who would disagree with such an argument, but it's a perfectly appropriate argument for legal purposes. Law is a practical field. One does not need the finer points of metaphysics to do it. And here we have an argument for attributing personhood that does not require any metaphysics at all; it depends not on the metaphysics of personhood but on the practical question of what the easiest way to do justice to a third party would be. The concept of 'legal person' or 'juridical person' is not a secret; it's widely known. So why would one assume that the metaphysical notion of personhood would be a necessary, and not just a sufficient condition, for treating something as having rights, even if one connected rights directly to personhood in the traditional way?
It gets worse. They go on to say:
Influential figures like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas held that a foetus is not a person until it begins to move, which they took to be 40–80 days after conception.
This is entirely wrong. Neither Augustine nor Aquinas are talking about personhood when they discuss these matters; they are talking about the standard view of what is involved in conception of a human being. The standard biological view in their day regarded human conception as an extended process over time; it was literally a sort of cooking process as the materials developed in the heat of the womb. Quickening, i.e., the point at which the fetus begins to move, plays no role at all in the thought of Aquinas. The only time Aquinas mentions the 40 to 90 day point he is talking about Aristotle's view, not his own (he never, as far as I am aware, commits definitely to any particular timetable at all). Quickening did not begin to have much of a presence in discussions of conception at all until the early modern period, and then it was a purely legal device for deciding how serious the penalties should be in various legal cases (e.g., if someone harmed a pregnant woman and caused her to miscarry). And, again, prior to the egg-and-sperm model, the dominant view of conception was that it was a process lasting several weeks; it shows nothing but historical ignorance to frame the discussion during this period as personhood arriving weeks "after conception". Augustine treats as the key characteristic not movement but sensation. This level of non-research in people trying to pull out their credentials in order to influence a political situation is embarrassing. What good is your status as a "professional philosopher" if you are going around making statements about texts that you've never bothered to read?
It gets even worse:
We grant that the question ‘when does a person begin’ is complex. But because the constitution is the backbone for all law in the state, it should be confined to highly plausible restrictions on the law that more or less everyone can agree with.
This is not how constitutions work. This is not how constitutions have ever worked. There is no serious theory of constitutions that would take this as a reasonable principle. Did not a single philosopher signing this document pause enough to ask, "And what would be the result if this were applied in contexts involving slavery, or mistreatment of minorities?" Is every one of the signatories so ignorant of history that they completely missed the fact that constitutions are built not on "highly plausible restrictions" that "more or less everyone can agree with" but (at most) on compromises that give concessions to as many major groups as possible, because you can't practically build a constitution entirely out of prior agreements? Do they honestly think that most constitutions in the free world are built entirely out of things that are "highly plausible" and that "more or less everyone" originally agreed with? That the purpose of a constitution is just a formality to summarize what practically everyone accepts anyway? Constitutions cannot do one of the things they are morally supposed to do -- protect the rights of the vulnerable -- on the principle given; constitutions are not in fact ever written on the basis of the principle given; and the principle quite obviously shows up here only in order to get the conclusion that they want.
Schopenhauer, I think, says somewhere that arguments are not like cabs; you cannot ride them to your preferred destination and then get off. Apparently none of these philosophers have learned that lesson yet; or else (more likely), they just decided to sign without any regard for the rationality of the argument, because they already agreed with the conclusion. The whole thing is just awful sophistry.
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Power, Wisdom, and Goodness
...there must be Power, Wisdom, and Goodness, subsisting in one Degree or other, in every Government worthy to be so called, let the exterior Form of it be whatever it may.
For Example, without Power the very Idea of Government is annihilated; and there are no traces of it left.
Without Wisdom to conduct this Power towards some certain End, or Object, the Thing itself would not be Power, in a moral sense, but blind Impulse, or mechanic Force.
And without Goodness to influence and incline the Operations both of Wisdom and Power towards some benevolent Uses, conducive to public Happiness, the Efforts of Wisdom would in effect be Knavery, Trick, and Cunning; and the Display of Power mere Tyranny and Oppression. There must therefore be a Coalition, or Cooperation of all three, in order to form a Government fit to rule over such a Creature as Man.
Josiah Tucker, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781), Part II, Chapter III.
Monday, May 21, 2018
Incommensurability
Philip Kitcher has a good review of Errol Morris's The Ashtray, in which he makes some important points about the work of Thomas Kuhn.
When I was in undergrad (a time when I read quite extensively in philosophy of science), I remember reading a number of criticisms of Thomas Kuhn and suddenly realizing that the reason they didn't entirely make sense to me was that the critics were assuming that 'X and Y are incommensurable' meant 'X and Y cannot be compared'. Of course, this is not true -- in fact, incommensurability implies that they can be compared. When we say that the legs and the hypotenuse of a right triangle are incommensurable, we don't mean that we can't compare them -- in fact, the Pythagorean Theorem gives you a precise account of such a comparison. Rather, the point is that in such a comparison there is no unit definable wholly in terms of a leg that measures the hypotenuse without anything left over. So to say that two theories are incommensurable in how they use the term 'mass', for instance, is not to say that you can't compare how they use the term, but instead that there is a shift of meaning between the two such that when you do compare them you find that one cannot perfectly translate what is meant by the other. 'Mass' in Newtonian physics and 'mass' in Einsteinian physics are obviously related and obviously comparable; but on comparison they do not fit each other exactly. You can identify precisely ways in which they do not fit each other. First, they are not exact synonyms. Second, if you try to get Einsteinian 'mass' from Newtonian 'mass' by adding qualifications or complications, you still don't get a direct translation until your qualifications have multiplied so much that you are just restating the Einsteinian account of mass. Third, if you try to get Newtonian 'mass' from Einsteinian 'mass' by (say) idealizing and introducing negligibility assumptions, you still don't get a direct translation until you've introduced so many assumptions that you can no longer use it for Einsteinian purposes. They are incommensurable -- you cannot intertranslate without something being lost or gained that the other theory cannot or does not countenance, because the sets of problems considered by each theory are not exactly the same, the methods used by each theory are not exactly the same, and the topics each theory treats as most important are not exactly the same.
Kuhn is hardly the first person to make the point -- Duhem argues the same, and more rigorously -- but Kuhn's version is in a generalized form so that it did not otherwise depend on the exact details of your account of how theory works. People reading him, however, regularly misunderstood what the word 'incommensurability' means, to the complete distortion of everything he says on the subject. This, combined with a dogmatic assumption about what scientific progress would have to mean -- cumulation without break -- and which Kuhn rejects, resulted in the kind of caricature Kitcher is arguing against.
According to the cartoon — and according to Morris: Kuhn denied the possibility of communication across the revolutionary divide. No — he said that such communication was inevitably partial. The languages of different paradigms are not straightforwardly inter-translatable. Often, no single term in one language will do for a scientifically important term in the other. What one paradigm sees as a “natural” division of the subject matter appears as odd and disjointed to its rival.
When I was in undergrad (a time when I read quite extensively in philosophy of science), I remember reading a number of criticisms of Thomas Kuhn and suddenly realizing that the reason they didn't entirely make sense to me was that the critics were assuming that 'X and Y are incommensurable' meant 'X and Y cannot be compared'. Of course, this is not true -- in fact, incommensurability implies that they can be compared. When we say that the legs and the hypotenuse of a right triangle are incommensurable, we don't mean that we can't compare them -- in fact, the Pythagorean Theorem gives you a precise account of such a comparison. Rather, the point is that in such a comparison there is no unit definable wholly in terms of a leg that measures the hypotenuse without anything left over. So to say that two theories are incommensurable in how they use the term 'mass', for instance, is not to say that you can't compare how they use the term, but instead that there is a shift of meaning between the two such that when you do compare them you find that one cannot perfectly translate what is meant by the other. 'Mass' in Newtonian physics and 'mass' in Einsteinian physics are obviously related and obviously comparable; but on comparison they do not fit each other exactly. You can identify precisely ways in which they do not fit each other. First, they are not exact synonyms. Second, if you try to get Einsteinian 'mass' from Newtonian 'mass' by adding qualifications or complications, you still don't get a direct translation until your qualifications have multiplied so much that you are just restating the Einsteinian account of mass. Third, if you try to get Newtonian 'mass' from Einsteinian 'mass' by (say) idealizing and introducing negligibility assumptions, you still don't get a direct translation until you've introduced so many assumptions that you can no longer use it for Einsteinian purposes. They are incommensurable -- you cannot intertranslate without something being lost or gained that the other theory cannot or does not countenance, because the sets of problems considered by each theory are not exactly the same, the methods used by each theory are not exactly the same, and the topics each theory treats as most important are not exactly the same.
Kuhn is hardly the first person to make the point -- Duhem argues the same, and more rigorously -- but Kuhn's version is in a generalized form so that it did not otherwise depend on the exact details of your account of how theory works. People reading him, however, regularly misunderstood what the word 'incommensurability' means, to the complete distortion of everything he says on the subject. This, combined with a dogmatic assumption about what scientific progress would have to mean -- cumulation without break -- and which Kuhn rejects, resulted in the kind of caricature Kitcher is arguing against.
Sunday, May 20, 2018
Fortnightly Book, May 20
Our next fortnightly books will be lesser-known Jules Verne works from the Voyages extraordinaires: The Self-Propelled Island (L'Île à hélice, #41) and The Castle in Transylvania (Le Château des Carpathes, #37).
In The Self-Propelled Island, a Parisian string quartet touring California is kidnapped and brought aboard a vast artificial island, Standard Island, whose main city is called Milliard City because it is inhabited by billionaires. It is a utopian, if expensive (lunch costs $160 per person), loaded with an endless list of the finest technological luxuries. It has everything you would expect from a Verne tale: amazing technologies, a voyage to exotic places, and -- all too forgotten -- biting social satire. Technological utopia is not a stable utopia, and a society of billionaires is perhaps not as promising a foundation for a healthy life as its endless parade of luxuries and conveniences and gee-whiz advancements might suggest. The original English translations all cut material out; I'll be reading the recent (2015) University of Nebraska Press translation, by Marie-Thérèse Noiset, which is the first unabridged English translation of the original 1895 work.
The Castle in Transylvania, first published in 1892, is thought by some to have been an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula; it is Verne's attempt to play around with Gothic tropes, including the sometimes-forgotten Gothic trope of science intersecting with superstition. In a village in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, rumors are flying about the local castle, which the villagers think is haunted by a devil and the spirits of the dead. Dr. Patak, a freethinker, investigates and discovers more than he had ever imagined. Count Franz de Telek, also freethinking, decides to get to the bottom of it all in order to show these superstitious villagers the light of reason. But the Count is perhaps underestimating the darkness in human nature. And he is also forgetting that the advance of science makes the world weirder and more uncanny: by technological discoveries, the past can last into the future in unexpected ways, and people can be present where they are not, and to deal with this can be as harsh and difficult an adjustment as dealing with ghosts and devils. I know less about the translation history of this work, but I will be reading the most recent translation, the 2010 Melville House translation by Charlotte Mandell.
The works are not particularly long or difficult, but because I have fairly busy schedule the next several weeks, I'm not sure if this will be a normal fortnight or will actually stretch into three weeks.
In The Self-Propelled Island, a Parisian string quartet touring California is kidnapped and brought aboard a vast artificial island, Standard Island, whose main city is called Milliard City because it is inhabited by billionaires. It is a utopian, if expensive (lunch costs $160 per person), loaded with an endless list of the finest technological luxuries. It has everything you would expect from a Verne tale: amazing technologies, a voyage to exotic places, and -- all too forgotten -- biting social satire. Technological utopia is not a stable utopia, and a society of billionaires is perhaps not as promising a foundation for a healthy life as its endless parade of luxuries and conveniences and gee-whiz advancements might suggest. The original English translations all cut material out; I'll be reading the recent (2015) University of Nebraska Press translation, by Marie-Thérèse Noiset, which is the first unabridged English translation of the original 1895 work.
The Castle in Transylvania, first published in 1892, is thought by some to have been an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula; it is Verne's attempt to play around with Gothic tropes, including the sometimes-forgotten Gothic trope of science intersecting with superstition. In a village in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, rumors are flying about the local castle, which the villagers think is haunted by a devil and the spirits of the dead. Dr. Patak, a freethinker, investigates and discovers more than he had ever imagined. Count Franz de Telek, also freethinking, decides to get to the bottom of it all in order to show these superstitious villagers the light of reason. But the Count is perhaps underestimating the darkness in human nature. And he is also forgetting that the advance of science makes the world weirder and more uncanny: by technological discoveries, the past can last into the future in unexpected ways, and people can be present where they are not, and to deal with this can be as harsh and difficult an adjustment as dealing with ghosts and devils. I know less about the translation history of this work, but I will be reading the most recent translation, the 2010 Melville House translation by Charlotte Mandell.
The works are not particularly long or difficult, but because I have fairly busy schedule the next several weeks, I'm not sure if this will be a normal fortnight or will actually stretch into three weeks.
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