We begin this episode of Drunk Ex-Pastors with some good news about Jason’s forthcoming book and Christian’s excitement over our podcast reaping a bit of that attention from it. We then address a listener’s objection that we are just pinko Rush Limbaughs, as well as deal with the issue of the rampant and bigoted persecution of Christians in this country . We take a listener’s call about what kind of pastor Christian used to be (since the very notion that he was ever a man of the cloth is simply inconceivable to most people), and then we discuss another listener’s question about what our personality types are (yes, we are distinguishable, but just barely). Jason addresses a question having to do with his “photographic memory” or something (he can’t remember), and then we spend some time discussing the topic of the minimum wage and the larger issue of globalization. The issue of where people are allowed to go potty comes up again, as does the sexualization of boobies and the role of money influencing public policy. We spend considerable time proving that we are not politically correct (but we do it in such a way so’s not to offend midgets or hermaphrodites). And finally, our “Dick Move, God” segment introduces us to a man whose entire life’s work is undone due to a technicality.
Also, we don’t care if you think we’re racists as long as you think we’re thin.
Links from this Episode:
Podcast #243: Political Correctness, Race, and (Our Last Discussion about) the Meaning of Life
Podcast #273: Asians, Tongues, Veins, and Impeachment
Podcast #372: Frank Schaeffer
Podcast #271: Faith and Fat-Shaming
Is the possibility of rape the only reason there are gender specific public bathrooms? I doubt it. I don’t think hundreds of years ago our ancestors were raping each other constantly in restrooms until someone had the idea to separate the genders. Maybe modesty had something to do with it as well. You know: “behavior, manner, or appearance intended to avoid impropriety or indecency”. I think we as a culture used to have greater regard for modesty.
In a culture that emphases it more today, take Muslim women. Some Muslim women wear a hijab whenever they are in the presence of, or might come into the presence of adult males from outside their immediate family. A large unisex public bathroom would remove a place where they would feel comfortable adjusting it, from a modesty standpoint.
Or maybe the point is better made with locker rooms. Let’s say tomorrow we made locker rooms all unisex. Do you think the real problem would be people worrying about being raped? Or do you think people are just uncomfortable undressing in front of people, especially the other sex? Should we consider those people bigots for feeling uncomfortable? Or say they are just afraid of rape, which is ridiculous? No they just don’t think it is appropriate to undress in front of the other sex.
Maybe modesty has gotten to a point in our culture that gender specific bathrooms no longer makes sense. An adult male and adult woman going into a restroom together used to seem inappropriate, maybe no longer? Has the culture awareness and acceptance of non-heterosexual orientations, made the gendered bathrooms not make sense any longer?
Good points and questions, Lane.
I do think that unisex locker rooms are another issue than unisex public bathrooms, and definitely a trickier issue. To be honest, I don’t even like changing in front of men. I don’t think I’ve ever been naked in a locker room. I don’t think it’s men though, I think it’s anyone. I’d be just as uncomfortable changing in a room full of women as I am in a room full of men.
As to your last question, I think it has for a large portion of society, myself included. However, it’s certainly not everyone and I doubt it’s the majority either.
From the numbers I have seen, I think it’s incorrect to say the minimum wage would be $22/hr if it had stayed with inflation. The minimum wage was set in 1938 at $0.25 which equates to approx. $4.25 in 2016 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the highest point came in 1968 when the minimum wage was $10.34 in 2016 dollars ($21.5k/yr).
So to argue to keep the minimum wage adjusted to inflation is to insinuate it was set to an acceptable standard. Maybe that standard should be in terms of the min wage’s share of the average workers wage (~70% in Bernie’s $15 proposal).
Hi Wesley, thanks for clarifying. You are correct. We meant productivity, not inflation. The information was from here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/minimum-wage-productivity_n_2680639.html?
Definition of Irony: Driving with the windows down on a beautiful spring day listening to a great new episode of DXP about political correctness when I pull up next to an African American who also has their windows down and Christian drops “the n-word” referring to a joke about Obama and I get a look like I’m some racist.
Loved the episode!
Ha ha. Sorry. LOL!
I just wound up in a conversation with someone from HR at my work and the podcast came up and they asked if they could find it on iTunes. I’m regretting that conversation a little bit, probably moreso if they begin with the most recent episode!
Hilarious!
• They make diet tonic water and diet ginger ale. Throw in a little lime juice and vodka and it’s pretty tasty.
• No, you’re not the anti-Limbaugh. Limbaugh only exists to generate outrage, not discussions. I didn’t think the discussion was that heated or even that bad, so I was a bit surprised that it ended that way.
• I think most of the people I know on FB who would appreciate your podcast are probably already listening, and the rest of the my FB friends are more of the type that are posting scripture and conservative political memes on FB unironically.
• I’d like to teach Science at Calvary Chapel High School. “Hey, kids, here is why the idea of a 6,000 year old Earth is bullshit. Your assigned reading for the week is “Why Evolution is True and A Brief History of Time.” Do you think I would last the entire day or do you think I would be escorted off by armed security before lunch?
• I used to believe in Personality tests, but then I kind of realized that they are pretty similar to a horoscope in the level of specificity they dispense. “You are a motivated and driven person who values family and has a strong sense of right and wrong…” Why yes… yes, I am.
• Perhaps, I’ve become too cynical. But you never do get a personality test result that says, “Whoa… you are just an awful human being… a complete asshole… just… horrible… you need help. Now.”
• Heh… And you just said the same thing. Fun thing about writing notes in real time.
• All early civilizations would incorporate astronomical elements because the stars were how they marked the seasons and certain days would hold religious significance. Many societies would build monuments with the stars in mind so that a particularly significant stellar object (to them) would shine through a window or a gap in the wrongs at certain time.
• “What’s so wrong with…?” Because there is no evidence for it? 🙂
• I have the same kind of memory, I wonder if it’s because of the culture we were raised in which emphasized the trivial and popular culture as opposed to science and classical subjects?
• Good question. It used to be in this country that we had jobs that a man (or woman) could make a living wage doing with only a high school diploma, and college degrees were required for some management positions and specialty fields. My grandfather got a job working in a P&G factory out of the war and retired as a supervisor with good benefits that took care of him and my grandmother until they both passed.
• With the loss of power of unions and liberalized trade policies there has been a power shift away from the individual employees to the employers. Unless you work in a highly specialized field, it’s difficult to negotiate top wages because there are less expensive options overseas. If you have a Master’s degree and you’re only making 38k a year, there is a problem. It could be that your degree has no value in the corporate market, but it could also be because we’ve come to expect low wages.
• But it is, I think, a major problem that there aren’t a lot of jobs for someone with a high school diploma that pays a living wage, and I think as their wages rise, we’ll see other tiers rise as well. But we might also have to start rethinking some of our economic ideas and priorities and explore other solutions, such as publically funded colleges, trade schools, and community colleges that cost the student nothing, a more worker oriented international trade focus, or even the guaranteed minimum income idea that has been floated.
• Or perhaps ideally, a UN treaty designating basic worker rights, wages, and safety standards, environmental standards, etc.
• Of course, while I’m wishing for improbable things, maybe I’ll win a trillion dollar powerball jackpot and I can start all of the factories here in America myself.
• A company used to feel an obligation to its community and its country. Now it’s almost entirely about profit and any community contributions are photo ops.
• Ever since we got rid of slavery, an entire subsector of industry has been seeking ways to get as close as possible to finding legal slave laborers.
• Australians do seem pretty chill, but then I remember Russell Crowe and he seems pretty high strung.
• Just follow the bathroom code, people. Follow the code…
• “Well, I was going to rape you, but then you went into the women’s room and I can’t go in there…”
• Can we get rid of troughs, though? They’re disgusting, it’s uncomfortable, and it always stinks.
• Okay, guys, you’re guys… so I know we’re not all that dissimilar. With the advent of the internet, we’ve all seen lots of naked breasts. Still totally interested in the boobies. They never get old.
• I think it sums it up to say, I don’t want to end all corporate influence on government, I do want to keep it in check so billionaires cannot rig the laws against everyone else and buy their own pet legislators like they can now. I think an unofficial system of checks and balances should be between the government, the citizenry, and the corporations, with each keeping the other two in check.
• Respectful and polite? Phhppt. Fuck that shit.
• There are acts of malice and acts of ignorance. I’ve been guilty of being racist by ignorance, but not by malice. A good friend will correct ignorance and receive instruction.
• Bill Marr said that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards because it took balls to fly a plane into a building knowing you were going to die. That, of course, ruffled quite a few feathers.
• There is a general lack of charity all around. And it’s easy for the internet to create a mob mentality where an ‘offender’ is judged without all the facts or without regard as to whether or not his ‘crime’ was one of ignorance or malice.
• Comedy dealing with race works when the comic is punching up and not punching down.
• Well, the entire story of Israel is sort of an entire story of dick moves:
God: “Okay, Abraham, come and follow me, I’m going to give you land.”
Abraham: “Sounds good.”
God: “Just one little thing… cut off a part of your penis.”
Abraham: “I think I hear Ba’al calling me, let me get back to you.”
God: “I’m going to give you a son…(quietly) and then ask you to sacrifice him to me.”
Abraham: “What was that last part?”
God: “Nothing…”
God: Okay, Abraham, let me tell you what will happen to your people after you’re gone. They’re going to go down to Egypt.
Abraham: But why? You said this was our land.
God: It is, but first you need to go to Egypt to survive a famine.
Abraham: Couldn’t you just not send a famine?
God: I could, but I want you in Egypt, okay?
Abraham: So we’re in Egypt, everything cool?
God: Not really, the Egyptians make them all slaves and kill a lot of babies for about 430 years. But then, I’m going to deliver them by killing a lot of Egyptians. Then you’re going to wander around for 40 years until everyone 20 and over dies in the desert, but then I’m going to lead you back to this land.
Abraham: But I’m already here… why is any of that necessary?
God: Trust me, it’s going to make a much better story. Pastors will use the whole story as an analogy for the Christian life, it’s going to be cool.
Abraham: I think I hear Ba’al calling me again.
Isaac: It’s been a while.
Ishmael: Yeah, that was because after I made fun of you when I was 12, the voice in dad’s head told him to send me away into the desert with not enough food and water for mom and I to, you know… live.
Isaac: Damn… that sucks. Hey, let me tell you what dad and I did when I was twelve. Hint, it involved ropes, a knife, an altar and a voice in his head telling him to kill me. I still have PTSD.
Ishmael: I wonder if people thousands of years from now will look upon these stories as inspirational and heroic instead of horribly abusive and mentally scarring?
I hope you appreciate how much weaker that little tid bit makes your argument. Which minimum wage position is now producing 70% more than it was in the 70s? Pick any position at all.
I’m not arguing for a $22 min wage, Kenneth. Write the article author.
I’m not arguing with you. I’m asking you. Do you think its fair to raise a wage to match production if said positions arent causing the increase? Yes or no.
I think it’s fair that anyone who works 40 hours/week at any job can afford basic necessities. (Without living malnutritioned or in squalor.)
That’s dodging the question Christian. Anyways, I have more interesting question I’ll post later.
But you dodged the issue and you know it
Bwahahaha!!!!
Not dodging the question at all. I don’t care about the other factors. A person shouldn’t work full time and not be able to afford basic necessities. Period. If that translates to a “Yes” to your answer, then I’m good with that.
Ha ha!
• “What’s so wrong with…?” Because there is no evidence for it? 🙂
• I have the same kind of memory, I wonder if it’s because of the culture we were raised in which emphasized the trivial and popular culture as opposed to science and classical subjects?
Can you refresh my memory as to what you’re referring to here?
You were asking, IIRC, what was wrong with using crystals to heal.
For the second one, I have the same type of memory issues as Jason. I remember an assload of just trivial pop culture shit, but I cannot, for the life of me remember appointments, names, directions, etc.
So out of all the minimum wage workers 50% of them are kids. These are real stats not kingery numbers 😉
These are kids that probably won’t have a job now due to cuts, robots, etc taking their place for a better profit. Is that a factor you don’t care about? Is your position “youth unemployment be damned”? On your best guess, just how many people work full time with families to support and live in squalor? Keeping in mind the Earned income tax credit, welfare, and everything else. And before you answer, and before we look up the actual numbers, what ratio are you looking for to justify the move? Say we screw all the kids. If 10% of all minimum wage workers are full time adults is that enough? 20%?
Yes, I think y’all do sound like a progressive version of Rush Limbaugh at times. But I still listen every week. I generally enjoy what you do, excepting the occasion when I think you take your playful irreverence too far, and much of your politics. Otherwise, thanks for what you do…most of the time 🙂
The free market rests on the inoffensive principle of peaceful, non-coerced exchanges between rightful property owners. This ideal has produced unprecedented freedom and prosperity into a world otherwise characterized by grueling poverty and hardship for the masses. It wasn’t until modern times that people became impatient with poverty. It wasn’t until the free market that we dared even hope for the elimination of inadequacy and squalor.
The proposed solution from leftists is to bark commands at the economy. Leftists believe that if we take away some of the “free” from our market we can engineer faster results. So its all about a “livable wage”. A command from up high that all full time employees will be able to live a decent life and afford all basic amenities. This seems noble (feels good), but I think its hopelessly arbitrary, does harm, and is immoral.
1. Arbitrary: why are employers the one responsible for real wages being livable? Why not protest the price of rent? Gasoline? Groceries? These prices are equally responsible for wages not being “livable”. So why does the employer get to play the villain? Its an arbitrary witch hunt.
2 does harm: we can’t control costs because whichever product is capped in price will inevitably produce shortages. But the exact same thing happens with minimum wages. Coercing higher wages for low skill jobs reduces employers demand for those positions, and the supply of said jobs goes down. We will just have touch screens at McDonalds instead of teenagers. Hours will be reduced, and prices of goods will go up. Which is why Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, etc all reject a federal min wage all together. Low pay is far from ideal…. But its better than no pay.
3. Immoral: Forcing employers to pay an unjust wage through coercion is immoral. Just as forcing a person to work for an unjust low wage is immoral. Two sides of the same wretched coin. Now, technically no one is forced, per se, to pay an unjust wage just because the minimum wage becomes law. The employer could get rid of low skill jobs, or consolidate tasks and make cuts in employment so that production goes up. But this isn’t what leftists want. The left wants all the job openings to remain the same AND to force higher wages. Leftists HOPE that there are no robots to take orders. That companies can’t make cuts to protect profits. Which means when it comes right down to it, the goal is to immorally set an unjust wage.
A better solution: If our concern is for the poor we could raise the EITC. Or else commit to a negative income tax. In this way we could raise their standards of living without being immoral, arbitrary, or doing harm.
Hey, guys, thanks for addressing my contentions on the “persecution of Christians in America” issue! (It made me curious enough to listen in again, hehe!) I guess that we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that subject, and on the “progressive Rush Limbaugh” thing, which I still do hold is the case about the more recent direction of DXP. With all of that said, I was interested to read this article, in a fairly moderate Catholic periodical, quoting Pope Francis on two different types of persecution of Christians– the “bloody” (which is self-explanatory) and the “velvet-gloved.” The second type of persecution, he says, can involve losing one’s job or suffering other hardships because of one’s refusal to obey laws which are contrary to historic Christian teaching on now-controversial matters. Therefore, if I’m being silly for thinking that some Christians are being persecuted in America today, I’m happy to be accompanied by the Pope in that silliness! 🙂 Cheers! (I’m an INFP.) http://americamagazine.org/issue/pope-francis-persecution-churchs-daily-bread
I’m a ESTJ for what it’s worth.
Personality wise, I noticed that as an ESTJ I’m on the opposite end of each spectrum from you!
I thought it was interesting when you guys were discussing globalization that you noticed the inconsistency between considering yourselves world citizens while also wanting protectionist economic policies. I can’t help but play devils advocate here.
While businesses, showing loyalty only to profit, have moved businesses to the poorest communities around the world, they have done a lot to lift those regions out of grave poverty. As a world citizen, shouldn’t you be in favor of the people most in need getting the available jobs? The valleys being filled first. On the other hand, moving jobs over seas has hurt low skill workers in America. On a worldwide perspective, these American workers may have been overly advantaged – privileged you might say. And as you have pointed out on the podcast in the past, losing long held privilege looks to those losing the privilege as persecution/oppression.
I wouldn’t worry about this episode as much the other episodes they could stumble upon where you complain about not being able to wear jeans to work or talk about binge watching tv shows while working….. hahaha
Why does that laugh make me want to picture you like a Bond villain???
I would disagree that these companies lift regions out of poverty. In many cases, they exploit the resources of a region (minerals, fossil fuels, labor) with the complicity of a compliant and corrupt government bought with favors and bribes, while the citizenry and especially any indigenous peoples live in grinding poverty, oppression, and misery.
Think of the model of colonial Britain where they would extract and ship the wealth back to the UK while doing the natives a ‘favor’ of running things.
I think the most extreme poverty found in other countries is precisely caused by, and perpetuated by corrupt governments. I’m not referring to corporations running other governments (being the corrupt government of others) or stripping their natural resources, but using cheaper labor from other countries in manufacturing.
Regardless, I think US corporations should follow some US regulations even while doing business in a country without them. Especially regulations on worker safety, worker hours, and environmental impact and such. However maybe not US min wage, since economic factors vary so much from one region to another in the world. And if a product is produced without those regulations they should have large tariffs. Just thinking out loud.
What if we leave businesses alone from a compensation perspective, except we raise taxes on higher income earners and on things like capital gains, ways people make money. And we then take that tax money to provide a robust floor/safety net to society. Allow the economy to create the high peaks, but rounding off the peaks through taxes to lift the valleys that might be created. It sounds like you might be in favor of that. At least as long we somehow provide incentives to not living on the floor. Am I wrong?
The free market rests on the inoffensive principle of peaceful, non-coerced exchanges between rightful property owners.
It is the most efficient way to distribute goods and services between people. But efficiency does not equal morality, humane, or sustainable. Those questions are not ones that the field of economics is concerned about.
If you add in the problem of sin, the logical safeguards of the theory of free market economics are also compromised. Libertarian and Objectivist economics assumes that everyone will do what is in their long term best interest or face punishment from the invisible hand of the free market, thus those who are rich deserve their wealth because they possess it and those who are poor deserve poverty because of some moral or character deficiency.
I assume Libertarians and Objectivists have never actually met another human being or experienced tragedy in their lives or they would have abandoned this theory and embraced reality.
Unless you happen to have been one of the ‘losers’ of capitalism, in which case, you could have been run off your land or gang raped by paramilitary thugs acting at the behest of the American or Canadian corporation that paid them, or living under constant threat of death by the cartels whose profits the international banks are laundering.
But you have to break a few eggs to make that freedom omelet.
The proposed solution from the leftists to add legal safeguards to keep the worst impulses of corporations in check, to break up the money power before it can start buying governments or hold the economy hostage and demand socialization of its losses, and to ensure that the ‘losers’ of capitalism have legal recourse when they are exploited and do not starve.
1. 5 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.
2. http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2015/07/31/real-argument-for-raising-minimum-wage/2/#7d9340a570bb
We have no practical evidence that a minimum wage hike means national job losses, and we currently have several cities experimenting with raising the minimum wage to the expected $15/hr. limit. If they are dystopian robot controlled hellholes in 5 years, I’ll happily concede the point to you.
As is, I don’t find it objectionable or harmful to demand that we shift the cost for service employment off of the public safety net and back on to the employer.
3. Nonsense. It is no more immoral to demand an employer pay his workers a living wage than it is to demand that he pay to implement adequate safety measures to protect his workers or that he pay more to dispose of his factory’s waste properly and not simply dump it into the river or that he pay the taxes asked of him by his country.
Yes, I think that’s great! America wants to help the poor through government. Fine. But let’s give them the money through our taxes and be done with it. We don’t need agencies to condescendingly hold their hand in the process. No ones freedoms are stomped on. No one is forced to pay or receive an unjust wage. We help those at the bottom and business as usual
Ha ha! Well, my complaining worked. We can wear jeans at work now!
I think the only time I binge watched TV during work hours was when I was so sick all I could do was barely keep my eye on my email for a couple days. 🙂
I’m not sure. Part of the problem is that if you raise the minimum wage for adults only, then you screw the adults because everyone will hire youth. If you raise the minimum wage for full-time workers, then you screw them over because employers will employ everyone for 29 hours/week. Whatever is done probably needs to be done across the board.
Do you think that there should be no minimum wage? Seems like you advocate for little to no regulation on businesses in general.
Yeah, globalization brings a whole host of issues we are not quite ready to deal with yet. To me, it could actually be one of those problems that there is currently no good solution for. We have the ability to run businesses in other countries as if we’re all one, but we’re clearly still very divided with different laws and rights. For the most part, I don’t see corporations lifting people in a country out of poverty as much as I see them exploiting that poverty.
Wtf are these abbreviations?!
Kenneth, you are an STFU. 😉
STFU…..
Sad Tithing Funny Uncle….
Silly Tall Furious Usher….
Saintly Timid Frumpy Uber….
I got nothing
No min wage would create a lot of jobs, that don’t currently exist. Lots of jobs for the unskilled, lots of 2nd and part time jobs. Lots incentives for companies to bring people in at low risk to train them for higher paying jobs – interns.
Now that I thinking about it. How do unpaid interns exist with min wage laws?
BTW, I highly recommend engineering education. While in college, with no degree, I was making $20+ an hour as an engineering intern. Actually, I take that back. I don’t recommend engineering education. #supplyAndDemand
Hi Christopher. I’m fine with agreeing to disagree. 🙂
Let me ask you a question. If someone opens a public business in a state where there are anti-discrimination laws for sexual orientation, do you think it’s OK for the business owner to agree to those laws, then break them, and then claim that it’s persecution?
I was just talking to someone yesterday who was telling me about their friend who got a degree in engineering in the early 2000s and is now a VP at Starbucks overseeing their supply chain. #ThanksCalvaryChapelForTalkingMeOutOfCollegeAppreciateThat
Yeah, provided that the government doesn’t allow monopolies I think the minimum wage should be zero dollars. Although that doesn’t mean I think unskilled workers should be left to die of malnutrition!!! I we can take care of these people on tax day. Also, many times with a zero dollar minimum wage unions form and negotiate minimums per industry per position. See Sweden, Switzerland, and Finland as examples. I think that this can really hurt economic growth, but at least there is no coercion and all parties agree PER specific industry.
Frankly, I want to see the least in society taken care of. I don’t care how it’s done. When the gap between the classes is growing at such a phenomenal rate, something is wrong. It’s obviously not good for the poor, but it’s not good for the rich either. It seems a lot like “six to one half dozen of the other” how we take care of them. It’s either going to come out of the 1%’s pockets by raising wages, or by raising taxes to give money to those they didn’t pay enough to.
What do you guys think about this?
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/
But are those really the only two options? I don’t think so. Learn from the swiss!!!
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/fight-for-nationwide-limit_swiss-say-no-to-world-s-highest-minimum-wage/38543758
Are you opposed to ending all welfare programs and writing a check for 9k bucks per person per family instead? My friends always think I’m joking about this, but I would really and truly rather a family of five get a check for 45k per year than for the money to get choked to tiny droplets within the beaurocracy and yellow tape. It seems to me that if we just let the money follow the poor….. Well, there wouldn’t be anymore poor people. Charities pick up the rest. I think freedom, compassion, and self responsibility work together that way. I hope that the GOP begins to move in that direction. The old school “let them help themselves” mantra is dead. I would rather see “let them be helped and keep their freedom”
I haven’t read much on it or looked too far into it, but I think it’s a really interesting idea, and if it could be made to work, on the surface it seems like something I could support.
Good luck with convincing other conservatives that the government should hand out a 45k check every year. I can hear the cries of “Why should I fund the lazy?” or “I should just quit my job and live off of welfare!”
I am curious though. Not long ago, I proposed turning the current welfare system into a jobs program for the able-bodied. You get a living wage for you and your family and childcare if you need it, but you have to work 40 hrs/week. You get on the job training, experience, and networking opportunities.
You didn’t seem to care for that idea, but you are willing to hand over a large check to someone who isn’t working every year?
Ill listen to it later this evening on my commute!
I’m against growing government programs in principle because I think they are impersonal, inefficient, and wasteful. If we have to use government then fine. But only as a last resort. Ive been on welfare, so im talking from experience here.
There is a zero percent chance that the GOP or any party will support writing that check. But the irony is that they already are! Only its not reaching the people in the most efficient way possible. I think writing the check directly to the impoverished would be terrible when it came down to giving people an incentive to work…. But I would RATHER that than welfare. We could use a negative income tax to bring people up to the poverty line (but never above it) and use the rest of the left over cash to provide everyone with a subsidized HSA account.
The big difference between this approach (which actually does have support within the GOP) and the leftist approach is respecting individual freedom and developing personal responsibility. The left (in my opinion) doesnt want to merely HELP the poor. They want to also CONTROL the poor and dictate their every action because they don’t believe them competent to handle the finances. We can have our freedom AND be mindful of the poor. Let the money follow the people who need it!
Great! I wish I could say the GOP is headed in this direction…. but it really isnt. SO if you like that idea you will be pretty lonely. 🙁
This summer I plan on starting an advocacy group for young conservatives. I want to help start a movement withing the GOP aimed at providing the poor with cash and freedom. School choice, Negative Income Tax, Subsidized HSAs etc. I think America has moved away from being overly concerned with balancing the budget and allowing the poor to sink or swim. That battle is over and in the marketplace of ideas I think most people want to use the government as an instrument to give aid. So lets do it without being freedom stomping liberal control freaks!!! IMO, if the GOP jumps into this full stop- it could be the face lift we need.
Bernie wants to give you free shit? Thats nice. We would rather give you cash. You want a hand me down sweater from grandpa or a VISA gift card?
😉
In my case, the “INFP” designation was from taking the Myers-Briggs personality evaluation.
Thanks for the question, Christian! Part of the problem, as I see it, as a Catholic, is that we were told by progressives that the fight to legalize gay marriage was “only” going to be about allowing gay people to be married. What I mean by that is, Christians were told, “This ruling is not going to affect you and your families. Stop saying that you will be adversely affected by it in any way! It’s not about you, and you’re being ridiculous!”
Now, though, some Christians and their families *are* actually being adversely affected, in very real ways, by the legal application of the Supreme Court ruling, and they are *still* being told that they are being ridiculous by speaking out about it and legally challenging it. Where does this end?
There are many Christian wedding planners in the U.S. who have been operating their businesses for much, much longer than gay marriage has been legally recognized. Why do the conscience rights of these Christians (i.e. to continue operating their businesses without participating in what their faith teaches to be sin) suddenly have to be legally unprotected, simply because a form of union is now legal that Catholics and other Christians don’t even believe to be marriage, period, according to the 2,000-year-old teachings of their faith?
Wanted to add to the whole personality discussion so I’m building off your post.
There are a few major issues with the MBTI.
It doesn’t give you any idea of where a person is on the spectrum. It dichotomizes the trait so a person who is a 1 out of 10 on extraversion is the same as someone who’s 4.9/10. That’s obviously a big issue because it’s not representative. Likewise, someone who’s a 5.1/10 is labeled different from the 4.9/10 although they’re much more similar to the 4.9 vs 1. You then lack the ability to see those differences for the 4 traits.
The S-N and T-F have almost no validity to what they’re measuring. Quite a few academic articles I can pull up if anyone is interested.
There’s also little support to show that the traits are actually dichotomies. Personalities are very complex and often interrelated. Trying to confine it to opposites often misses valuable information.
For personality assessments, you’re better off using tests that base measures of the big 5 personality traits or the HEXACO model. Both are more accurate and can provide a greater depth and accuracy of the measures.
Wasn’t there some discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership implementing those types of policies to improve worker safety, environmental regulations etc?
Could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that was one of the promotional points for it.
The more interesting personality type question is: are you an order muppet or a chaos muppet? http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/what_kind_of_muppet_are_you_chaos_or_order_.html
…INTP here.
And on a different topic, during Victorian times the sight of a woman’s ankle was thought to be super sexy, so ankles were always covered up, but I doubt that ankle caresses played a huge role in Victorian sex. Of course I could be wrong. I’m guessing boobs play a fairly big role in sexual play because of their sensitivity – something about the type and concentration of nerve endings. And then there’s the fact that ears and necks are usually clearly visible, but having your ear or neck tickled/licked/bit is a sexual turn on for lots of people. So I’m not sure I’m on board with the hypothesis that people are going to stop playing with their partner’s boobs just because now they can see boobs on tv whenever.
The free market rests on the inoffensive principle of peaceful, non-coerced exchanges between rightful property owners. This ideal has produced unprecedented freedom and prosperity into a world otherwise characterized by grueling poverty and hardship for the masses. It wasn’t until modern times that people became impatient with poverty…
The problem with origin stories is that they sometimes don’t account for the shifts in the landscape that have occurred that may have raised new questions. So the free market (along with a number of other social changes) brought about prosperity at a level unseen before. But that new prosperity itself shifts the ethical questions that should be asked and gives them a new context. The conversation has to be different in a world where some are thriving beyond measure while others are extremely vulnerable.
I totally agree about the negative income tax though, and think it might be the only solution where you could get some agreement from both conservatives and progressives.
The other beef I have with free market talk is that I actually read Adam Smith once upon a time, and what he envisioned is nothing like our actual economy. Monopolies and predatory corporations would have horrified him. I would guess a free market does work in his context – a smallish town in which the people who are doing business know each other, and the coercive employment and pricing practices that are pretty common today are unheard of. You have to actually interact with the people who are impacted by your business practices, and you’re also breathing the air, drinking the water, etc. in the place where you do business. That’s radically different than our world, so I’m always skeptical when I hear free market discussions take place. Context is everything…
So the free market (along with a number of other social changes) brought about prosperity at a level unseen before. But that new prosperity itself shifts the ethical questions that should be asked and gives them a new context. The conversation has to be different in a world where some are thriving beyond measure while others are extremely vulnerable.
Yes, I agree, but that doesn’t mean we should alter the principle of peaceful, non-coerced trade among rightful property owners. And this is where so much of the disagreement lies between right and left.
The other beef I have with free market talk is that I actually read Adam Smith once upon a time, and what he envisioned is nothing like our actual economy.
Well of course it was different than today. But why does that even matter? Context is very important, but not in the way that you imagine. The nations that have the most prosperity, do more for the poor, that make the largest and fastest technological advances, and that enjoy the most political freedom (because economic and political freedom are connected) are precisely the ones that follow his model. Those that depart from it are precisely the nations with the most squalor, poverty, and suffering.
Do we have homeless and poverty? Yes. But so does everyone everywhere in all periods of time all over the earth. The big difference is that our poor live like Gods compared to their ancestors. Do we have a super class rich and influential people? Yes. And so does everyone everywhere in all places and throughout all times in history. But there are so many more today than ever before! Context IS everything, and I feel like its one of the biggest factors free market haters ignore.
I didn’t mean to imply that breasts would cease to be fun to play with and to have played with. My point was that seeing breasts is probably not a huge deal in environments where they’re out all the time. Does a 12 year old in Africa freak out if he sees a pair of boobs like an American 12 year old might?
In other news…. NASA just reported the polar ice caps haven’t shrunk at all, and in fact have grown by several billion tons.
Now, I realize there is a deep consensus on man caused global warming….. But it has to be at least a little embarrassing that all of their models and predictions keep ending up fantastically wrong. I mean at some point don’t we all say
“yeah, you all agree, but your also always wrong about nearly everything so who cares”
http://louderwithcrowder.com/nasa-report-antarctic-ice-sheet-is-actually-growing-by-billions-of-tons/#.VxeM0-5Okwg
Yeah, they would certainly be less sensational. Which might be a good thing in some ways.
Having read the actual NASA post on its webpage, I’m baffled by your interpretation of it, like we didn’t read the same article.
There is no dispute about the increasing melting of ice in Western Antarctic and the Antarctic peninsula. The lead researcher admits that if current trends of ice loss continue, the loss will outweigh whatever snowfall accumulation is happening in Eastern Antarctic. There is no dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. No dispute that since industrialization, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen to levels not seen in several hundred million years when the Earth’s climate was very different. No dispute about the Greenland ice and arctic ice melting. No dispute about sea level rise.
But that’s all rubbish because one area continues to receive good amounts of snow therefore Climate Change is a hoax?
Sure, man. Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep your preferred ideology in tact.
So this transgender concept, that one is born biologically male but psychologically female, must cause feminists real heartburn. Since don’t feminists claim that there is no difference between male and female, except what society tells us. So you basically have nature vs. nurture concepts of gender bashing heads under the progressive umbrella.
Honestly, I’m interested in how feminists view transgendered females.
Just saw this:
Haha yes it is exactly like we didn’t read the same article.
From NASAs website
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
Obviously no one is doubting that certain parts of the gigantic ice cube are melting. The point is that the melting is doing nothing to rise sea levels. Which contradicts what we have heard for years! Over, and over, and over, again the IPCC puts out models that go bust. Which is the very reason why we have changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change”. Because the models were wrong. In fact, to date, 95% of all data the IPCC has put out has been wrong. That’s a freaking enormous amount of bullshit that has been ” corrected” and then “recorrected” and then “rerecorrected” for decades. The polar ice caps are GAINING ice, not losing it. And IF trends continue in about forty years we may begin to lose a smidgin of ice. And then IF that continues it will take decades just to get us back to where we are today. And you say all of this lines up perfectly with what we have been sold? PUH-LEASE
And, the “pause” of global warming just had its 19th birthday. Which means no freshman in college has ever experienced a day of “climate change”. Witness the schism this has caused among alarmists. Maybe at 25 years we will get a retraction and an apology from snobby leftists? Doubt it 😉
I’ve never heard a feminist say there is no difference between male and female. I’ve heard them say that males and females should be treated equally.
I agree, Jamie. I also think that personality tests would be much more accurate if 10 of your closest friends/family took the test for you instead of you taking it yourself. 🙂
There’s a very wide range of views within feminism…
But the first thing is that sex and gender are not thought to be the same thing in most feminist circles, so you really have to separate the two or any conversation on trans people will be basically incoherent. Which explains a lot of the current debate. The narrative from the far right is that the proposed bathroom policies are allowing men in the women’s bathroom, but this only makes sense if you believe that sex and gender can’t be uncoupled. Of course, the basic problem for trans people is that their gender doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth, so their struggle is to realign the two or come up with a compromise that feels livable to them. Given that view, most feminists are supportive of trans causes and agree that the individual should be allowed to define themselves and we should be respectful of their wishes and their autonomy.
The second thing is that the vast majority of feminists see oppression of all the various types as being of a piece, springing from the same source, and not something you can address individually. So objecting to sexism but not racism, ageism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, etc. is not a consistent or defensible position since at the root of the issue these are basically the same thing in different form.
That’s a pretty rough and dirty rundown, but it’ll have to do.
And to further muddy the water… it’s very hard to nail down what this thing is that most people are talking about when they say “biologically male” and “biologically female.” But that’s a topic for another day.
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-cb92-The-conflict-between-feminism-and-the-transgender-movement#.VxgDTE1f2SM
Wiki article on Feminist views on transgender and transsexual people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_and_transsexual_people
Maybe there has been a growing acceptance, but it looks like there was definitely tension in the past, and some still.
Replace the word “gender” with the word “sex” on the label for the first button and you’ve not only accurately described the problem a trans person faces, but you’ve resolved the tension here.
Pow.
They don’t call me Wonder Woman for nothing. 😉
It would probably help to make a distinction between the radical feminist who do have an issue with the trans movement and the rest of feminism. As far as I know the radical feminists still hold that position, but they’re a very small minority.
However, the trans person is claiming that their born, natural gender, is different from their sex. There is nothing to be done, they say, it is something internal, intrinsic, and unchangeable. So we must accept their situation. But if gender is a social construct, something imposed from the outside, something not intrinsic, it can be changed.
I’m all for being nice and understanding. I don’t want to see my fellow humans suffering. I want to love them and see them flourish. However, if we are allowing people to not come to terms with their biological sex, in fact encouraging them not to, that isn’t promoting flourishing. Allowing people children to change their hormones pre-puberty. Allowing people to essentially mutilate themselves. It doesn’t seem loving to me.
And before you point it out, I get that not everyone fits perfectly into the 2 biological sexes. But that is a very small minority (I believe, correct me if I’m wrong) of people who identify trans.
I replied to this, but I’m not sure where it went.
The reason why it matters that our actual economy is nothing like what Adam Smith envisioned is that a different context raises different ethical questions and calls for different actions.
The free market might be a just arrangement in a world where everyone starts out on an even playing field, but when in fact you have a certain percentage of the population starting out at a distinct disadvantage through no choice of their own, then intervention is called for. Not if your only ideal is to maintain a totally free market, but if you’re throwing things like ethics into the mix. The free market is amoral, but our choices and policies aren’t supposed to be.
Putting some constraints on the market as a means of protecting the vulnerable doesn’t invalidate the ideals behind free market philosophy. It just acknowledges the reality of the world we live in. The market we actually have is already inherently coercive because those who come to the bargaining table are not on equal footing, so appealing to a market free of coercion doesn’t get you what you think it does.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/24/study-drives-a-sixth-nail-in-the-global-warming-pause-myth
The NOAA study is openly mocked by everyone today. Look, I’m not a climate scientist and neither are you. So we can both post links all day that give various explanations for nearly all points. What I like to watch for are shifts behind enemy lines. Today is 2016 and The NOAA study is considered by many global warming advocates to be useless. Including one of its authors! The entire thing is now under congressional investigation.
The alarnists are turning on each other. Its a schism. And where there is smoke there is fire.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/28/study-the-pause-in-global-warming-is-real/
Yes, they challenged something about a theory. Ooooo… that would be how SCIENCE! works. As I said, they didn’t challenge Climate Change or sea level rise. They came up with a story that provides a counterpoint to one data projection regarding overall ice depletion in Antarctica.
And yes, it is expected with Climate Change that some areas will experience wetter or colder weather even as the overall global air and sea temperature rise.
If anything, this should put to rest the idea that the 98% of climatologists that agree that Climate Change is happening is a uniform conspiracy determined to go along. Scientists are competitive. And if one of them had definitive proof, actual evidence that would invalidate the theory of Climate Change, it would be published tomorrow. But it won’t be because that proof does not exist. Except in the fever dreams of those whose ideology or pocket book demands that they keep doubt alive.
First I think the idea is that one is not born with a gender. That’s the acquired, socially constructed part.
But although there’s a lot of variation, being trans doesn’t require a gender binary either. In general it’s the gender binary that feminists are questioning and/or rejecting. If you think of gender as two discreet boxes, no actual person fits into them, and a lot of work goes into trying to make people fit. Yet even the manliest man and the girliest woman will have some qualities from the other box. And in truth the boxes are not terribly comfortable for most people. So it’s more helpful to think of gender as a continuum and let people inhabit that spot on the continuum that’s most comfortable for them. Most trans people end up occupying some space that’s closer to the other end of the continuum, but being trans isn’t contingent on the existence of the boxes.
And then there’s genderqueer…
Yes, we could trade links. But this is not economics or politics. Mine would be from people who are climate scientists and have spent their lives studying the data and building a theory that fits the data.
And while there is the possibility that we are missing data and tomorrow we might find that new piece of data that invalidates the theory, today, Climate Change is the best theory we have that fits the observable data, and the possibility of that game changing discovery is looking as remote as discovering new evidence that invalidates evolution.
The closest analogy I can think of is that (God forbid) you go to your doctor and he tells you that you have cancer. And you get a second opinion and he tells you you have cancer. So you get a third opinion and another and another and 98 doctors have told you that you have cancer and need to start chemotherapy to save your life, but you’ve found two doctors who say “Eh, not sure… probably not cancer. Eat better, exercise more, you’ll probably be fine.” So you walk away and join a gym instead. It’s possible you’ll be fine, but it’s pretty damn improbable.
And the frustrating thing is that this is something that addressing the problem would have good benefits for mankind even if those 2% of scientists are right and it is all a huge hoax. It would be a good thing for us to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels which are pollutants and are not good for us and do cause environmental problems during extraction and transportation. No one serious is saying we should outlaw gas, coal, and oil and go back to preindustrial times. But we should look to a future where we no longer use them: wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and wave energy.
And the frustrating thing is that this is something that addressing the problem would have good benefits for mankind even if those 2% of scientists are right and it is all a huge hoax. It would be a good thing for us to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels which are pollutants and are not good for us and do cause environmental problems during extraction and transportation.
Yes. This is the thing that baffles me the most. It’s incomprehensible to me.
Kenneth, you’re a fan of Pascal’s Wager. How about you apply that to Climate Change?
I think we can do prudent things environmentally and with energy policy, even if the climate change thing turns out to be completely overblown.
First thing I would do is start building nuclear power plants until we are almost completely off coal and other fossil fuels. And while we are doing that invest in the battery technology that will allow solar, wind, and other transient sources of power to supply base load.
Yes 95% of them claim to think man causes warming….. But then 95% of their models are wrong. Is that how SCIENCE! Usually works? Everyone continuously affirms X to be true even while they are utterly unable to make any predictions with accuracy! No. That’s not how SCIENCE! Is supposed to work
The analogy is that one doctor says i have cancer and that it will soon spread EVERYWHERE. But he is wrong. The next doctor says I have cancer and that any day now my lungs will collapse. But he is wrong and my lungs actually look healthier than ever. The next doctor says I have cancer and that my quality of life will any day get worse and worse. .. But for 20 years nothing happens…. At all. Everyone agrees I have cancer, but no one has anything useful to say about this cancer, what’s causing it, how it works, or what it will do from here. That’s a theory of nothing
You know that 76% of people say that 88% of statistics are pulled out of thin air.
If you think nothing has been happening with the Earth’s climate over the last 20 years, you haven’t been paying attention.
Google “95% of climate models wrong” and see what comes up 🙂
I looked at a few articles from NASA and here is what I found. Globally, sea ice has decreased by 5% since the 70s. Land ice, as we just read, increased by hundred of billions of tons. Absolutely no warming has taken place for 19 years and counting.
I’m not denying that there is climate change. Thats sort of the history of weather. But I betcha NO ONE was expecting to hear 5% less sea ice and gigantic expansion of land ice on the caps. That’s just not what we have been told. I would also be willing to bet that not many people are aware that 95% of the predictions made by these experts have been wrong. That’s just shocking to me. But maybe I’m alone in those sentiments
Again, your statistics are wrong.
http://climate.nasa.gov/
That is one idea. Another is that a human being (to invoke a conservative category) is not born with a sex (male or female), and that the sex / gender distinction is artificial.
Kenneth,
Have you ever heard of the concept of Social Credit which was articulated by Clifford Hugh Douglas in the 1930’s? There is an article on the idea currently posted on The Distributist Review website. There is also a website devoted specifically to the idea of Social Credit as developed by Douglas. What prompted me to mention this here is that the concept involves something similar in effect (though not in theory, so far as I can tell) to negative income tax and / or direct welfare. In this case, prices and wages / salaries are brought into alignment in the form of a dividend that is due to every member of society as his natural share in the proceeds of “real capital”, where real capital is defined as the means of production (“the machines, equipment, and tools of an industrialized society”) which are dependent upon natural resources and the cumulative technological / cultural inheritance of a society. Every member of society (according to this theory) has a natural right to these “common” resources, i.e., to the largesse of nature and culture (which includes, in my view, the material or quantifiable aspect of the common good), which entails that he has a natural right to the benefits produced by real capital, which right (so the notion goes) ought to be realized in the form of “social credit.” Its not classical distributism, but it is similar to that theory insofar at it represents a third option between capitalism and socialism.
What statistics? Which ones? I got all of them from NASA!
But let’s take some time to appreciate this link from their website. It hasn’t been updated in a while so it serves as an excellent illustration of the BS in time capsule form.
1. It lists “melting Antarctic ice sheets” as part of the evidence for global warming. The latest research from their organization proves the opposite is true. Antarctic ice sheets have grown exponentially.
2. It lists melting sea ice. In 2014 Antarctic sea ice reached a new record maximum never before seen. As of today we are only 5% lower than the 70s in terms of global sea ice. That’s not a big deal.
3. It states that surface temperatures are getting hotter and hotter with the hottest years yet in the last decade! Except…. No warming in 19 years and counting!
To be fair it looks like this stuff was written in 2009. At least the footnote used is based on a publication in 2009. No one noticed the pause for another few years.
4. Glaciers melting!!! Remember when the Himalayas were going to evaporate in just a few short years? Turns out ZERO ice loss in over a decade.
Look Chris, if all these scientists have a consensus that we have cancer I’m not going to go say they are wrong about that. But I can’t help but point put they’ve been super duper wrong on quite a bit of those symptoms that were supposed to come with it. I think maybe these geeks got some attention they weren’t used to, hyperventilation took place, and they got a little carried away. It happens. But we shouldn’t crush our economy and damage industry when they don’t have a clue what’s happening
For sure. There are some really good arguments for the position that sex is also a constructed category, and when it comes right down to it, there are no “facts” that we don’t always already layer with meaning and interpretation, and experience through a cultural filter. That’s just what it is to be human.
But the sex/gender distinction was certainly useful when trying to distinguish between the expected roles and characteristics and behaviors and propensities that come along with gender (all of which are culturally and historically contingent) from the physical characteristics. Maybe we’ve moved past that now? I kind of doubt it.
1 and 2: “The sea ice cover is one of the key components of the climate system. It has been a focus of attention in recent years, largely because of a strong decrease in the Arctic sea ice cover and modeling results that indicate that global warming could be amplified in the region by a factor of about 3 to 5 times on account of ice-albedo feedback. This results from the high reflectivity (albedo) of the sea ice compared to ice-free waters. A satellite-based data record starting in late 1978 shows that indeed rapid changes have been occurring in the Arctic, where the perennial ice cover has been declining at the rate of about 13% per decade and the ice cover as a whole has been declining at the lesser rate of about 5% per decade. In the Antarctic, the trend is opposite to that in the Arctic, with the sea ice cover increasing at about 1 to 2 % per decade. This is despite unusual warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region and declines in the sea ice cover in the Amundsen/Bellingshausen Seas of about 6% per decade. In the Arctic, a slight recovery in the sea ice cover has been observed in 2008 and 2009, following a major decline of the ice in 2007, while in the Antarctic, the sea ice cover was more extensive than normal in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Shown below are up-to-date satellite observations of the sea ice covers of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, along with comparisons with the historical satellite record of more than 30 years. The plots and color coded maps are chosen to provide information about the current state of the sea ice cover and how the most current daily data available compare with the record lows and record highs for the same date during the satellite era.”
The area of the Antarctic that is seeing growing ice formation is one small part of a very large planet. Trying to use that to disprove Climate Change is as absurd as bringing in a snow ball to the Senate floor and saying Climate Change must be a hoax.
The Arctic is melting. Greenland is melting. We will have a Northwest Passage for the first time in quite a while. Things are getting hotter.
3. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1fb6e057757e4b53d59f119e8c4de23d2620f8d879055fab4158d1db1d23898.gif https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/41519cc1bb89941d682e8f6dbcb4aeebd4a3d265c0944cd3a76013556a1608b1.png
Above all else though, has CO2 stopped being a greenhouse gas? Do you really think we can increase atmospheric concentrations to levels that have not been seen in several hundred million years when the Earth’s climate was much warmer and not see an effect or that the fact that the Earth is the only planet seeing a warming climate is a natural aberration?
Sigh…
And even aside from all of that, you never commented on what exactly would be so horrid about moving away from fossil fuels to nuclear and renewable energy?
Not that any of this matters. We’re not going to do jack shit until Miami is underwater and then maybe, just maybe, we’ll all get around to acknowledging a problem.
Well, the “usefulness” of a distinction is relative to a particular agenda (the pragmatic criterion of thought), but I am not primarily interested in that aspect of distinctions. Rather, I am interested in whether or not distinctions are adequated to reality. Certainly we have not moved past reality.
It’s funny you mention that! You can actually get information about how people see themselves from that and analyze the discrepancy between their and others views.
This podcast starts with “free money” being described. Free money does not exist. In order for “free money” to exist then the wealth it is connected to would have to fall out of thin air. Don’t you think this is dangerous for the culture to think of money as free instead of as money has to be earned or produced by an individual. It is not free.
Free money? Not sure what you’re referring to.
About 10 minutes into the podcast when you are talking about a christian wedding planner being persecuted…..you questioned Jason on it when he said free money and he answered the free pastoral housing……Jason calls it free money a few times…..
Sometimes people use common colloquialisms to save time with the assumption that others understand their meaning. Like when people say “free college tuition” or “free health care.”
In these cases, free just means funded by public money. That’s what I meant.
Thanks for the reply. It may not be as important as it seems to me. I see many people in society struggling and one of the largest factors is their perception of wealth, money and who actually funds government provided benefits. American citizens should get the credit for these benefits. It is American citizen funded health care and American citizen funded tuition. I believe it takes the conversation to a higher level and our culture can handle it.
So, the argument in the past has been that gender varies pretty dramatically from culture to culture and from one historical context to another. So the argument has been that if you don’t separate the two that variation in one but not the other becomes hard to account for.
I think the original question I was responding to was asking how feminists respond to the trans bathroom issue. In most forms of feminism today, the gender/sex distinction is generally accepted in some form.
Thanks for the dialogue, this is controversial topic that most people don’t know a whole lot about.
“First I think the idea is that one is not born with a gender. That’s the acquired, socially constructed part.”
Right feminists believe that gender is not something intrinsic, not essential. Gender is whatever you want it to be, and any expectations connected to gender are external and artificial.
Yet the trans person says that there experience of their gender is what is intrinsic, and their biology should be changed.
“So it’s more helpful to think of gender as a continuum and let people inhabit that spot on the continuum that’s most comfortable for them. Most trans people end up occupying some space that’s closer to the other end of the continuum, but being trans isn’t contingent on the existence of the boxes.”
If gender is socially constructed, not intrinsic, then your place on the continuum is arbitrary and can be changed from the outside – since it is caused from the outside. Taking hormones and having surgeries is trying to force the biological sex (something intrinsic) to fit the outwardly imposed, socially constructed gender. Any hardship is caused outwardly from the gender, not inwardly from the biology (except in rare biological cases).
If by “gender” one means behavioral / cultural characteristics generally associated with “men” or “women” (assuming of course that there really are such things as men and women as distinct from each other–not to mention humans as distinct from other species of animals, etc), then there is obvious variety across time and space and of course from person to person, some of which might be reckoned dramatic. My own view is that gender and sex are distinct though not (in embodied persons) separate–they are really related though not identical aspects of embodied personhood. To me the really interesting question in this regard concerns the relation of body and identity, specifically, the relation of biology (the objective or pre-chosen facts about a person’s body) and sex / gender identity; i.e., whether there are any objective markers of the latter independent of what an embodied person thinks, feels, and chooses about his or her gender.
I suppose that most feminists would respond in a smilar way to the issue of gender identity as applied to practical or political questions, though for slightly (relative to the whole spectrum of opinion) different reasons.
There are some feminists (albeit fringe) who believe gender identity is completely cultural. Camille Paglia talks about going to head-to-head with her fellow academics for merely stating that biological and hormonal differences between males and females needs to be acknowledged.
Another bundle of intertwined issue here… 🙂
First, you don’t necessarily get that gender is whatever you want it to be from gender is not intrinsic. As a social construction, gender is a product of intersubjective agreement in society – it’s a collective thing that we’ve built and has evolved as a result of the complicated interplay of all kinds of social, economic, religious, etc. forces. Just as our economic systems are social constructions (they don’t exist “in nature” outside of human collective activity), they’re still large complicated systems that we can’t individually, or even as fairly large groups, decide to change overnight. And they inform the way we experience the world, perceive of ourselves, filter our experiences and perceptions, etc. Both gender and economic structures, in many ways.
Second, besides this gender thing that is supposed to inform who we are and how we move through and experience the world (we start with Disney princesses from the moment of birth, right?) there is also the experience of the body, and we’re told that these are connected, and we experience them in tandem. There’s an interplay. Feedback loops. So there is this very well-documented phenomenon called body dysmorphia, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with gender or sex. In fact, in many cases people despise some non-sex related part of their body and want to change or remove it, but these cases are much less visible at this point. So some trans people want to change their body to match what they feel is their actual gender identity. Some just want to change their body. Some just want to change their gender. Some don’t want to be binary, but the two binary choices a all they’ve been presented with so far. There’s a huge range and wide diversity out there, and just framing it as the gender doesn’t align with the sex doesn’t do that justice. And in many cases, reassignment surgery is not the ultimate goal.
But back to your concern about people mutiliating themselves and not coming to terms with their sex. First, I think of something like having cancer as something you come to terms with. If something is bringing you constant and profound misery, and it’s not something you ar forced to live with, then why live with it? Who will be harmed by your quest to avoid that profound discomfort, and what can be done to mitigate their suffering if you choose to change your body? Second, if there was something about your body that you despised and you had a deep, lasting sense that it was not you, it didn’t fit with you in any way, would you experience it as mutilation if given the chance to alter or remove it? I had a bunch of loose cartilage removed from my knee a few months ago that was the remnant of a bunch of old basketball injuries. Did I mutilate myself? We remove wisdom teeth and moles and tonsils and all kinds of portions of our bodies that displease us. Is that mutilation? It seems that the experience of the individual having the experience and undergoing the change must be primary over the concerns and experiences of others. Not that the feelings of others don’t count. Just that as a separate person, your feelings about the intactness of my body cannot trump my feelings about it.
There are a number of feminist thinkers who’s position is at least very close to yours. Maybe the same.
I think here’s where my thoughts on the issue probably come closest to yours. The sex/gender distinction is useful in certain contexts, and certainly played an important role in the evolution of feminist and queer theory. At some point wresting apart the biological and the social was a critical step. But as with all models we make up to explain what’s going on with humans, it has its shortcomings, and we have to always remember that it is a model. Some want to think of sex and gender as these strata that are built up on top of each other, but that doesn’t account for the interplay between them. And it’s impossible to isolate the experience of the body from the social ideals around the body, because nobody exists in a vacuum. You need to find some kid that was raised by wolves, but when you do, you find that their experience and way of moving through the world is so entirely foreign to ours that you can’t get anything useful out of studying them. In this regard anyway. At the very least, it doesn’t seem to make any sense to say of a wolf child that they experience their body as being gendered in any way, or even of belonging to one sex or the other. So this maybe supports your position, and I think it’s a totally plausible one.
As an extremely tomboyish, athletic girl growing up in a very conservative environment, I actually experienced a lot of what I would now call dysmorphia, but not because I wanted to be physically male. At all. I was fine with my body, but couldn’t reconcile the way I experienced it with the way girls are supposed to experience and inhabit their bodies. I was just totally all wrong, and got away with it only because I totally by accident fit the beauty standard of my culture. I think this starts to get at the point where the sex/gender distinction breaks down, because I wasn’t only failing to perform gender correctly – I was also not embodying my sex(ed body) correctly. If that makes sense.
But whatever the relation between gender and sex, to me the more useful use of gender is as a sort of shorthand for social positioning. And in that framework you can’t isolate it, because of course our social positioning is made up of the interplay between our sex, gender, race, class, educational status, etc. But seeing it as a marker of where you stand in society allows you to be pragmatic, take political action, challenge the normativity that surrounds gender and sexual orientation, etc.
“But back to your concern about people mutiliating themselves and not coming to terms with their sex. First, I think of something like having cancer as something you come to terms with. If something is bringing you constant and profound misery, and it’s not something you ar forced to live with, then why live with it?”
First, cancer is literally killing you. So I don’t think is comparable. The constant and profound misery is psychological in nature, it seems. And should be dealt with that way.
“Who will be harmed by your quest to avoid that profound discomfort, and what can be done to mitigate their suffering if you choose to change your body?”
The person harming themselves is harmed. And harm to one is harm to all collectively. We aren’t islands, individual decisions affect all. If someone decided they identified as blind, should we allow them to damage their eyes, to remove them, encourage them to follow their heart? No. We should not allow them to do that. BTW this isn’t a made up case:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/01/north-carolina-woman-identifies-as-blind-pours-drain-cleaner-in-her-eyes/
The same goes with suicide. Should we just allow someone to commit suicide? No. We should seek to protect them from themselves and give them psychological help. Some people are really progressive about this and think anyone with a fleeting desire for suicide should have the freedom to do it without any coercion. I think these people are insane. Not only is suicide a great harm to the person committing the act, suicide causes great pain to people around that person, and tends to lead to more suicides. No one is an island.
“I had a bunch of loose cartilage removed from my knee a few months ago that was the remnant of a bunch of old basketball injuries. Did I mutilate myself? We remove wisdom teeth and moles and tonsils and all kinds of portions of our bodies that displease us. Is that mutilation?”
These are medical procedures that are directed toward realizing a restoration of health and the prolongation of human life which are each consistent with the natural drives of organisms: survival.
If you were to cut your healthy leg off, or blind your healthy eyes, or remove your jaw, or cut your tongue in half to look like a dragon. All of these sound to me to be mutilation. You are removing healthy function from your body – purposely causing damage. I think intentionally retarding sexual development through hormones, or the removal and alteration of the genitals fall into this category.
Also, before you ask. I am Catholic and think intentionally sterilizing one’s self, with the goal to be sterilizing (not treating cancer for example), to be wrong.
“Just that as a separate person, your feelings about the intactness of my body cannot trump my feelings about it.”
I sort of addressed this above. I do think we are more connected than this. We should be promoting the common good of everyone, promoting their flourishing. Allowing people to harm themselves, encouraging it, does not do this. We should all be trying to grow in virtue not only for ourselves but for others. And we should be promoting others to do the same.
First off, love the podcast! Been listening since almost the beginning!
I think it was this podcast where you guys were talking about double standards and corporations using their money to stand up against NC’s new bathroom laws (or maybe it was last podcast). Anyways, it got me thinking about the christian bakers who refuse to make a wedding cake. Is Bruce Springsteen refusing to do his job because he is standing up for what he believes in, the same thing? Could somebody sue Bruce for refusing them services based on the state they live in?
My gut says they are different because one is trying to include more people, while the other is trying to exclude people. It’s like lobbyist who lobby for something good. I hate lobbying and the money that is in politics, but if they are advocating for the poor, the disenfranchised … should we lump them together with the oil lobbyist? Can you say one is good and one is bad? Can you ban one and not the other?
Hi Joshua, thanks for the kind words and for listening.
Here is the difference as far as I’m concerned. One is refusing to do business with an entire state based on what the business/artist considers to be unjust laws. A Christian wedding planner is free to do the same. The other is refusing to do business with certain people based on their sexual orientation, which is against the law in some states (about 20 I believe). If any business/artist refused to allow certain people to purchase tickets to their concert based on sexual orientation, that would be a similar scenario.
You are actually allowed to refuse to do business with certain people, but it has to be across the board. For example, you can have a “No shirt, no shoes, no service” sign in your window because shirtless, barefooted people are not a protected class, and it applies to all people equally despite race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. So a business/artist refusing to do business in a certain state is not discrimination against a protected class, while a Christian wedding planner who refuses to serve gay people in a state that has anti-discriminatory laws for sexual orientation is breaking the law.
Hope that helps.
FYI, I think there is an entire thread along these lines in #92.
The Christian wedding planner is not refusing to serve gay people, just same-sex marriages. They would also refuse to provide services to two heterosexual men planning to get married for tax/health benefits (Why don’t you help Jason out). Could they put up a “No bride, no groom, no service” sign in their window?
Most of my comments to this point don’t stake out a position so much as they (are supposed to) map out some of the fundamental questions (to some of which, incidentally, I think that there are common sense answers of which we can be certain) that underlie the question of sex and gender. My focus is not at all pragmatic or political, but rather philosophical, and that alone probably has me swimming against the tide not only of most feminist or queer theorists, but most liberal intellectuals.
Again, the things that most interest me in this regard are primarily (a) “the [real] relation between gender and sex”, (b) the real relation between gender / sex and human bodies, and (c) the real relation between embodied personhood and gender identity. Pragmatic (what is “useful”), subjective (“how one experiences his body”), and relative (“standard of my culture”) concerns are secondary (not unimportant) from this point of view. One important question for me then, is whether sex and gender are simply models that we make up, or whether underlying the malleable, unique (e.g., an individual’s own experience), and socially constructed aspects of sex and gender there is an irreducibly objective aspect of the same, much as (in my view) the categories of “human being” and “man” and “woman” are objective (there are in reality such things human beings, including men and women), not merely social constructs or subjective experiences or programs for political action.
From this point of view, the sense in which e.g., “wresting apart the biological and the social” could be “an important first step” is the sense in which such wresting is based upon the real relation of the biological and the social (i.e. are they really disjunctive?) such that wresting them apart in theory is either an advance in knowledge (in case these things are really disjunctive) or an advance in ignorance (in case they aren’t). I agree that bodies don’t exist in vacuums, but they do (to stake a few claims) exist independently of the mind; they are objective features of reality and essential aspects of human beings.
By the way, that bit you shared about your childhood made me think of St Joan of Arc. Her story complicates (in a good way) the discussion of these issues as between religious traditionalists (such as myself). Any theory or narrative re cultural gender markers / expectations that leaves her on the outside looking in is deficient, in my opinion.
At first you said we cant just look at specific regions and need to look at the whole picture. Now you say we should ignore Antartic sea ice growth and focus on arctic sea ice decline? Wtf is that double standard. Globally sea ice has declined by 5% as you said….. so that means my stats are correct. Global sea ice down 5% from the 70s and land ice growth by hundreds of billions of tons.
Both of those graphs are from the 2014 study that has been disowned by its own authors, laughed at by the scientific community, and is currently under investigation by congress. Again, I can tell this is a failed argument by the disagreement among people who believe in man made global warming. As seen here. Schism!!!!
http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-hiatus-debate-flares-up-again-1.19414
CO2 is a green house gas. So what? Im not saying mankind isnt having an effect on the planet. Im saying climate scientists have no fucking idea what that impact is as seen by their inability to make predictions accurately.
Hi Rachel,
The reason why it matters that our actual economy is nothing like
what Adam Smith envisioned is that a different context raises different
ethical questions and calls for different actions.
The free market
might be a just arrangement in a world where everyone starts out on an
even playing field, but when in fact you have a certain percentage of
the population starting out at a distinct disadvantage through no choice
of their own, then intervention is called for. Not if your only ideal
is to maintain a totally free market, but if you’re throwing things like
ethics into the mix. The free market is amoral, but our choices and
policies aren’t supposed to be.
A couple of things:
1. I dont think the free market is amoral. I think it is morally superior to other systems. This goes back to that inoffensive principle we talked about. How can you say that “peaceful, non-coerced exchanges between rightful property owners” is neither moral nor immoral?
2. Intervention is called for whenever a percentage of the population has an advantage. Thats true in one sense. Monopolies need to be broken up by the government to ensure that the free market remains free. But other than that, I cant think of any other situations where “intervention” is required. What did you have in mind?
Putting some constraints on the
market as a means of protecting the vulnerable doesn’t invalidate the
ideals behind free market philosophy. It just acknowledges the reality
of the world we live in. The market we actually have is already
inherently coercive because those who come to the bargaining table are
not on equal footing, so appealing to a market free of coercion doesn’t
get you what you think it does.
These are just words. Legislation from the government that “restricts” the free market nearly always hurt the many to help out the few. Where as the market in general tends to help the many at the expense of a few. There is no other system yet discovered which accomplishes more for the poor.
Competition does restrict freedom but always in a way that benefits society. If you want to sell groceries you cant just charge whatever price you like. Wal-Mart comes to the table with an advantage and your prices are gonna need to be competitive. If you are an employee you cant just charge whatever you like for your work. Others might do the same labor for less. Collectively we reach an equilibrium. This isn’t coercion. Its competition. There is a difference.
Yeah…. I dont get it. I read a few articles and still didnt understand it so I just gave up. You give everyone money so that they can make up for the supposed “gap” in-between production and consumption. SO everyone gets a bank account at the FED and is given debt free credit every month, as much as is necessary, to buy what they want….. I just dont freaking understand it dude.
Put some nuts and bolts on it for me with practical examples of what life looks like under this proposal
I think the issue of allowing people to harm themselves is for sure a tricky one, and one that you and I won’t ultimately agree on.
But first I think you have to clarify how you define harm. If any instance of altering my body that is not meant to address a disease or injury is categorized as harm, then that’s a pretty narrow definition. For example, I don’t think you can justify the fact that we routinely yank out people’s wisdom teeth, and I think circumcision would be a very hard procedure to justify. Especially since the recipient of the surgery cannot consent to it. [Slowly backs away from that hornet nest she just poked]
But also, what do you mean by flourishing? If you’re talking the Aristotelian sense of flourishing, you can’t limit this to the physical. A life characterized by profound and persistent psychological pain is not a life of flourishing. A life lived with a constant sense of wrongness is not a life of flourishing. And then beyond that, I think the question for a Christian should be “would a loving god require some of his creatures to live this way?” And now we’re into the problem of evil, which I have to admit I’m a bit tired of after having discussed it with students in philosophy courses for nigh on twelve years. Obviously I would probably say that a loving god would not require a person to live that way – particularly in an environment where it can be remedied pretty easily, but I’m a black sheep backsliding agnostic, so…
I think at the root of the issue is how paternalistic do we think we should be, and how do we value personal autonomy? In my book, autonomy is very important, and I don’t really care to have other people constantly deciding what is best for me. Particularly since they don’t have to live my life and experience the world as me. Respecting that each individual has their own experiences and preferences and feelings and responses to the world demands a basic respect for their autonomy. But I agree that this is not a position that most Christians will feel comfortable with.
So here’s where we really begin to diverge, because I would argue that there is a such thing as a human animal outside of our collectively created social reality, but it is nothing like what we think of when we say “human being.” So from that perspective it’s hard to make sense of the objective/subjective distinction. We are fundamentally social animals, and we are formed entirely in a context where our conceptions and experiences of ourselves and others are constantly informed by our social context. So take a wolf child (or a locked-in-a-room-their-whole-childhood child) or a grown adult who has been in true solitary confinement for years and years, and what you find is someone with no sense of themselves as an individual person, no ability to interact with others, and a brain that has developed in such a way that they are almost incapable of language acquisition (or re-acquisition). It’s difficult to say that there even is an identity there, so in what sense can this creature fit into your tentative category of human being? It doesn’t seem that you can truly separate the two.
So what is “human being,” “man,” “woman” outside of society and culture? Nothing, I think. Is that a bad thing? No. It just is what it is. Identity is a tricky thing that forms as the result of a million daily interactions and a complicated interplay of social forces, feedback loops, etc. I think the point is that if we have social and political categories that are doing real harm to people in the world, then it’s up to us to acknowledge that we together as a collective whole created them, and we can also alter them and loosen them up, and make space for people to be able to live in a manner that feels comfortable to them. And changes like this don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen without some resistance and turmoil, but change is just like that, and change that alleviates human suffering is a good thing in the end.
Friday night, I don’t feel like being serious. So tell me, if you had access to a time machine, what is your top five to-do list for time travel?
Mine:
1. Find Jesus. Bring video recorder and solar charger. Settle all of the questions once and for all.
2. Take history text books to Constitutional Convention. Let everyone know that the future does not look kindly on the whole owning people and racism thing. Plus… the whole Civil War… 600,000 killed… half the country burned to the ground.
3. Convince Gavrilo Princip that he should go to a different sandwich shop.
4. If still a problem after item 3, kill Hitler. If not, find Mohammed and edit the Koran to explicitly forbid violence and misogyny.
5. Deposit money into a bank I know will be there after the Great Depression. Allow 100 years of compound interest to accumulate.
After I read this piece, and the extended essay upon which it was based, I thought, “I wish that every left-progressive-leaning person in America who enjoyed the run of ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,’ and took it to be great political humor, would also take the time to ponder the words of these two writers”: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/434458/vox-calls-out-smug-style-american-liberalism
Haha! Those are well done.
1. I wouldn’t want to see Jesus get killed. I would schedule the machine to drop me off as soon as Christ met Peter and pick me back up after palm Friday. If everything checks out by that time there really wouldn’t be any need to see the blood and gore. Plus I got to hangout with Jesus for three years.
2. Kill Mohammed. Sniper.
3. Have a little sit down with Martin Luther and the Pope. Bring some history books so they can see the price about to be paid.
4. Give the native americans a heads up. Particularly Montezuma.
5. Go back to the day my first baby was born. One more time. I would want to be invisible and listen in to all the conversations. It was a good day 🙂
I’ve thought about number 4, but in my ‘what-if’ scenario, I bring back smallpox vaccines and science, engineering, and math textbooks to see what kind of civilization would emerge.
I think I’ll leave the discussion here for now, before we shoot off in too many directions. Thanks again for the thoughtful civil dialog!
Its a goodie
1. Find Jesus. Meet Mary and Joseph. See public ministry through Acts. I’m okay if this is years of observation.
2. Meet Aristotle. Bring a ton of modern science and history of science books. See what one of the greatest minds in human history can do with it.
3. Same as #2 with Aquinas. Probably try to make sure he doesn’t hit head and fall off his horse (which he eventually died from) on his way to Second Council of Lyon to discuss reconciliation between East and West.
4. Bring Luther some history books. And not just future history, better early church history. Maybe bring a lifetime supply of xanax.
5. Give myself some lotto numbers. Or give some people a heads up about Hitler… Okay, probably lotto numbers.
Well, I was hoping that you might see something there that I didn’t on the nuts and bolts end. The justice of social credit, as a part of the common good (as roughly outlined in my comment), appealed to me, as did the notion of eliminating consumer credit and those aspects of the banking industry implied by the same. But I couldn’t see how the social credit would not be inflationary, mostly because I did not get Douglas’s theory of money. Beyond that, my thinking was along the lines of articulating some sort of reason why people have a right to purchasing power beyond what they earn through work (the operating assumption being that in an industrialized society more than sufficient wealth is generated to meet everyone’s needs and [reasonable] desires for goods and services). Rich people are granted that right in a capitalist system. In a socialist system, the state has that right (in theory, of course, the state’s wealth will be distributed to the people), while in a “social credit” system everyone has that right. If those are the three options, and granted the underlying assumptions, that third is obviously preferable–everybody wins!
Yeah, I think you put your finger on the fundamental difference between our views (in my opinion this is, generally speaking, the rock bottom philosophical difference between social conservatives and liberals). In my view, the human animal is a human being simply by virtue of its nature. That nature is not an acquired identity or social construct, it is inherent in the entity simply by virtue of its existence. On this view, the category “human being” is not any more tentative than what you posit as a “human animal.” (How do you know the animal is human, by the way, or that the entity being considered is even an animal?)
One application of this view in areas of moral and political concern is that if human beings are real, and not reducible to subjective experiences or social constructs, then human rights are objective and universal, being consequent on human nature–everything that is human has human rights. These rights are absolute, not reducible to or dependent for their existence upon social constructs (social and political categories), although social constructs can reinforce and promote, or conversely undermine and inhibit, the enjoyment of human rights. These rights, in turn, are not simply whatever an individual or society wants them to be, but are grounded in human nature.
If, however, socialization is what fundamentally makes human beings, then human beings and human rights are simply whatever a society wants to them to be. It seems to be an implication of this view that “harm” and “help” are empty or tautologous categories, since the truth of whether a human being is harmed or helped is not relative to what a human being is by nature (since it is, as you put it, “nothing”); rather, whether a “human being” is helped or harmed is relative to our collective imagination and power to enforce our individual and collective wills on the raw material (or whatever) of nature.
I did some more research on the idea and it seems under developed. How each citizen would get the money, who would distribute it, what index of distribution would be used, and what information statisticians would use to calculate the gap in between production and consumption (the market not clearing) etc. have no concrete answer. Its basically helicopter money. Rained from the sky by the government from no where.
I think that there is some confusion by many people as to what the term “right” means. Jason and Christian seem to think that a “right” gives you a voucher to make other people pay for what you need. So that if I have a “right” to medical care that means I have a “right” to make someone else pay for it. Or if I have a “right” to an education that means I can force others to provide that too. I don’t think that’s how “rights” should work in society. For me, a “right” is something that other men can’t take away from me. Not something that allows me to take from others.
In this case, the right to purchasing power beyond what one earns from work in the form of wages / salary, is grounded in the common good, specifically, the sum of public intellectual capital, infrastructure, and natural resources that are required for the means of production to exist and operate.
I mentioned Distributism earlier, which shares some things in common with Social Credit. (I’m interested to know if you have any interest in or opinions about the former.) Anyways, one difference between distributism and social credit theory is that the former advocates that everyone become owners of the means of production, while that latter does not (oligarchy is fine in business, but not in economics / banking). I am inclined towards the former view insofar as it would eliminate conflicts between labor and capital–and perhaps all the related guff and umbrage over issues like minimum wage and so forth–because each worker would own the means of production, i.e., capital belongs to labor. (For example, Publix, a grocery store chain in the South which consistently rates high on lists of best places to work–e.g., its made the Fortune 100 list in that category for something like 18 years in a row–embodies a similar principle by being employee-owned.)
Kenneth, if you didn’t read the longer essay in Vox that inspired the NR piece, I *highly* recommend it. It’s written by a liberal who is not afraid to be quite critical of the smugness in his own political circles. At times, I’ve written similar things about smugness in conservative circles but with nowhere near the length and depth of this article.
But isn’t the Christian wedding planner doing something similar: refusing to do business with a constituent because they believe a law (allowing gay marriage) is unjust. One constituent is an entire state of people and the other is entire type/class of people. We can get into whether or not homosexuals should be a protected class, but I think that is a bit of a different argument. For now, I think I am trying to find where we draw the line between personal freedoms and the public good.
Personally I think the wedding planner is an idiot for not providing services to a gay couple, but I wonder if making a law against it is always the best way forward. I mean look at NC, people choosing where to spend their money and who to provide services to is making more waves than any law. I don’t know, it just feels like in this day and age, we (liberal and conservatives) are quick to try and write laws as soon as we are offended by something.
It seems reasonable to think that everyone has the “right” to share in the bounty? There is that word again. It is not a “right” to share a bounty that one didnt contribute towards. Although it is charitable which is desirable.
Seems reasonable, and I have no moral objections to the system proposed. No ones freedoms are trampled and society could benefit as a whole if increased consumption clears the market. I’m just not sure if it can work. There are precious few advocates of the idea and so it hasn’t really been vetted. Since that’s the case, I’m very skeptical of claims about the “greater good”. If the distribution of capital doesn’t clear markets and only causes inflation and a lack of incentive to work that’s no longer a greater good. Lots of IFs. I would like to see some PhDs give attention to the idea though.
I don’t have much of an interest in distributism because I think it seeks to correct something that isn’t actually a problem in the first place. I know that its all the rage for Catholics to support it, especially since Chesterton, but economics isn’t something that theologians and philosophers can formulate a priori. That was Mises mistake in human action (in my opinion) and Friedman’s biggest strength. In seeking the common good, we need to promote what is actually good for the masses and not simply what sounds nice from a philosophers chair. The Chicago school recognized that the government has a role to play in clearing markets. Its just the way it is. Mises and other libertarians can shake their fist at the idea, but that doesn’t make their a priori philosophical notions true. Its the same with socialism, communism, and distributism. They all sound great! But each fails in its own way to recognize the reality of human nature or the science behind economic prosperity.
I believe economic solutions have right and wrong answers. I also believe that economic freedom and political freedom are intimately tied together. The message of history is absolutely clear: the free market drives innovation, prosperity, and eliminates poverty at staggering rates.
Today, for the first time in history, the world has become impatient with poverty. It is no longer considered a fact of life, but a nusance that must be eliminated rapidly. Not everyone has shared in the free markets glories “equally” and this is supposed to be some scarlet letter on the entire enterprise! Philosophers and theologians want charity to be somehow infused into the economic system. So that all can be “equal” which is somehow equated with “fair”. But equal isn’t fair and equal isn’t always just.
The free market does exactly what its supposed to do. There is nothing more to be done outside of securing freedom, enforcing contracts, breaking monopolies, and clearing markets. Those left behind should be helped by the Church and charities. That’s what we are here for after all. Love one another and all that jazz.
If people want to use government as an Instrument for charity that’s fine! Whatever. But let’s write the check and be done with it. Government aid is never as personal and efficient as private charity. Let’s give money to the people who need it and let the Church and other charitable organizations do Gods work from there.
Whoever wrote that Vox article must have been listening to DXP all these months. He described their playbook exactly, offense and defense.
Yes, they’re similar. However, things can be similar without being the same as I’m sure you’re aware. A man can shoot another man in self-defense in a similar way that a different man shoots another man in a murder. They are similar actions, but they are not the same.
Springsteen and others are not even refusing to do business with North Carolinians. They just don’t want what they do to prosper a government they consider to be unjust. The more I think about it, the less I think the comparison is even that similar.
Its like a called to communion essay but for politics. Neither side really seeks understanding anymore.
Sure, it is reasonable to suppose that everyone has a right, defined as what is due to someone in justice, to the bounty of nature and society, because such bounty is required for human beings to survive and flourish–our nature is such that we need land to walk upon, air to breath, food and water, shelter and society (at the very least in the form of families). These are among the “free gifts” spoken of in social credit theory. The basic elements of nature by which we must live belong to each of us–in the most fundamental sense, the earth belongs to no man over and above another. The cultivation of those elements does involve human work, and each man has a right, in the sense just defined, to the proceeds of his labor. But there is a cumulative effect to this cultivation that endures beyond consumption, e.g., the “know-how” that is handed down from generation to generation, something like common intellectual capital. Technological advances are the more obvious instances of such capital, upon which, along with natural resources, real capital (the means of production) depends.
So, since everyone has by nature a right to the “free gifts” of nature and social / cultural patrimony, everyone has a right to the proceeds of real capital, since the latter depends upon the former. That’s the theory. Its predicated upon a sense of justice, not charity. Its compatible with private ownership, and as articulated in the articles I’ve been reading it aims at a minimum of government involvement in society. (At first blush, the theory sounds way too individualistic to me.) I’m not saying the crucial inference, from the “free gift” to the social credit, is obviously valid, but its not obviously fallacious either.
It seems to me, and this ties into social credit theory, that the primary reason the world has become impatient with poverty is that the means of production have become so efficient that there is now more wealth (proportionately) in the world than at any other period of history. There is enough to “go around” and then some. That has not, perhaps, always been the case. Without such efficient means of production, there would be a lot less to exchange on the free market (I am all for free markets). Capitalism, at least the form we live with, guarantees that the great proportion of this wealth will be concentrated in a very few hands. Fair may not mean equal, but sometimes inequality can be an indicator of injustice. I wouldn’t plunk for capitalism a priori or without qualification. That’d be letting the ideology wag the philosophy, which is very bad, liberal bad. I agree that one aspect of good government is to regulate markets in various ways, but I don’t know enough about different schools of economics to say which I agree with more, or to what degree.
Regarding arm chair philosophy, I suppose that most thinking and writing, on philosophical as well as economic subjects, is done from some sort of chair. Data collection, depending on the kind of data, sometimes involves walking around and picking up stuff and so forth, but at some point folks have to sit down and think about the data–or maybe only philosophers do that part. Anyway, some philosophical notions (laws of logic, for example) are a priori in the sense that their truth does not depend upon matter or experience. But in my view knowledge of these truths is not a priori, it results from rational reflection upon reality as present in the mind via the senses.
Yeah, I don’t see any reason why charity should be outside the province of government. But I am not convinced that every form of welfare is a form of charity. In any case, its the greatest virtue of all.
I think the inference is fallacious. Our nature does demand the bounty of the earth, but this bounty is no free gift. It is a toil. I think this idea of “rights” confuses the seed with the harvest. Every new invention (capital) does not belong to me via natural law. I am not owed electricity just because someone invented it. I have no natural rights to the fruit of another mans labor. Its a premise that conflates political freedom to enter the marketplace with equality within said marketplace. Its the same fallacious reasoning used by socialists and communists, but with less objectionable means. Again, I have no problem with the idea in general. But when framed in the way that you offered its aimed at fixing an “injustice” in capitalism that doesn’t exist. I think the argument is better presented as a tool for clearing markets via increased consumption.
While its true that economic inequality can be a measure of injustice the same is true of economic equality itself. So I don’t think it takes us very far as a measuring stick for economic justice.
The method of econonics used by Mises and company is fundamentally divorced from results. They don’t care if people starve. Government intervention in the economy outside of enforcing contracts is a priori off the table. This is based on a sort of philosophical argument rather than a pragmatic analysis. There is no math, no complex formulas, just an ideal on a pedestal. Which seems to be the same thing as the social credit theory only it follows Keynes more than Hayek. Its Keynes general theory without the complex math involved in fiat money and interest rates.
Which welfare programs aren’t charity?
I just watched Alex Epstein testify at the US Senate.
http://youtu.be/R5KoYJ64vjA
Then I clicked through your Amazon link to buy his book. Do you guys feel dirty? Hehehehe
Any welfare program that provides people with something they are due as a matter of justice but cannot provide for themselves is not charity, though such programs can be motivated by charity in the sense of love for neighbor.
Creation is a free gift. Rain, air, sunshine, plants, animals, our own bodies and mental faculties are all gifts. We did not work to make them, though we do work to develop / utilize these gifts. The patrimony of society is a free gift to those who inherit it. This patrimony was achieved by the toil of people who went before us, not by us. To us, it is gift. Make of it what you will, and pass it on.
Andrew,
Any welfare program that provides people with something they are due as a matter of justice but cannot provide for themselves is not charity, though such programs can be motivated by charity in the sense of love for neighbor.
Like what? What welfare programs provide people with something they are due as a matter of justice? Sunshine? Rain? Plants? Put some nuts and bolts on this.
Creation is a free gift. Rain, air, sunshine, plants, animals, our own bodies and mental faculties are all gifts. We did not work to make them, though we do work to develop / utilize these gifts.
None of this, so far as I can tell, has anything to do with welfare.
The patrimony of society is a free gift to those who inherit it. This patrimony was achieved by the toil of people who went before us, not by us. To us, it is gift. Make of it what you will, and pass it on.
This is compatible with free market capitalism just the way it is…. Right?
Thanks for that link! His best point was highlighting the myriad of horrible predictions all the pros have made. Again, 95% wrong. A consensus of error.
Imagine if the theory of evolution was completely INCAPABLE of making any predictions whatsoever with any accuracy. If you can’t make predictions with any accuracy, you don’t know what’s going on. Period.
Lots of welfare programs do that. Child nutrition programs, for example, provide children with something that they are due as a matter of justice (food and water), since all children are humans and all humans have a natural right to nutrition. In cases where a child’s parents both die, or abandon it, or otherwise refuse or are unable to provide for what its needs to live, a community which had the ability to provide for that child’s needs could not in justice refuse to do so, saying, in effect, that that child has no right to live. Such refusal would of course be uncharitable, but it would also be unjust. Also, providing for those needs could proceed from the virtue of charity, but it need not. Justice would be satisfied in a case where an uncharitable community provided for the needs of a destitute person. It is easy to imagine (and perhaps possible to identify) cases where a community is full of hateful people, but they still collectively provide for the common welfare from a sense of fear of what other communities might think of them if they did not, or to keep up appearances among themselves, or for some other reason having nothing to do with the virtue of charity.
In short, the relation of natural resources to welfare is this: The earth belongs to everyone as a gift given to all; in cases where people cannot obtain a sufficient share of this common good by means of work, inheritance, or private assistance, public welfare programs help ensure that they receive such a portion, which is theirs by right as a human inhabitant of earth. Where wealth is created, hoarded, or utilized in such a way that some persons are deprived of the resources of nature and common social patrimony, there is social injustice.
In the indeterminate sense given above (“make of it what you will”), free market capitalism is of course compatible with the “free gift.” Whether free market capitalism is compatible with the common good depends upon what, specifically, that system (or various versions of it) makes of this free gift / common inheritance. So far as I can tell, to this point the results are mixed.
You are much quicker to respond than I am!
Clearly no two situation are ever exactly the same, there is a lot of nuance in most situations. However, if you are going with the murder vs self defense analogy, then I believe you are automatically assuming that the intentions of the christian wedding planner is to do malice (aka the murder). And in a lot of cases, that is probably true, there are a lot of assholes out there. But I was trying to take a step back and only compare the actions, and assume that both the christian wedding planner and Springsteen were not trying to cause malice, but instead stand up for a deeply held belief. I mean, one could even argue that Springsteen is trying to cause financial malice to NC, in order to stand up for his deeply held beliefs.
If you wanted to look at the validity of their deeply held beliefs, I am totally on board with saying that the christian wedding planner is wrong and Springsteen is right. I think inclusivity is almost always a better policy than exclusivity. If the intention is not malice, but solely standing up for one’s believe, then I am just not sure you can say that one protest is valid and the other is not.
Like Cory Booker says, patriotism requires love of one another, not just that we tolerate each other. I think that’s a better place to start than legislating anything and everything that might be offensive to you. #CoryBooker2020
Rachel, Dr. Bryan Cross just posted to FB a set of slides be was going to use for his class. It looks really good and touches on many of the ideas we discussed. I thought you might be interested. Here is his post with link to the lecture slides:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzZUQJzWyw77ZjlXeDhsc0VTamc/view?usp=sharing
A quick clarification: socialization does not make a creature human. Rather, it is the nature of humans that we are inherently social, and we build meaning collectively, and our identities are forged withing this complex interplay of the social and the biological. That’s quite different from saying that the human is merely the product of socialization.
But beyond that, I don’t see how “has rights and value” follows from “is a human being simply by virtue of its nature.” Apply this elsewhere to test it. “A porcine being is a pig simply by virtue of it’s nature.” Does this grant all pigs universal rights and intrinsic value? I would guess your answer is no. Some other mechanism is needed to get from “is a human being” to “has rights and value.”
Of course, what that extra mechanism is will vary based on your world view. Is it “made in the image of God?” OK, but this very God (as I know about him) does not seem to view all human beings as the bearers of human rights and value. I’m thinking of the Amalekites (“Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants”), the firstborn sons in Egypt, the Canaanites and their cohort (“completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites–as the LORD your God has commanded you”), etc. Maybe you get human rights from the sentient being argument, which also grants varying degrees of these rights to non-human animals. The human rights conversation can go a lot of different directions and take a lot of different forms.
But before I go off on that tangent, I think the point of this comment is, you don’t get “there is no basis for human rights or value” from “individual human beings are the product of their cultural and historical contexts.” And my earlier point was not that you get humanness (if that is a thing) from socialization. Rather that you get the self-aware individual person with an identity that even makes something like gender possible as a result of a human animal having developed within the social context that gives gender (and language, and economic systems, and social classes, etc.) meaning.
My use of “amoral” here just means outside of the arena of moral judgement.
I think here’s the crux of the entire free market issue. If in fact a free market economy was occurring in a context that was entirely free of coercion, then all of your claims about it would work. The problem is that context would have to occur in a historical vacuum. Economic decision and negotiations are only free of coercion if all participants come to the bargaining table on equal footing. We all have the same quality of opportunities and choices available to us. We all have the same quality of skills or education. We are all in fact free to move around geographically to obtain opportunities. We all have the same quality of social capital. There are no historical facts or social categories or preconceived notions of value and competence attached to individuals within different demographic groups. But in fact, we know that this is nothing like the world we actually live in. There is no such thing as a coercion-free environment. Imagining one may be useful for the purposes of theorizing just as imagining frictionless surfaces may be useful for the purposes of engineering exercises. However, when we go to apply a solution, we must always remember that we’re functioning in the real world here, and not in some imagined historical vacuum that we constructed for the purposes of theorizing.
So interventions might come in the form of minimum wages which acknowledge that those who own the means of production have a distinct advantage over those with whom they are contracting to provide labor. It might come in the form of restrictions on the number of hours you can force somebody who has very few other employment options to work. It might be restrictions on child labor and environmental hazards in the workplace. These restrictions acknowledge that an individual who sees themselves as having no other choice may expose themselves to hazards or conditions that harm them simply because their choice is to support their family by agreeing to substandard labor practices or starve. And that’s where it becomes the government’s job to act as the representative of the people rather than as the representative of industry. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the free market is really cool in theory but there doesn’t actually exist a coercion-free environment in the real world, so some restrictions and safeguards have to be put in place.
So this is funny because I teach a Philosophy of Love and Sex class from time to time, and also Feminist Theory.
I think his powerpoint is missing a third option that is fairly well supported by the views of several philosophers and sociologists. (It’s also missing Hume, who denied that there is a stable identity that exists over time, but I won’t get into that here.)
Take something like language, or games. These things exist in all human cultures (in different forms), but they require collective human activity to bring them about. They don’t exist in nature independent from human activity. In addition, if you have a completely unsocialized individual (even the wolf child has a social context, so instead imagine the child locked in the closet) there will be no language, no games. Hence Wittgenstein’s thoughts about private languages (no such thing). So we know that so much of what we do, how we think, how we act, how we view ourselves, is informed by this social reality that is built up on intersubjectivity. And the way to explain the significant differences in gender between cultural and historical contexts is to note that gender is a product of this intersubjectivity. It’s not like his second option where you create your self-identity as you see fit in an entirely free manner. That’s not an option in this view. We’re deeply social beings and we form our own self-understanding in part by how we see ourselves reflected back to us by others. This is especially true in very young children.
So the third option I would add is that gender and race and a number of other facets of identity are socially constructed categories that are neither fixed in nature nor entirely a matter of individual choice and definition, but rather a set of somewhat fluid categories that individuals are presented with by their culture, and that they can, in incremental ways, influence as members of that society which is producing and maintaining them thought its collective beliefs and practices. Sorry that was such a long sentence! So it’s neither and it’s both.
Take race, for example. Race is not a biological category. There is no set of physical characteristics that make up the racial categories as we know them. And in fact the concept of race didn’t exist until we had need of it during the colonial era when we were trying to justify our (indefensible) practices. Suddenly race was a thing, and it was used to enforce a social system that benefited those in power, but as a concept it continued to evolve with social changes. If you’re of Irish or Italian ancestry you most likely think of yourself as white now, but there was a time when you would not have been granted that status.
Gender evolves in similar ways with some cultures having more than two genders, or allowing for relatively easy movement between the genders based on economic or social need, while others have extremely rigid and punishing gender categories. Within cultures, gender roles have also evolved with economic changes and the need for different types of workforces, more or less population to feed the economic machinery, etc. So to me the evolution of identity is less about the individuals and more about historical shifts and events beyond their control. Of course, individuals are deeply impacted by this, which is why we have an ethical obligation to take it seriously and give it the thoughtful consideration it deserves.
A philosopher and fellow Catholic shares what used to simply be considered common sense on the “bathroom wars”: http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/what-bathroom-wars-really-mean
If socialization is not what makes a creature human, then the question remains, what does? My position is that nature settles that question prior to any individual choice or social construct. If we agree on that much, then all the better.
Human rights follow from human nature. Human rights do not follow from porcine nature. So being able to tell the difference between a human and a pig is an important first step in the discernment of human rights. Presumably, we both have the ability to discern human beings from pigs, so, again, all the better.
Yes, human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1) so of course God, who by definition is omniscient, knows that every human being is made in his image and he further knows which beings are human. Human rights are perfectly compatible with and indeed in some circumstances call for retributive as well as distributive justice. So the fact that God dispenses the former as well as the latter does not show that God views some human beings as not being the bearers of human rights.
Regarding your final paragraph, this brings us back to the question: where do you get humanness (which in my view is a real thing, though not a particular thing; that is, human nature is a universal), without which there are no specifically human animals? If human nature is not a social construct, and if humans by nature have specific characteristics or potencies which (unless impeded) develop over time, then it cannot simply be assumed that characteristics such as gender are completely dependent upon socialization. (And if human nature is simply a social construct, then there is not ultimately any sense in saying that human nature is anything definite or that some things are human, and others are not human.)
As evidence for my view that human nature is real and involves certain inherent potencies, consider that a human being raised by wolves has the potential to acquire language by way of human socialization; a wolf raised by humans does not.
Finally, you can get “human rights” in an equivocal sense from cultural and historical contexts alone. But if that is it, then the rights will be as variable as the context, which is what I meant when I wrote that “help” and “harm” are empty categories or tautologous claims apart from appeal to objective human nature.
To clarify, I haven’t been arguing that human nature is a social construct. I’ve been arguing that many of the facets of identity are social constructs, and that humans are intrinsically social beings. To acknowledge the fact that human identity unavoidably develops within a social context and incorporates shifting, contingent social categories, concepts, relations, roles, etc. is not to claim that human nature is a social construct.
I think earlier (this thread is long!) I stated that humans have all kinds of capacities (such as language acquisition), so we;re in agreement on this, but the point is that these don’t develop outside of a social context. And they devolve in fully developed adults who are held in true solitary confinement for extended periods of time to the point where there is really no identity left in the individual. This seems to reinforce the idea that what we think of as identity is something that develops and persists only in a social context. This might require some more analysis, but my initial thought is that what we’re thinking of when we use the phrase “human being” is a fully developed individual with language and social skills, and a sense of themselves. This is radically different from the human animal you would find developing in total isolation. So you can make all kinds of arguments about whether or not humans have rights or whether we have an obligation to treat them in certain ways that don’t necessarily hinge at all on the role of socialization in human development. The inherent capacities themselves can be the basis of an argument for certain rights.
But either way, it’s still not the case that “p has rights” follows from “p is human” on its own. There must be some further premise that gets you “p has rights.” That’s the point of substituting some other term. The same is true for “p has value” in relation to “p is human.” Maybe that other premise is an implied one that seems so self-evident to you that it goes without saying, but if you’re trying to build consensus and make your position clear, it has to be articulated.
If for you that mechanism is “humans are created in the image of God” then that works for you, but when you’re dealing with others who don’t share your religious view, you’re not going to get that. If you hope to apply these rights universally and get consensus, you’re going to have to find a set of premises that will garner that agreement beyond religious circles.
Also, I know the scriptures very well, and I struggle to come up with some scenario that would make the infants of Canaan so evil that wiping them out would be justified and would not be a violation of their human rights. Maybe some tortured Calvinist original sin logic might do it, but then I wonder what sense it makes to talk about human rights if all humans are already born so sinful that virtually any treatment of them can be chalked up to retributive justice.
Everything has an identity simply by virtue of having a nature. Circumstances do not generally change what a thing is, though there are exceptions (e.g., in certain conditions, carbon can be turned to diamond). A human in solitary confinement does not cease to be a human or to have an identity. So, no, what I am thinking of when I use the phrase “human being” is a human being, not a human being in certain circumstances.
To argue that human rights are not consequent upon human nature, which implies that not every human being has human rights in principle, is certainly a point of disagreement, not only between ourselves, but in society generally, with dire consequences for many humans beings. And of course there are implicit premises in my position that need to be fleshed out, but that sort of thing can only go so far in this context.
This is as far as I will go at that moment: Human beings are a distinct kind of thing among other material beings, that is, other animals, plants, minerals, and so forth. The specific difference is discerned by experience, and primarily manifest in the rational faculty, including moral discernment, and free will. A human being has these unique capacities that render him or her capable (at least in potency) of moral agency. Something that is by nature a moral agent cannot rightly (i.e., in a manner fitting to nature) be treated as a mere object or means to an end besides those ends specifically designated by its nature (e.g., as we treat rocks by stacking them into walls, or trees by cutting them up for firewood, and so forth, even though it is not the natural end or telos of rocks and trees, as such, to be used for walls and fires).
As can be shown by reason, God is the end, in the sense of purpose, of all things. Within the realm of creation, all rational things, in addition to being ordered to God as their end, are like God in the sense of being ends in themselves, i.e., the kind of thing that cannot rightly be subordinated to the end of a higher nature. (Thus, human beings cannot rightly be used as food, fuel, or machines, unlike other animals, plants, and non-living things.)
Gaining consensus is one thing, knowing truth another. Special revelation, as found in the Bible and Christian tradition, is a means of knowing truth. Those who disagree, if they hope to gain consensus in their position, will need to find a set of premises that garner agreement beyond unbelieving circles. All of that is a matter of course.
I don’t claim to know the scriptures very well, though I have spent half my life studying them (in college and seminary and since). But I do know a little bit about logic and philosophy (again, not much), and that it is not the same thing to say “I can’t see a just reason for this” and “There is no just reason for this.” We simply don’t know enough about the nature of the Canaanites’ sins or how those sins might have affected those human beings not yet capable of personal wrongdoing (the Canaanite infants) to say why, in justice, God commanded them to be slain. But we do know (by revelation) that God is just, and that his care for and sustenance of human beings extends to their souls after death, so that his purposes for those infants did not end with the sword.
The Christian religion, including scripture, is not irrational, but it is not like the multiplication table either. As C.S. Lewis put it in “Till We Have Faces,” holy things are dark like blood, not clear like water. The Christian religion is no exception, its revelation a blood-red wine too dark for the unbeliever who is not yet adult enough to have a taste for the beverage, demanding instead that (in a rejection of Canaan and reversal of Cana) wine be turned into water.
So, I think we’re just using the terms differently, and that difference is such that we’re never going to agree. When I say “identity” referring to humans I’m not talking about identifying a particular object (eg that black dog to the left, the green chair in this room). I’m talking about the way we use the word identity when referring to humans. In this case your identity is made up of the particular facts about you which include things like gender, race, socioeconomic status, educational background, geographical location, etc. Many of these are inherently social identifiers. So your first paragraph makes no sense given this use of “identity.” And this is where I think we’re stuck.
Second, in regard to this: “As can be shown by reason, God is the end, in the sense of purpose, of all things.” I’ve heard this argument numerous times in varying forms (I went to a Christian college for part of my undergrad career), and there are a number of reasons why this is simply not compelling to me. It can be shown by reason if and only if you are starting from certain premises. To an individual who is not starting from those premises, the argument is not compelling. It’s not enough for an argument to be valid – you also have to have consensus on the premises or you won’t reach agreement. Here’s a valid argument: Grass is purple. All purple things are delicious. Therefore, grass is delicious. It’s a valid argument. Is it compelling? No, because you don’t accept the premises.
I grew up in a fundamentalist church where we were constantly reading and re-reading scripture (and C.S. Lewis, from time to time). Believe me, it was in my best interest to find scripture compelling, and the fact that I had so many questions about it and found so many things contradictory caused me endless problems. But from a very young age I did have questions and doubts, and it’s not from a lack of intellectual ability or logic or hermeneutics or rational capacity that I reject traditional Christianity. It simply doesn’t ring true for me, I can’t reconcile the inherent conflicts within the narrative, it doesn’t provide a compelling way for me to live my life, etc.
And maybe this is where we get back to the gender issue. Perhaps the difference between you and me is that I simply cannot turn off my brain and accept things that don’t make sense to me, situations that harm me or don’t allow me to grow and flourish, and behaviors and practices that seem abhorrent to me, and yet as a woman in that tradition that is exactly what I’m required to do. So maybe a part of it is the difference in where you personally are situated in traditional religion as compared to the situation of a woman.
And to your point about the Canaanite infants, I would argue again that you could extend that argument to any perceived human rights violation. The school girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram may all be guilty of some offense that we don’t know about such that God sent Boko Haram to punish them. Who are we to yammer on about human rights when all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, right?
That last sentence sounded snarkier than I meant it to – I really do appreciate civil dialogue!
I understand what you mean by identity. But that is not the only intelligible sense of the word. Human beings have identity in the sense you indicate, but they also have identity in the sense in which I use the word, as indicating the kind of thing an entity is. Clearly, these two senses of the word are not mutually exclusive, so there is no reason to get stuck on this difference.
There are, so far as I understand and remember, rational arguments for God’s existence which are sound as well as valid. (For me, the argument from contingent being to necessary being comes first to mind, though I don’t understand the argument as clearly now as in the past.) The premises for these arguments are not adopted willy-nilly or arbitrarily, but are instead metaphysical principles derived from rational reflection upon reality as present in the mind via the senses. Among these principles are propositions the denial of which is absurd (e.g., being is being, being is not non-being, for every effect there is a cause).
I appreciate the autobiographical notes, but of course what “rings true” for a person is often a relative matter and as such does nothing to establish what is actually true or false. Thomistic metaphysics and traditional Christianity “ring true” for me, but that is neither here nor there regarding the truth value of various metaphysical and theological propositions.
So the difference between you and me is that you can’t turn off your brain but I can? Maybe, but we would first have to know what is meant by turning off one’s brain. Lets say, for example, that someone cannot wrap her head around Schrodinger’s paradox, and so she rejects quantum mechanics. Conversely, let’s say that someone else accepts quantum theory on grounds independent of Schrodinger’s thought experiment, and suppose further that this person accepts that if quantum theory is basically correct, then something like Schrodinger’s paradox obtains, but still finds the paradox intellectually problematic–he cannot rationally resolve all of the problems that it raises. Nevertheless, he does not reject quantum mechanics. Now, which of these two people has “turned off” his or her brain?
A cursory glance at Christian history shows that countless women, being situated in a traditional form of the religion, have flourished by means of faithful observance of their religion. Again, your comments here are primarily autobiographical, they don’t tell us anything about the truth regarding gender, sex, human beings, religion, etc, beyond your own experiences. But the truth of these matters far exceeds your (or my) experiences.
My point about the execution of the Canaanite infants presupposes other things that are specifically theistic and Christian in nature, and fit within a very specific historical (namely, biblical and traditional) narrative. (I do not, of course, hold these things as arbitrary presuppositions; I think that there are good reasons to accept them.) In the case at hand, those presuppositions are good reasons to accept that there was justice in the Israelite’s total warfare in Canaan (insofar as they were dong what God commanded them to do), though I cannot see exactly how their actions were just. (I don’t accept an equivocal understanding of divine justice or a nominalist interpretation of “divine command theory” in ethics.) The same considerations, however, obviously do not apply to Boko Haram.
Don’t worry about any snarky noises. I think that some such sounds have crept into some of my comments, though that hasn’t been my intention either. I also appreciate the civility and reasonableness of the dialogue.
Rachel,
If in fact a free market economy was occurring in a context that was entirely free of coercion, then all of your claims about it would work.
Fantastic! So now we have an easy target to focus the discussion upon. Consider the following three points.
1. We need to define our terms. You say that we are only “free” if everyone is on equal footing at the negotiating table. But this is not a necessary condition of freedom in so far as we have a reasonable definition of “freedom”. Obviously, none of us picked our parents, geneology, time in history, skin color, skill sets, brain activity, or circumstances we encounter on a daily basis. So we aren’t “free” to choose those things. We are also not “free” in the sense of controlling our own needs. The person who sells and produces electricity has an advantage over the person who sells and produces energy drinks. The person who produces and sells bread has an advantage over the person who produces and sells key chains. etc. There is no Utopian paradise where everyone enjoys perfect maximal freedom. However, the free market in no way relies on such a paradise. Nor does it seek to create such a world because that place is impossible from the outset. We also recognize that the government has a very important role to play. The government needs to enforce contracts, provide a military, control money, protect against neighborhood effects, and stop monopolies when possible. So this is hardly a naive system.
2. What the free market accomplishes is only a secondary kind of “freedom”. One in which citizens can operate in the market without others using “force” to dictate their decisions and actions. The genius of the free market is that it DOES take into consideration the realities we face in the real world. We know that everyone seeks their own self interests. But through competition and consumer sovereignty those at the top must first think of others to reach their goals. If you want to start a business you need to pay a wage that will attract free citizens. If you dont pay a fair wage a competitor will! If you want to sell a certain good you need to charge a fair price. If you do not, a competitor certainly will! In this way the free market makes the flourishing of those at the bottom in the self interest of those at the top. Throughout this entire process, no one is subjected to the use of force. Although they may not enjoy perfect maximal economic autonomy.
3. The funny thing is, I view the “interventionist” system that you promote to be naive. The leftist is eager to recognize that those in the market pursue their own self interest, but then imagine a referee who is immune to such concerns. Where do you get these angels? How is it that political self interest is nobler than economic self interest? Conservatives realize that bureaucrats and politicians live the same way as the rest of us do. Only without the same ties to altruism. Which is why our budget has money going to the most BIZARRE places imaginable. Everyone has their hand in the honey pot. But no market to keep them in check. They dont get voted into office only to sacrifice their own agenda for their constituents. Sure, in fairy world that is how things would go, but like you said, that is not our reality. People with sincere motives become corrupted. If they dont, they are replaced with people with bad motives. The more power you give to the referee, the more and more you setup the takeover. Lenin had pure motives. I have no reason to think that he didnt. He sincerely believed marxism was going to be good for the world. But then comes Stalin. We know how things played out from there.
No one gets a perfect world, but ill take the one without force. Ill take the one where my freedoms are most protected. I’ll take the one that has a track record of helping the most at the expense of a few. Rather than hurting the masses at the benefit of a minority. I’ll take the option makes todays laggard better off than yesterdays mean. Pure – Blooded- Capitalism
Cheers!
Solar and Wind dont produce mass amounts of power at cheap prices. Fossil fuels do. If they ever DO then we can have that discussion. But the government isnt pushing for research subsidies. Its pushing for increased regulations to make fossil fuels more scarce and expensive. That is harmful to society because we rely on fossil fuels.
Pascals Climate Wager runs like this
Many scientists predict we are causing damage to the atmosphere that will cause incalculable damage to the planet. Two things to consider:
1. They cant make any predictions with accuracy.
2. They generally agree that we cant stop global warming without returning to a pre-industrial age, Its not like they are saying we are “juuuuuuuuuust barely” causing damage. If their inaccurate and unreliable predictions are true we are in a corvette speeding 250 mph at a brick wall. Bringing it down to 200 mph at great expensive to our lives isnt very attractive. Let the market roll and innovations for cheaper cleaner energy will present themselves
In one day, solar, wind, and wave produce more than enough energy for the entire planet to use over a year. We just don’t have the infrastructure set up to harness it yet, which is what we should be investing in. We do have the technology.
Also, fossil fuels are harmful to society. Politically and health-wise.
Yes, and in the absence of said infrastructure…. The world needs fossil fuels! Without fossil fuels we all die, lose our jobs, freeze to death, over heat, can’t travel, can’t fly, can’t boat, can’t provide medical care, can’t do anything at all. How is that harmful to society?
You can do all that stuff with renewable energy as well, without the wars and other dangers to our planet. Is someone saying that all oil production must cease immediately and anyone not using solar power tomorrow is going to have to freeze to death?
Hmm… Fair enough!
OK, so when I say “free” here note that I’m talking about free from coercion. That’s a bit narrower than freedom per se, or freedom to choose your parents, your background, etc.
1. Coercion can occur in the shape of force or physical violence. It can also occur in the form of desperation, lack of viable choice, threats to survival, etc. Tell me, in the late 19th century were consumers “free” to purchase oil and coal from anyone they chose? Sure, if they could find someone other than Rockefeller and his friends to buy them from. Could they choose not to purchase them? Sure, if they were OK allowing their families to freeze to death and their businesses to shut down. Was anyone holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to do business with the cartel. Of course not. So this isn’t a coercive environment, right? This is an example of the free market doing it’s job. It’s not about ethics or morals, it’s just business. It’s not personal…
2. I don’t doubt that people seek their self-interest (although they might not define that the way you would expect). I question their ability to pursue their self-interest in an environment where there are severe and sometimes insurmountable power differentials.
3. I think there’s a great deal of evidence that free market theorists are naive, or self-serving, or in denial. And I don’t think it’s all or nothing – you don’t have to believe that you can create a perfect world in order to pursue a better one (straw man argument here). You don’t have to believe that any restrictions placed on the free market take you directly into socialism or communism (slipper slope and false dichotomy here). The real world is complicated and full of subtleties that have to be navigated and adjusted to, and you’re never going to get any large complex system perfectly dialed in. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
One last thing: I’m not sure that the form of capitalism that we have right now today is helping the most at the expense of the few. In the current environment, the differential in consumption and purchasing power is growing rather than shrinking. The data would suggest that this form of capitalism in this environment is helping the very few at the expense of the masses. There are many sources out there to confirm this; all you have to do is look. I believe there was a time when unconstrained capitalism did have a positive effect for the majority of people, but a developing country is different from a developed country, and it seems to me that they call for different constraints.
But the way the word “identity” is being used here does matter, because this conversation started with a discussion about gender identity and all that.
On the arguments for the existence of God… I teach them from time to time in philosophy classes, and I think they’re interesting and I’m not at all trying to dismiss them. The first cause argument you refer to (that originated with Aristotle) for example does work on a certain level. It just doesn’t get you a conscious agent or anything like the Judeo-Christian God. It can if you want it to, but it can also get you a number of other kinds of gods, or just other original causes.
To clarify, I don’t think the premises of any of the arguments for the existence of god are adopted will-nilly. I think the premises are statements that may ring true for one person but not another. And so the argument can be valid (if it’s deductive) or sound (if it’s inductive) but still not be compelling if the premises are not something I have to accept as a rational being. (Back to my valid nonsense argument about the purple grass, here). The premises may be acceptable and the reasoning solid but the conclusion is open to interpretation in some way. Like the first cause argument. If the idea is it can’t be turtles all the way down and there must be some original, uncaused cause, I think we can all get on board with that. But the original uncaused cause could be an accident or some non-anthropomorphic being that was powerful in some way but not conscious or intentional or able to connect with us in the way we want the creating god to be, or whatever. In other words, I get how the arguments work. I just don’t think you get out of them what people want to get out of them.Unless you’re already inclined to believe and are looking for a framework.
And I didn’t mean to say that you can turn your brain off. I meant that as a woman in a conservative religious context that is what’s required of you in order to survive. And I can’t. The narrative of how the world works in that context has never made sense to me – I can’t reconcile the contradictions and inconsistencies, I can’t ignore and invalidate my own very real experiences, etc. But I’m willing to believe that the experience of a male in that situation is very different, so I understand why there would be a desire to make it make sense and reconcile it, and I respect that. It just doesn’t work for me.
I think the infants in Canaan and other similar stories (like the ones featured in the dick move God segment) are relevant to this discussion for this reason: I don’t think you can necessarily get universal human rights out of the Bible. Old or New Testament. I think something like human rights has become a part of Christian theology via Aristotle as imported by Aquinas. But in the bible it is very clearly OK to use a human being as a means to an end and visit suffering on them that has nothing to do with their actions. You don’t have to look very far to see that genocide was ok in the bible if it served the right purpose. Rape and murder and destruction of people’s homes and livelihoods was just fine. And I actually think you can justify that if you tell it as a narrative that has an arc of growth and development and evolution. In primitive times shit was brutal and then slowly over time things changed and love and compassion entered the picture and we as the human race are evolving and growing, etc. Do I believe this? I have my doubts. But it makes for a compelling story and allows you to put the genocide and rape of the OT in context while moving on to a less brutal ethic. The thing is that in so many religious contexts people aren’t willing to do that. And so this is where the contradictions come in. As a child I remember being told that God is love and then trying to make any sense out of the story of Lot and his family, or Hagar being banished into the dessert for doing absolutely nothing wrong, or any of those stories which honestly aren’t really appropriate for young kids. But I think I was right. A loving and powerful God doesn’t stand by and allow that shit to happen, or worse yet, command it.
So maybe as an evolution story it makes sense. Maybe God grows and evolves and all that. But then you can’t have it both ways. You can’t try to enforce biblical (OT or NT) rules in a context that’s nothing like the world they originated in. If we’re not OK with stoning people in the city center any more, then we also shouldn’t be trying to enforce some old rules about marriage and family and gender norms.
I agree that the way “identity” is used in this discussion matters. My point was that both senses of the word, the subjective / conditioned and the objective / given, are intelligible and correspond to reality. Again, these senses of identity are not mutually exclusive. The key is figuring out how they are really related, e.g., as pertaining to sex and gender and other features of human beings.
I also agree of course about Aristotle’s prime mover or movers and the one God of Judaism and Christianity. But I would argue that Aquinas and various Thomists, using Aristotelian principles and not borrowing premises from special revelation, e.g. the “five ways” (which are only summaries as presented at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae), do conclude with an entity that could not possibly be one among other kinds of gods and is necessarily an intellectual agent (a person).
Also, good arguments don’t “get you” things because you want them to. They get those things, i.e., conclusions, only if they are sound and valid. Validity refers to the form of the argument (the conclusion logically follows from the premises); soundness refers to the truth of the premises. Whether or not a premise in an argument “rings true” for someone does not in itself tell us anything about whether or not that premise is actually true. All propositions are open to interpretation, wrong interpretations and correct interpretations and mixed or indecisive interpretations. For example, some who interpreted the following argument, If A then B, A, therefore B, to mean or entail If A then B, B, therefore A, would be wrongly interpreting a modus ponens argument (which is valid) as affirming the consequent (which is a fallacy). That is an example of an obvious interpretive error. Naturally, many texts are complex and not susceptible of such easy interpretation, and errors in interpretation are more difficult to detect. My point is that hermeneutics is not a purely subjective enterprise, and so arguments are not necessarily epistemically underdetermined simply because they have to be interpreted.
Well, again, the autobiographical remarks are interesting, but it might be as well to listen to and read the accounts of other women (as well as men) who have flourished in a traditional religious environment. Otherwise, you run the risk of projecting your experience onto others, saying, in effect, that your religion is not what you think it is, because I have experienced it otherwise than you have. That sort of appeal to autobiography is a kind of “projectionist” subjectivism that implicitly invalidates the testimony of women who have had experiences very different from yours.
The arguments that I accept as the basis for objective human rights do not depend upon specifically biblical premises, just as the arguments I accept for the existence of God do not depend upon specifically biblical premises. Universal human rights are implicit in certain biblical texts, i.e., those which enjoin moral absolutes as commands which seem to apply to all people, not only Israelites or Christians. There are biblical commands which are tailored along the lines of civil law, and are not intended as moral absolutes but rather prudentially apply the same (or refrain from applying them) for prudential reasons in a given context. These can be bad or harsh when taken in the abstract, but might make sense in context. One the Hebrew prophets (I can’t remember whom) even wrote that God gave Israel laws that “were not good for them.” But the prophet was not implying that God was engaged in some sort of “dick move.” To conclude in that way from isolated pericopes is an illiterate reading of the Bible. A holy text is after all a text, and one like scripture can not rightly be “read off” in a superficial way, as though it were a contemporary magazine article. However, an evolutionary reading of those texts such as you describe erases the difficulties at the cost of disrupting the literary context and acknowledging the humanity of the biblical authors–i.e., it sets aside their willingness to allow ambiguity or tension in the narrative, or else reckons that they did not recognize or appreciate these aspects of the text because, well, they lived “way back then” when people did horrible things to one another as a matter of course, like routinely going to war and objectivizing other people (totally unlike what goes on in the modern world, of course). But that discounts the moral awareness and sensibilities that we find in the bible itself, including the pentateuch. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that rape, murder, and theft were not “just fine.” So either the text is a mishmash of conflicting points of view, and the editors too lay or stupid to do much by way of ironing out the difficulties, or too stupid or evil to recognize the difficulties and points of tension, or something else is going on in these texts. But this isn’t the place to forward my surmises about what that might be (i.e., to summarize my own incomplete biblical theology)!
Again, it seems to me that there is an analogy here with other disciplines, e.g., one can just as easily dismiss quantum mechanics because, well, the universe doesn’t stand by and let shit like that happen, much less everywhere all the time. Maybe, but at first glance that seems like a hasty and unintellectual response.
Your concluding paragraph assumes that all biblical laws are supposed to apply equally to all communities (they aren’t, even on the bible’s own terms), and that our context is “nothing like” that of the ANE or late Roman Republic / early Empire. Both assumptions are manifestly untrue. Then, as now, people lived in communities of men and women and children and had to provide for their needs in relation to one another and adjacent communities. At the most basic level, their needs were the same as ours. Of course these basic needs were then as now pursued and enjoyed or else longed for or even despaired of in peculiar ways, conditioned by unique social, cultural, and geographical conditions. But those things are not insuperable barriers to intra-human understanding and empathy. We do not exist in hermetically-sealed social-cultural pods, doomed to subsist intellectually in a kind of echo chamber; we can reach out to other kinds of people, even those who existed in the remote past, and learn from them. (For me, this is the greater part of being conservative, in the first [and non-political] sense of the word given in the OED dictionary, quoting Chaucer.)
Finally, I am not advocating that certain rules be either enforced or not enforced. My primary concern in this conversation is to argue that certain rights (and corresponding responsibilities) are inherent in human nature, and that before we go about making (or breaking) “rules” we need to have some understanding of whether or not there is such a thing as objective human nature (my argument is that if not, then there are no such things as human beings and this discussion is moot; every moral and political matter reduces to power and propaganda) and if so what is like and what is required for human beings, as such, to flourish, to more perfectly realize their inherent potential?
Rachel,
OK, so when I say “free” here note that I’m talking about free from coercion. That’s a bit narrower than freedom per se, or freedom to choose your parents, your background, etc.
Fine, you included “survival needs” and “lack of viable choice” in your definition of coercion. Our parents, culture, time in history, genetics, brain activity, etc. all factor into those equations. So I hope you can see how your preferred semantic range is unusually broad.
1. Coercion can occur in the shape of force or physical violence. It can also occur in the form of desperation, lack of viable choice, threats to survival, etc. Tell me, in the late 19th century were consumers “free” to purchase oil and coal from anyone they chose? Sure, if they could find someone other than Rockefeller and his friends to buy them from. Could they choose not to purchase them? Sure, if they were OK allowing their families to freeze to death and their businesses to shut down. Was anyone holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to do business with the cartel. Of course not. So this isn’t a coercive environment, right? This is an example of the free market doing it’s job. It’s not about ethics or morals, it’s just business. It’s not personal…
Monopolies are undesirable, but there are times when they are unavoidable. The rail road monopoly of the 19th century bordered on a technical monopoly borne of necessity. In either case, most free market advocates include protection from monopolies as an important role of government. The entire system only works if there is competition. In those rare instances where a technical monopoly occurs (one that can not be avoided) one might advocate the government running said business, the government regulating said business, or the business running itself until competition may emerge. These instances should be made as rare as possible because government run programs dont produce the same results as the free market. Education is a wonderful example. Welfare could also be added to the list. We spend a ridiculous amount of money on both and precious little actually reaches the people it was supposed to help (because bureaucrats pursue their own interests) So I dont think this example gets you very far, because it is already accounted for within the capitalist framework. There are fringe libertarians and anarchists that do not share this view, but it is the mainstream position.
2. I don’t doubt that people seek their self-interest (although they might not define that the way you would expect). I question their ability to pursue their self-interest in an environment where there are severe and sometimes insurmountable power differentials.
Questioning that ability and providing an argument against that ability are two different conversations. Rags to riches stories abound. It is very rare for someone to immigrate to America and become a billionaire, but it is utterly blase for them to immigrate and see their quality of life go through the roof! The only obstacle to mobility in the market is education. Something that the government has failed horribly at providing the poor with.
3. I think there’s a great deal of evidence that free market theorists are naive, or self-serving, or in denial.
This is an assertion without any supporting evidence.
And I don’t think it’s all or nothing – you don’t have to believe that you can create a perfect world in order to pursue a better one (straw man argument here). You don’t have to believe that any restrictions placed on the free market take you directly into socialism or communism (slipper slope and false dichotomy here).
If you acknowledge that people always pursue their own interests, and also acknowledge that government is comprised of such individuals, in what way does the expansion of government not put us in danger of socialism/facism? It seems to me that you want to have it both ways. If the free market leads to Rockefeller, the monopoly man, and wall street corruption- government expansion/intervention leads to Stalin, Mao, Polpot, and Mussolini. Big government has slaughtered more people in the last hundred years than all religious wars combined throughout history. These arent lessons learned from the ancient past. It just happened. Many of our grandparents still remember (which is why Bernie tanks with older dems).
The real world is complicated and full of subtleties that have to be navigated and adjusted to, and you’re never going to get any large complex system perfectly dialed in. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
I agree! Which system in history has done the most for mankind, produced the most excess, the most freedom, and the least poverty? Its a short list, and the free market stands WAY above the others.
One last thing: I’m not sure that the form of capitalism that we have right now today is helping the most at the expense of the few. In the current environment, the differential in consumption and purchasing power is growing rather than shrinking. The data would suggest that this form of capitalism in this environment is helping the very few at the expense of the masses. There are many sources out there to confirm this; all you have to do is look. I believe there was a time when unconstrained capitalism did have a positive effect for the majority of people, but a developing country is different from a developed country, and it seems to me that they call for different constraints.
This is an interesting point, but one that only holds water if one accept the premise that it is government action that produces prosperity and eliminates poverty. History tells a very different tale. Further, I dont believe for a moment that purchasing power has decreased due to free market capitalism. (I’m not convinced that it has at all) The form of market that we have now is a kind of Frankenstein system. Its a free-market, kind of, sometimes, depending on the industry and who holds congress. The tax system is bazaar (because bureaucrats pursue their own interest) and the fed has produced a very unstable monitory system. This all makes it very difficult to see through the fog. I think the country would be better served many times if we cut frankenstien to pieces and just went one way or the other. I would rather have government funded single payer healthcare than Obamacare. We could even do single payer in a way that encourages a free market (subsidized HSAs perhaps). These kinds of ideas dont even get approached because it wouldnt really be a clear “win” for either side. Conservatives wouldn’t get the government completely out of the way and liberals wouldn’t get to expand government power. So the compromise just gets shelved and both parties wait their turn to add a different limb to the frankeneconomy.
History tells us all kinds of different tales. It depends on where you direct your attention. There are many examples of coercion and exploitation and abuse in a free market environment (I’m guessing you’re familiar with the company store?). There are also examples of economic success and prosperity in the free market. What I’m saying is that a system that gives a huge advantage to some while allowing others to starve or freeze to death is not a just system. And governments have justice and the well-being of their citizens as a concern in addition to their economic concerns. That’s all.
Also, it’s bizarre to me to think that the current distribution of wealth and opportunity could be perceived as being defensible. I’m not saying there aren’t things about free markets that are valuable. I’m just saying look around.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&w=560&h=315%5D
In my last my comment I was referring to charity in a sense of the word not most germane to the point under consideration, but I don’t think it affects the main point I was trying to make. I just get annoyed with myself for being obtuse like that.
[Note: I recently edited the following reply, submitted a few hours ago, which caused it to get kicked into the spam bucket. So I’m copying and pasting the following, hopefully the format will not be too weird as a result.]
I agree that the way “identity” is used in this discussion matters.
My point was that both senses of the word, the subjective / conditioned
and the objective / given, are intelligible and correspond to reality.
(Even if someone’s subjective sense of identity were obviously
counter-factual, say, a man who sincerely self-identifies as a
cornstalk, it would still be true that in some sense he experiences
himself in that way.) Again, these senses of identity are not mutually
exclusive. The key is figuring out how they are really related, e.g., as
pertaining to sex and gender and other features of human beings.
I also agree of course about Aristotle’s prime mover or movers and the
one God of Judaism and Christianity. But I would argue that Aquinas and
various Thomists, using Aristotelian principles and not borrowing
premises from special revelation, e.g. the “five ways” (which are only
summaries as presented at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae), do
conclude with an entity that could not possibly be one among other kinds
of gods and is necessarily an intellectual agent (a person).
Good arguments don’t “get you” things because you want them to. They
get those things, i.e., conclusions, only if they are sound and valid.
Validity refers to the form of the argument (the conclusion logically
follows from the premises); soundness refers to the truth of the
premises. Whether or not a premise in an argument “rings true” for
someone does not in itself tell us anything about whether or not that
premise is actually true.
All propositions are open to interpretation; there are wrong interpretations and correct
interpretations and mixed or indecisive interpretations. For example,
someone who interpreted the following argument, If A then B, A,
therefore B, to mean or entail If A then B, B, therefore A, would be
wrongly interpreting a modus ponens argument (which is valid) as
affirming the consequent (which is a fallacy). That is an example of an
obvious interpretive error. Naturally, many texts are complex and not
susceptible of such easy interpretation, and in those cases errors in
interpretation are more difficult to detect. My point is that
hermeneutics is not a purely subjective enterprise, and so arguments are
not necessarily epistemically underdetermined simply because they have
to be interpreted.
Well, again, the autobiographical remarks are
interesting, but it might be as well to listen to and read the accounts
of other women (as well as men) who have flourished in a traditional
religious environment. Otherwise, you run the risk of projecting your
experience onto others, saying, in effect, that “your religion is not
what you think it is, because I have experienced it otherwise than you
have.” That sort of appeal to autobiography is a kind of “projectionist”
subjectivism that implicitly invalidates the testimony of women who
have had experiences very different from yours.
The arguments that I accept as the basis for objective human rights do not depend upon
specifically biblical premises, just as the arguments I accept for the
existence of God do not depend upon such premises. Universal human
rights are implicit in certain biblical texts, i.e., those which enjoin
moral absolutes as commands which seem to apply to all people, not only
Israelites or Christians. There are biblical commands which are tailored
along the lines of civil law, and are not intended as moral absolutes
but rather are issued for prudential reasons in a given context. These
laws can be bad or harsh when taken in the abstract, but might make
sense in context. In fact, one the Hebrew prophets (I can’t remember
whom) even wrote that God gave Israel laws that “were not good for
them.” But the prophet was not implying that God was engaged in some
sort of “dick move.” To conclude in that way from isolated pericopes is
an illiterate way of interacting with the Bible. A holy text is after
all a text, and a text like scripture can not rightly be “read off” in a
superficial way, as though it were a contemporary magazine article.
An evolutionary reading of those texts such as you describe erases the
difficulties at the cost of disrupting the literary context and failing
to acknowledge the humanity of the biblical authors; i.e., it sets aside
their willingness to allow ambiguity or tension in the narrative, or
else reckons that they did not recognize or appreciate the troubling
aspects of the text because, well, they lived “way back then” when
people did horrible things to one another as a matter of course, like
routinely going to war and objectivizing other people (totally unlike
what goes on in the modern world, of course). Such a reading discounts
the moral awareness and sensibilities that we find in the bible itself,
including the pentateuch. There is plenty of evidence in the bible
showing that rape, murder, and theft were not “just fine” and that all
human beings have moral obligations to one another. So either the text
is a mishmash of conflicting points of view, and the authors and editors
too lazy or stupid to do much by way of recognizing and ironing out the
difficulties and points of tension, or something else is going on in
these texts. But this isn’t the place to forward my surmises about what
that might be (i.e., to summarize my own incomplete biblical theology)!
Again, it seems to me that there is an analogy here with other disciplines,
e.g., one can just as easily dismiss quantum mechanics because, well,
the universe (or god or whatever) doesn’t stand by and let shit like
that happen. Maybe, but at first glance that seems like a hasty and
unintellectual response to the data.
Your concluding paragraph assumes that all biblical laws are supposed to apply equally to all
communities (they aren’t, even on the bible’s own terms), and that our
context is “nothing like” that of the ANE or late Roman Republic / early
Empire. Both assumptions are manifestly untrue. Then, as now, people
lived in communities of men and women and children and had to provide
for their needs in relation to one another and adjacent communities. At
the most basic level, their needs were the same as ours. Of course these
basic needs were then as now pursued and enjoyed or else longed for or
even despaired of in peculiar ways, conditioned by unique social,
cultural, and geographical conditions. But those things are not
insuperable barriers to intra-human understanding and empathy. We do not
exist in hermetically-sealed social-cultural pods, doomed to subsist
intellectually in a kind of echo chamber; we can reach out to other
kinds of people, even those who existed in the remote past, and learn
from them. (For me, this is the greater part of being conservative, in
the first [and non-political] sense of the word given in the OED
dictionary, quoting Chaucer.)
Finally, I am not advocating that certain rules be either enforced or not enforced.
My primary concern in this conversation is to argue that certain rights (and corresponding
responsibilities) are inherent in human nature, and that before we go
about making (or breaking) “rules” we need to have some understanding of
whether or not there is such a thing as objective human nature (my
argument is that if not, then there are no such things as human beings
and this discussion is moot; every moral and political matter reduces to
power and propaganda) and if so what is human nature like and what is
required for human beings, as such, to flourish, to more perfectly
realize their inherent potential?
Rachel, I posted a reply to your latest comment in our discussion, but it got kicked into the spam bucket. I have tried to re-post it in two parts, but with the same results only worse–weird formatting (due to copy and paste I guess). I’ll try again later.
Hey, I had posted a lengthy reply, but it got kicked to spam. A tragedy for all concerned. Anyway, I’ll see if this reply takes, and if so, I’ll try to re-post my response to your most recent remarks.
[Here’s another another attempt to post my comment:]
I agree that the way “identity” is used in this discussion matters.
My point was that both senses of the word, the subjective / conditioned and the objective / given, are intelligible and correspond to reality. (Even if someone’s subjective sense of identity were obviously counter-factual, say, a man who sincerely self-identifies as a cornstalk, it would still be true that in some sense he experiences himself in that way.) Again, these senses of identity are not mutually exclusive. The key is figuring out how they are really related, e.g., as pertaining to sex and gender and other features of human beings.
I also agree of course about Aristotle’s prime mover or movers and
the one God of Judaism and Christianity. But I would argue that Aquinas and various Thomists, using Aristotelian principles and not borrowing premises from special revelation, e.g. the “five ways” (which are only summaries as presented at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae), do conclude with an entity that could not possibly be one among other kinds of gods and is necessarily an intellectual agent (a person).
Also, good arguments don’t “get you” things because you want them to. They get those things, i.e., conclusions, only if they are sound and valid. Validity refers to the form of the argument (the conclusion logically follows from the premises); soundness refers to the truth of the premises. Whether or not a premise in an argument “rings true” for someone does not in itself tell us anything about whether or not that premise is actually true.
All propositions are open to interpretation; there are wrong
interpretations and correct interpretations and mixed or indecisive
interpretations. For example, someone who interpreted the following argument, If A then B, A, therefore B, to mean or entail If A then B, B, therefore A, would be wrongly interpreting a modus ponens argument (which is valid) as affirming the consequent (which is a fallacy). That is an example of an obvious interpretive error. Naturally, many texts are complex and not susceptible of such easy interpretation, and in those cases errors ininterpretation are more difficult to detect. My point is that hermeneutics is not a purely subjective enterprise,and so
arguments are not necessarily epistemically underdetermined simply because they have to be interpreted.
Well, again, the autobiographical remarks are interesting, but it
might be as well to listen to and read the accounts of other women (as well as men) who have flourished in a traditional religious environment. Otherwise, you run the risk of projecting your experience onto others, saying, in effect, that “your religion is not what you think it is, because I have experienced it otherwise than you have.” That sort of appeal to autobiography is a kind of “projectionist” subjectivism that implicitly invalidates the testimony of women who have had experiences very different from yours.
The arguments that I accept as the basis for objective human rights do not depend upon specifically biblical premises, just as the arguments I accept for the existence of God do not depend upon such premises. Universal human rights are implicit in certain biblical texts, i.e., those which enjoin moral absolutes as commands which seem to apply to all people, not only Israelites or Christians. There are biblical commands which are tailored along the lines of civil law, and are not intended as moral absolutes but rather are issued for prudential reasons in a given context. These laws can be bad or harsh when taken in the abstract, but might make sense in context. In fact, one the Hebrew prophets (I can’t remember which one) even wrote that God gave Israel laws that “were not good for them.” But the prophet was not implying that God was engaged in some sort of “dick move.” To conclude in that way from isolated pericopes is an illiterate way of interacting with the Bible. A holy text is after all a text, and a text like scripture can not rightly be “read off” in a superficial way, as though it were a contemporary magazine article.
An evolutionary reading of those texts such as you describe erases the difficulties at the cost of disrupting the literary context and failing to acknowledge the humanity of the biblical authors; i.e., it sets aside their willingness to allow ambiguity or tension in the narrative, or else reckons that they did not recognize or appreciate the troubling aspects of the text because, well, they lived “way back then” when people did horrible things to one another as a matter of course, like routinely going to war and objectivizing other people (totally unlike what goes on in the modern world, of course). Such a reading discounts the moral awareness and sensibilities that we find in the bible itself, including the pentateuch. There is plenty of evidence in the bible showing that rape, murder, and theft were not “just fine” and that all human beings have moral obligations to one another. So either the text is a mishmash of conflicting points of view, and the authors and editors too lazy or stupid to do much by way of recognizing and ironing out the difficulties and points of tension, or something else is going on in these texts. But this isn’t the place to forward my surmises about what that might be (i.e., to summarize my own incomplete biblical theology)!
Again, it seems to me that there is an analogy here with other
disciplines, e.g., one can just as easily dismiss quantum mechanics because, well, the universe (or god or whatever) doesn’t stand by and let shit like that happen. Maybe, but at first glance that seems like a hasty and unintellectual response to the data.
Your concluding paragraph assumes that all biblical laws are supposed to apply equally to all communities (they aren’t, even on the bible’s own terms), and that our context is “nothing like” that of the ANE or late Roman Republic / early Empire. Both assumptions are manifestly untrue. Then, as now, people lived in communities of men and women and children and had to provide for their needs in relation to one another and adjacent communities. At the most basic level, their needs were the same as ours. Of course these basic needs were then as now pursued and enjoyed or else longed for or even despaired of in peculiar ways, conditioned by unique social, cultural, and geographical conditions. But those things are not insuperable barriers to intra-human understanding
and empathy. We do not exist in hermetically-sealed social-cultural
pods, doomed to subsist intellectually in a kind of echo chamber; we can reach out to other kinds of people, even those who existed in the remote past, and learn from them. (For me, this is the greater part of being conservative, in the first [and non-political] sense of the word given in the OED dictionary, quoting Chaucer.)
Finally, I am not advocating that certain rules be either enforced or
not enforced. My primary concern in this conversation is to argue that certain rights (and corresponding responsibilities) are inherent in human nature, and that before we go about making (or breaking) “rules” we need to have some understanding of whether or not there is such a thing as objective human nature (my argument is that if not, then there are no such things as human beings and this discussion is moot; every moral and political matter reduces to power and propaganda) and if so what is human nature like and what is required for human beings, as such, to flourish, to more perfectly realize their inherent potential?
1. I’m rejecting the objective/subjective binary when it comes to identity. As I explained above, “intersubjective” is a whole other category, and without it we wouldn’t have languages, economic systems, traditions, culture, games, etc.
2. The five ways are very compelling for individuals who are already invested in getting the Judeo-Christian God out of them. Sure. I grant that. Are you trying to find an argument that is rationally compelling to all humans everywhere? Even those who don’t start with your preferences and preconceptions and experience of the world and emotional ties to a church community? If so, you can’t get that out of the five ways. (Nor from Descartes nor from Pascal, etc.).
3. I’m familiar with argumentation, as I teach Logic and Critical Thinking at the college level. You’re simply misinterpreting my point. Validity is about the form of the argument. You can create a valid argument with premises that I don’t agree to, and your argument is fine, but it only works for you and for other people who also agree with your premises. So the distinction you need to make here is between form and content. I’m not talking about switching around the p and q in a modus ponens argument. That would be a problem with the form. I’m talking about building consensus on the premises themselves – the content. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter how solid your form is. Again, here’s a valid argument: Grass is purple; all purple things are delicious; therefore, grass is delicious. You see here the form is solid. The content is debatable. If I don’t agree that grass is purple then the argument accomplishes nothing. I am not compelled by reason to accept the conclusion.
4. Your binary explanation of interpretation is interesting. There are wrong and right interpretations and that’s it. OK. What’s the criteria for wrong and right? In some cases multiple reasonable interpretations can follow based on the facts available, the readers life experience, the context of the text, etc. What is the measuring stick for these right and wrong interpretations?
5. Referring to them as “my autobiographical remarks” is a tad dismissive. So let’s take them out of the context of the girl-child sitting in the pew in a traditional fundamentalist patriarchal church. As a rational being who has an inherent need to make sense of the world and has difficulty accepting two contradictory statements as both being simultaneously true, I have numerous issues with statements that are made in and about the Bible. Rationality requires coherency. The mental gymnastics that are required to explain away, justify, and compartmentalize these inconsistencies can be one approach to the need to resolve your beliefs with your rationality. I get that, and I respect that as a choice that people can make. I don’t care for them myself.
Also, the claim that some women are perfectly happy in repressive religious environments seems problematic to me. If you take some of the women in my family and in their social circle, I can point to some pretty big signs that they’ve developed some coping mechanisms, but there are also some serious issues at play. I don’t doubt that if you sincerely believe that the only way to get into heaven is to put up with the situation, you’ll find ways to put up with it. That doesn’t make it right. And there’s an uncomfortable parallel with all the arguments that were made in favor of slavery on the basis that the slaves were so happy (as evidenced by their constant singing).
6. There is plenty of evidence in the bible showing that rape, murder, and theft were not “just fine” and that all human beings have moral obligations to one another.
Then there are massive, massive contradictions, and if you don’t allow for change and growth and adaptations then all you’re left with in incoherence. You cannot say “go into the land and kill every man, woman and child living there” and then in the same breath denounce genocide. These are contradictory. So you either need some mechanism to account for the contradiction (such as an evolution story), or you have to reconcile yourself to it.
7. I haven’t read this but it sounds interesting: http://www.amazon.com/God-Biography-Jack-Miles/dp/0679743685
8. I don’t expect compassion out of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has never claimed to be the embodiment of love. And I would be totally OK with God being more like quantum mechanics and less like a loving but not-loving confusing sometimes vengeful sometimes merciful father figure. But in that case, why would it matter whether I believed in him/her/it or how I lived my life? How could I be said to have a relationship with it?
9. If biblical laws don’t apply across the board then I’m confused about why this conversation started out with human rights. And I’m confused about why Christians condemn genocide. Is it that genocide is only OK in certain situations? Well then isn’t that relativist and subjective and all the things that I’m accused of being?
I guess the bottom line is, I think you can make a compelling case for Christianity and Christian beliefs and principles if you’re willing to allow them to evolve and to be re-applied to the current context. So if you go in a kind of Paul Tillich direction where the goal is to find the kernels of truth in the Bible and then discover how they apply to our times, then I think that’s possibly a worthy and achievable goal. That’s not what I see happening (for the most part) in the Christian church in America. Clinging to some scripture but not others (I see a lot of people eating shrimp and wearing clothing made of mixed fibers out there) and insisting that they be applied today the same as they were thousands of years ago doesn’t seem tenable. That being said, I’m totally fine with people choosing to do that in their own lives. I just think they shouldn’t try to force it on others.
1. The oil and coal monopoly example was simply meant as a counter point to the claim that the free market always benefits everyone. It wasn’t an argument that the gov’t should run anything. Just that constraints are sometimes necessary because the free market doesn’t give a fuck if your family is freezing or starving to death. People have to be the ones who care about that and take some kind of action. We might disagree about what that action should be, but I still maintain that it’s unethical to stand by and watch Rockefeller get obscenely wealthy while children are freezing to death because of his price-fixing.
2. Look at the data and tell me how likely it is for a child born into dire circumstances to ever acquire wealth. The fact that it happens in very rare cases doesn’t prove that the free market is morally superior. There’s plenty of data out there.
3. That was just a response to your statement – which was also unsubstantiated. 🙂
It seems odd to compare what people complain about as “big government” in America to the likes of Stalin, Mao, Polpot, and Mussolini. I agree that those dudes did slaughter lots of people. But their beliefs and methods and governmental systems bear so little resemblance to ours that I can’t figure out how this could be a useful analogy.
4. I wouldn’t say that unconstrained capitalism has produced the most freedom. It seems that our political system has. Moving away from authoritarian governments to more democratic forms (as flawed as they are) has produced freedom. In our case capitalism and democracy came hand in hand.
I’m not sure how you look at the current trends in wealth distribution in America and argue that free market capitalism is benefiting everyone. Even extremely conservative economists (I know several) don’t try to deny that, and acknowledge that there’s a problem.
And maybe the crux of the problem is that I don’t believe there’s any system out there that can solve human problems alone. People have to solve people problems, and that means you can’t choose one inanimate, amoral system and put it in place and have blind faith that it will work. If you take yourselves to be ethical people, you have to look at what’s going on, and do your best to improve and troubleshoot and fix the problems that come up. But inflexibly adhering to a system or philosophy or set of principles or approach while denying or ignoring the issues that come up seems really problematic to me.
And… this is pretty sobering
https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
1. The oil and coal monopoly example was simply meant as a counter point to the claim that the free market always benefits everyone. It wasn’t an argument that the gov’t should run anything. Just that constraints are sometimes necessary because the free market doesn’t give a fuck if your family is freezing or starving to death. People have to be the ones who care about that and take some kind of action. We might disagree about what that action should be, but I still maintain that it’s unethical to stand by and watch Rockefeller get obscenely wealthy while children are freezing to death because of his price-fixing.
Yeah, I understood your point. I just don’t think it gets you very far due to the reasons I laid out. Capitalists understand that monopolies need to be avoided when possible. The other problem is that this SAME period of history was the greatest period of charitable giving the world has ever known. So people weren’t just sitting around allowing people to freez to death. They were doing something about it. Without coercion, no one looking over their shoulder, no one harming wealth creation in the process.
2. Look at the data and tell me how likely it is for a child born into dire circumstances to ever acquire wealth. The fact that it happens in very rare cases doesn’t prove that the free market is morally superior. There’s plenty of data out there.
This data spans all political systems and economies. Tell me which system in particular INCREASES those odds the most? So far as I can see it is only the free market that made such a thing possible in the first place. Again, history tells a very one sided story on this point.
3. It seems odd to compare what people complain about as “big government” in America to the likes of Stalin, Mao, Polpot, and Mussolini. I agree that those dudes did slaughter lots of people. But their beliefs and methods and governmental systems bear so little resemblance to ours that I can’t figure out how this could be a useful analogy.
Only if you start at the end of the story. If you are agreeing with me that
1. people always pursue their own interest
And
2. Power corrupts men
Then you should also agree that we should be weary of concentrated power. The ultimate in concentrated power is political power.
4. I wouldn’t say that unconstrained capitalism has produced the most freedom. It seems that our political system has. Moving away from authoritarian governments to more democratic forms (as flawed as they are) has produced freedom. In our case capitalism and democracy came hand in hand.
Political freedom and economic freedom ALWAYS come hand in hand. Without economic freedom you do not have a free society. Capitalism is not a sufficient condition for a free society but it is a necessary condition. We can explore that idea further if you like.
I’m not sure how you look at the current trends in wealth distribution in America and argue that free market capitalism is benefiting everyone. Even extremely conservative economists (I know several) don’t try to deny that, and acknowledge that there’s a problem.
The gap in wealth distribution is largely illusary. Capital gains, the modern stock market, and our monitary system create an inflation of “wealth” that exists in largely imaginary ways. There was an oil tycoon worth billions who lost his entire fortune in stocks. Where did the money go? No one knows. Its a mystery. When the banks need a bailout they can account for every missing dollar. When wall street needs a bailout they can never account for much at all. Its just gone! Lol is the quality of life today better than the quality of life 50 years ago? Hell yes! Even for the poor. The big difference is in the gap between the mean and the ballers. But this would immediately disappear if we returned to a gold standard (which will never happen) and got rid of fiat money.
And maybe the crux of the problem is that I don’t believe there’s any system out there that can solve human problems alone. People have to solve people problems, and that means you can’t choose one inanimate, amoral system and put it in place and have blind faith that it will work. If you take yourselves to be ethical people, you have to look at what’s going on, and do your best to improve and troubleshoot and fix the problems that come up. But inflexibly adhering to a system or philosophy or set of principles or approach while denying or ignoring the issues that come up seems really problematic to me.
I completely agree. But you also need to look at the MEANS used to accomplish desired ends. Force is not the way to go
Thanks for numbering the points, it’ll help track things better. I’ll try to be much more succinct than I was in my previous reply.
1. Okay, but without human beings we would not have intersubjectivity in any of the applications you mention, nor would there be anything to have identities in the senses discussed up to this point. What makes something objective, as I use the term, is its existence and (in cases of propositions) truth not being reducible to a personal experience or imaginative or social construct.
2. I am not speaking of the arguments as compelling, but as conclusive. The conclusion logically follows from true premises. There are all sorts of reasons that people do not find conclusive arguments to be compelling.
3. The distinction between form and content is precisely what is mapped out by the difference between validity and soundness. I don’t think that I could have been clearer on that point.
4. Here you overlooked what I explicitly wrote, namely, that there are right and wrong as well as “mixed or indecisive” interpretations.
5. Well, on this point I think you’d need to points out the difference between possible explanations of difficulties and “mental gymnastics”, as well as the difference between living in a manner consistent with your convictions and getting by via “coping mechanisms.” As it stands, you’ve merely applied pejorative labels to the experiences of other women and compared them to slaves. What was that about being dismissive?
6. A contradiction would involve God commanding the Israelites to kill everyone in a city, while at the same time and relation commanding them not kill everyone in that city. It would also be contradictory to claim that God can never in justice command the killing of an innocent child while also claiming that God justly commanded the death of an innocent child. But no one is making the prior contradictory claims, while traditional Christians (partly but not entirely on the basis of the biblical narrative) typically deny that God can never in justice command the killing of an innocent child. So there is no contradiction, only a contested point, i.e., whether or not God can ever, in justice, command the killing of an innocent child.
7. I have not read that either, but the blurb makes it sound similar to some of the points made about scripture by, e.g., Robert Alter in the intro chapter of The Art of Biblical Narrative.
8. That analogy did not turn on the difference between compassion and quanta, rather it had to do with perceived incongruities generally, such as that between the love and mercy of God and the command to kill the Canaanite children. My point is that if we can live with points of apparent incongruity without rejecting an entire paradigm in science, then we can do so in religion as well.
9. I have not accused you of being a relativist, though I have pointed out where your points, insofar as I understood them, have tended to be subjective. Anyway, some biblical laws apply across the board, some do not. Discerning the difference is one of the things that biblical theologians try to do. So far as I can remember, I first brought up the matter of human rights, while you first asked how that notion squared with the Bible. In a sense, you provided an answer (a good one) to that question from the outset, i.e., universal human rights can be inferred from the biblical concept that human beings are created “in the image of God.”
Traditional Christians accept that the conquest of Canaan, including the total warfare waged upon some cities, was just insofar as it was commanded by God. Some go on to argue that “justice” or “right” is by definition whatever God commands. That is one way of resolving the problem, but that is not my view. Rather, I believe that God is essentially and necessarily just and good by his very nature, and that he never commands anything but what is according to his nature. Since we know, by reason and revelation, that the divine nature is good, then we can know that whatever God commands is good, even in cases where we cannot perceive the goodness of what he commands. In short, the difference is between the notions that (i) something is right (simply) because God commands it, and (ii) God commands something because it is right.
Among the crucial things to bear in mind, from this point of view, is that the relation of God to creation is unique, not only in his sovereignty over life and death but in his purposes for each soul, which purposes (and power) extend beyond death. There is a lot to unpack here, especially as pertains to the problem of evil generally, and most especially to the problem of God commanding what would certainly be evil if a human being were to command and or / do the same (on his own initiative). Even given the requisite theological unpacking, I think that a theodicy on these points is going to involve a good bit of speculation, leaving many questions unanswered. Again, the waters here are probably always going to be murky, like blood. But rational people routinely accept degrees of ambiguity within a paradigm (cf. the quantum mechanics analogy) and there is no reason that religious people cannot rationally do the same.
Dang. That last point just blew up my intent re brevity.
Regarding your bottom line, what you see as a possibly compelling case for Christianity (along the lines of Tillich) I see as leaving us with something essentially other than Christianity which simply goes by that name.
Well, my reply to this comment was kicked to spam as well. I’ll see if this note sticks and if so will re-post my reply at a later time.
The other problem is that this SAME period of history was the greatest period of charitable giving the world has ever known. So people weren’t just sitting around allowing people to freez to death. They were doing something about it.
Perhaps we’re reading different history books? There are so many well-documented instances of malnourished children dying of easily curable diseases in the cold and unsanitary slums that so many people were living in during that time period that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around this picture of the charitable monopoly bosses swooping in on their golden chariots and saving everyone with their charity. And also, doesn’t the American ideal include a work ethic in favor of a system where people have the opportunity to earn a living wage rather than wait for the charity to trickle down from the obscenely wealthy people who got that way by exploiting their very labor?
I’m talking about the data in America of how frequently people from low socioeconomic groups make it out. Most remain extremely vulnerable their whole lives, and increasing numbers of the middle class are falling into that vulnerability. When your purchasing power is eroded and you’re living paycheck to paycheck shit can hit the fan pretty fast, and we’re working to eliminate the safety nets and transfer risk back to the individual.
I’m not advocating for concentrated power, but the fact is we already have concentrated power. So it’s an economic oligarchy within the context of a somewhat democracy where there’s still kind of a balance of power between the branches of gov’t rather than a dictatorship. That’s still a big difference. And I would add to your list “unchecked greed corrupts people” as well. Again, Rockefeller.
Political freedom and economic freedom ALWAYS come hand in hand.
That’s not exactly a response to my point. Your claim is that the economic system created freedom. My point is that you could have a “free market” under a repressive regime and I’m not sure that would get you freedom per se. Let’s say we have a totally free market but I’m the dictator (yay!) and I say that nobody can have more than one child. everyone has to serve in the military for at least 4 years, and everyone has to be, oh, I don’t know, Lutheran. I just picked one. How free are we?
Also, are you suggesting that capitalism and democracy always go hand in hand? Are you familiar with the Scandinavian countries, which also have the highest quality of life in the world? Most of them are quite socialist, but everyone seems to feel free and satisfied and …happy.
Is the quality of life today better than the quality of life 50 years ago?
Apparently we’re not reading the same things. Like the Wall Street Journal and Money Magazine and Forbes and NYT. A higher percentage of families cannot afford to buy a house now than 50 years ago. Most families need more than one income. Most people carry more consumer and student load debt than they did 50 years ago. The ability to save and build wealth such that you can retire in comfort has shrunk to a smaller pool of people at the top. There may be other measures of quality of life that you’re looking at, but the concentration of wealth has shifted dramatically to the top very small tier. I’m not sure how you can look at the numbers and deny that.
And I’m not sure what you mean by continually referring to force. Do you mean rule of law? Is the ideal a gov’t that makes no laws governing economic practices?
Here’s another way to look at it. Economies thrive in stable systems that provide infrastructure and access to resources. Without stability, infrastructure, and resources business gets nowhere. Who provides those things? A government that enables collective action such as infrastructure development, security, rule of law to prevent theft and interpersonal violence, etc. facilitates business and economic growth. So any story about someone pulling them up by their bootstraps is total bullshit at the bottom of it all, because without that environment and access to resources, none of it would be possible. But a country’s resources belong to all of it’s citizens, not just some. So a person who succeeds in business should be rewarded for her hard work, for sure. But she should also be expected to give back in order to keep that stability and infrastructure in place, and also to acknowledge that the resources she used did not belong only to her. She should also not be allowed to utilize abusive means to grow her business – unfair or unsafe labor practices, exploiting resources and polluting the environment, etc. for her personal gain. Is that expectation that you’ll give back and refrain from abusing others unfair FORCE? I guess you can describe it that way, but it seems unreasonable to me. And for those who continue to whine about it, I invite them to try to conduct their businesses in unstable countries where the infrastructure is unreliable, you may or may not have electricity on any given day, there may or may not be an accessible road to move your goods to market, they may get stolen along the way, rebels may come and take over your facility as soon as you get it up and running, etc. And then tell me about how some American dude pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Obviously hard work should be rewarded, but we always have to acknowledge that the environment in which you do business allows for and facilitates your success.
The other problem is that this SAME period of history was the greatest period of charitable giving the world has ever known. So people weren’t just sitting around allowing people to freez to death. They were doing something about it.
Perhaps we’re reading different history books? There are so many well-documented instances of malnourished children dying of easily curable diseases in the cold and unsanitary slums that so many people were living in during that time period that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around this picture of the charitable monopoly bosses swooping in on their golden chariots and saving everyone with their charity. And also, doesn’t the American ideal include a work ethic in favor of a system where people have the opportunity to earn a living wage rather than wait for the charity to trickle down from the obscenely wealthy people who got that way by exploiting their very labor?
I’m talking about the data in America of how frequently people from low socioeconomic groups make it out. Most remain extremely vulnerable their whole lives, and increasing numbers of the middle class are falling into that vulnerability. When your purchasing power is eroded and you’re living paycheck to paycheck shit can hit the fan pretty fast, and we’re working to eliminate the safety nets and transfer risk back to the individual.
I’m not advocating for concentrated power, but the fact is we already have concentrated power. So it’s an economic oligarchy within the context of a democracy where there’s still kind of a balance of power between the branches of gov’t rather than a dictatorship. That’s still a big difference. And I would add to your list “unchecked greed corrupts people” as well. It’s not just power that corrupts, it’s also greed. Again, Rockefeller.
Political freedom and economic freedom ALWAYS come hand in hand.
That’s not exactly a response to my point. Your claim is that the economic system created freedom. My point is that you could have a “free market” under a repressive regime and I’m not sure that would get you freedom per se. Let’s say we have a totally free market but I’m the dictator (yay!) and I say that nobody can have more than one child. everyone has to serve in the military for at least 4 years, and everyone has to be, oh, I don’t know, Lutheran. I just picked one. And also that they have to eat cucumbers for breakfast on Thursdays. How free are we?
Also, are you suggesting that capitalism and democracy always go hand in hand? Are you familiar with the Scandinavian countries, which are for the most part quite socialist and also have the highest quality of life in the world? Pretty much everyone in those nations seems to feel free and satisfied and …happy.
Thanks for numbering the points; I’ll respond by number, trying to be much more succinct than I was in my previous reply.
1. Okay, but without human beings we would not have intersubjectivity in any of the applications you mention, nor would there be anything to have identities in the senses discussed up to this point. What makes something objective, as I use the term, is its existence and (in cases of propositions) truth not being reducible to a personal experience or imaginative or social construct.
2. I am not speaking of the arguments as compelling, but as conclusive, that is, as a valid argument in which the conclusion follows from true premises. There are all sorts of reasons that people do not find conclusive arguments to be compelling.
3. The distinction between form and content is precisely what is mapped out by the difference between validity and soundness. I don’t think that I could have been clearer on that point.
4. Here you overlooked what I explicitly wrote, namely, that there are right and wrong as well as “mixed or indecisive” interpretations.
5. Well, on this point I think you’d need to spell out the difference between plausible or at least logically possible explanations of bible difficulties and “mental gymnastics”, as well as the difference between living in a manner consistent with your convictions and getting by via “coping mechanisms.” As it stands, you’ve merely applied pejorative labels to the experiences of other women and then compared them to slaves. What was that about being dismissive?
6. A contradiction would involve God commanding the Israelites to kill everyone in a city, while at the same time and relation commanding them not to kill everyone in that city. It would also be contradictory to claim that God can never in justice command the killing of an innocent child while also claiming that God justly commanded the killing of an innocent child. But no one is making the prior contradictory claims, while traditional Christians (partly but not entirely on the basis of the biblical narrative) typically deny that God can never in justice command the killing of an innocent child. So there is no contradiction, only a contested point, i.e., whether or not God can ever, in justice, command the killing of an innocent child.
7. I have not read that either, but the blurb makes it sound similar to some of the points made about scripture by, e.g., Robert Alter in the intro chapter of The Art of Biblical Narrative.
8. The analogy did not turn on the difference between compassion and quanta, rather it had to do with perceived incongruities generally, such as that between the love / mercy / compassion of God and the command to kill the Canaanite children. My point is that if we can live with apparent incongruities without rejecting an entire paradigm in science, then we can do so in religion as well.
9. I have not accused you of being a relativist, though I have pointed out where your points, insofar as I understood them, have tended to be subjective. Anyway, some biblical laws apply across the board, some do not. Discerning the difference is one of the things that biblical theologians try to do. So far as I can remember, I first brought up the matter of human rights, while you first asked how that notion squared with the Bible. In a sense, you provided an answer (a good one) to that question from the outset, i.e., universal human rights can be inferred from the biblical concept that human beings are created “in the image of God.”
Traditional Christians accept that the conquest of Canaan, including the total warfare waged upon some cities, was just insofar as it was commanded by God. Some go on to argue that “justice” or “right” is by definition whatever God commands. That is one way of resolving the problem, but that is not my view. Rather, I believe that God is essentially and necessarily just and good by his very nature, and that he never commands anything but what is according to his nature. Since we know, by reason and revelation, that the divine nature is good, then we can know that whatever God commands is good, even in cases where we cannot perceive the goodness of what he commands. In short, the difference is between the notions that (i) something is right (simply) because God commands it, and (ii) God commands something because it is right. Again, I hold the latter view.
Among the crucial things to bear in mind, from my point of view, is that the relation of God to creation is unique, both in his absolute sovereignty over life and death and in his purposes for each soul, which purposes (and power) extend beyond death. There is a lot to unpack here, especially as pertains to the problem of evil generally, and most especially to the problem of God commanding what would certainly be evil if a human being were to command and or / do the same (on his own initiative). Even given the requisite theological unpacking, I think that a theodicy on these points is going to involve a good bit of speculation, leaving many questions unanswered. The waters here are probably always going to be murky, like blood. But reasonable people routinely accept degrees of ambiguity and even paradox within a paradigm (cf. the quantum mechanics analogy) and there is no reason that religious people cannot rationally do the same.
Dang. That last point just blew up my intent re brevity.
Regarding your bottom line, what you see as a possibly compelling case for Christianity (along the lines of Tillich) I see as leaving us with something essentially other than Christianity which nevertheless continues to go by that name.
1. Nevertheless the distinction is important since things that arise through intersubjective agreement are not particular to the individual in the way that subjective experiences are. Again, money, language, etc. And I question the value of this objective truth thing that conservatives are so fond of. How exactly do humans access this “objective truth” since every kind of knowledge or belief they can have is always experienced through the lens of a particular human viewpoint in a particular time and place via human perception that’s maybe not all that unreliable. Whence comes your unmediated perception of and knowledge about these truths that are not impacted in any way by human perception or interpretation?
2. “Conclusive” is the problematic term here. Conclusive meaning a rational being couldn’t deny your conclusion? No. You don’t get that out of these arguments.
3. I’m not sure where your conception of soundness gets you agreement. I don’t agree that the grass is purple so I don’t see your argument as being sound. You believe that the grass is purple, so you see the argument as valid and sound. We still don’t agree, and that doesn’t get you “conclusive.” I am not bound by rationality to accept your conclusion.
4. You hear “there must have been an original uncaused cause” and you jump straight to the god of the bible. I might go some other place based on my beliefs and experiences. Who’s right?
5. If a belief system requires me to accept contradictory things about the world and about myself, then I reserve the right to reject it. I understand that people who have a lot invested in staying in a certain religious context (like my sister and my cousins) are willing to do the work to resolve or compartmentalize those contradictions. I’m fine with that. I prefer a different approach.
6. Those are some intricate mental gymnastics. Either genocide is ok or it’s not. Who’s to say God didn’t send Hitler to wipe out the Jews for disobeying him? Why are we doing all this work to condemn and attempt to prevent genocide? (Obviously this isn’t what I believe, but it follows from your story).
8. In science the assumption isn’t that we have some perfect paradigm that explains everything. It’s that this is the best we have right now, and presumably we’ll come to understand more in the future and we’ll continue to dial in the model that we’ve got (or pitch it for a new one). The way I’ve heard religion presented is that it’s THE paradigm that explains everything and is not subject to change or evolution.
9. But we started out with you arguing in favor of universal human rights.
So this is the intrinsically moral commands versus moral relative to divine command question. The Euthyphro question. So your number two still has some pretty brutal human rights violations as being commanded by God, so somehow it was the context that made it right. In other words, genocide is right when it occurs in the right context.
But I agree on people being able to accept things with some degree of uncertainty, and of course all of us have to do this every day in order to function. What I disagree with is holding this story up as THE story and trying to make everyone live according to it’s standards.
Since you brought up the scientific paradigm point, I’ll use it as the analogy here. The theory about paradigm shifts is that originally people hold to a paradigm and understand the world from the context of that paradigm. Over time they observe anomalies and situations that are not properly predicted by that paradigm. Once the number of anomalies hit critical mass (my way of phrasing it) then you’re ripe for a paradigm shift. I personally can’t handle the number of contradictions and inconsistencies in the biblical story (such as genocide). I’m not OK with the degree to which traditional ancient systems like this require individuals to deny their natural tendencies and interests and desires. I’m not OK with the fact that for at least certain individuals flourishing (in the Aristotelian sense) is not an option. I’m not OK with the fact that an accident of birth (such as having a penis) gives you access to power and privilege through no work of your own or particular strengths and abilities you might possess. That doesn’t work for me, and so then it’s my job as an adult human being to find a framework that does work for me, that does allow for flourishing and personal growth and finding a way of life that is ethically solid and defensible.
So this relates back to the original question in that the traditional Christian framework sees trans individuals as just being troublemaking perverts who need to be forced to conform. I have a problem with that but understand its origin. My point is simply that if a Christian finds themselves having gender dysphoria then they are free to apply the Christian framework to themselves and force themselves to live as the gender assigned at birth and use the restroom they’ve been told to use. What I question is the compulsion to apply it to others who don’t share their worldview.
1. We know objective reality in the first place as it comes to exist in the mind via the senses. This knowledge is perfectly compatible with and indeed always informed by (though not reducible to) linguistic and other socio-cultural particularities and personal idiosyncrasies.
2. No, “conclusive” does not mean that a rational being could not deny the conclusion. Conclusive means that the conclusion logically follows from true premises.
3. The proposition that (green) grass is purple would be a false premise, which premise renders a valid argument unsound.
4. No, I don’t “hear” that there is an uncaused first cause and jump straight to the God of the Bible.
5. Again, you are simply applying pejorative labels to the experiences, choices, and / or “approaches” of other women.
6. Again, you are simply using labels without explaining the difference between “mental gymnastics” and making careful logical distinctions. The latter is what I was attempting to do on this point.
8. Correct, regarding science; incorrect, regarding religion. What you heard was wrong.
9. Actually, we started out by discussing what the relation is between identity (specifically, gender identity) as a subjective experience and / or social construct, and objective reality (specifically, what a thing is by nature).
Well, here as several times previously, you are asserting, without argument, that there are actual contradictions in the biblical story. I gave a couple of examples of what would count as actual contradictions, but you only claimed that that was “mental gymnastics” (as opposed to what?). I think you need to be more specific on both counts.
As for requiring individuals to deny their “natural tendencies and interests and desires,” the disagreement generally turns upon the word “natural.” Some individual tendencies, interests, and desires are, I would argue, unnatural, as in opposed to what humans by nature require to flourish. Homicidal tendencies, myopic self-interest (at the expense of others), and rape / molestation desires are examples that come to mind.
People who see an inherent relationship between biological sex and some aspects of gender (or, more generally, between human nature and personal identity) think that their view “applies” to others insofar as those others are also human. Human nature applies to everything that is human. But this kind of application does not amount to or logically entail compelling other people to accept or live according to one’s own views, either by harangue or legal action or some other means.
However, if one denies that human nature is real or that truth about human beings is knowable (and shareable), then there is (in principle, at least) little point in civil and rational dialogue, because such dialogue is based on the premise that, despite our differences, we can recognize the real humanity and other common ground that unities us with our interlocutors. Apart from such objective unity, those who disagree with us on important matters could be dismissed as simply “others” who are in our way, requiring only to be rhetorically dismissed and perhaps legally proscribed. The only questions remaining would be, who comes out on top (liberals or conservatives, secularists or believers, etc) and how do “we” ensure that our side wins (i.e., gets whatever it happens to want)?
In my view, on the other hand, civil and rational discourse between all human beings is in principle both possible and desirable precisely because we (a) have human nature in common and (b) are by this nature oriented, specifically by means of our rational faculties, to the truth, which truth is not one thing for me and another for you (in which case a disagreement is but a dead end) but something we have or should seek in common.
Rachel,
Perhaps we’re reading different history books?
Same history books. Yes there were people dying of diseases and living in slums. But you have to put that fact in its historical context. What was life like for the masses one hundred years prior? As you said, developing countries are different than fully developed ones. The period of unrestrained, rugged individualism was a period when the modern type of nonprofit community hospital was first established and developed. It was the period of the Carnegie Libraries and their spread through the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie. It was the period when so many colleges were founded throughout the country. It was the period of the founding of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the spread of foreign missions. Was there more to do? Sure. But I see no evidence that what was accomplished through coercion, force, and ineffective government agencies would not have been accomplished if we had left things as they were. I think its fine to use government as an instrument of charitable giving, but only provided there is universal or near universal support for said effort.
And also, doesn’t the American ideal include a work ethic in favor of a system where people have the opportunity to earn a living wage rather than wait for the charity to trickle down from the obscenely wealthy people who got that way by exploiting their very labor?
Yes, but both can be true at the same time….
I’m talking about the data in America of how frequently people from low socioeconomic groups make it out. Most remain extremely vulnerable their whole lives, and increasing numbers of the middle class are falling into that vulnerability. When your purchasing power is eroded and you’re living paycheck to paycheck shit can hit the fan pretty fast, and we’re working to eliminate the safety nets and transfer risk back to the individual.
Again, context is crucial. The mean income of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the other nanny states is lower than nearly every state in the US. Our MEDIAN income is extraordinarily high in the US. So these people who fall through the cracks are actually better off than they would be almost anywhere in the world. Do we really want to implement policies to be more like the nations poorer than MIssissippi? I dont think so! I dont share this alarmist view of American economics. Inflation is a big issue, but i dont think increasing the inflationary policies that got is there is going to do much good.
That’s not exactly a response to my point. Your claim is that the economic system created freedom. My point is that you could have a “free market” under a repressive regime and I’m not sure that would get you freedom per se. Let’s say we have a totally free market but I’m the dictator (yay!) and I say that nobody can have more than one child. everyone has to serve in the military for at least 4 years, and everyone has to be, oh, I don’t know, Lutheran. I just picked one. How free are we?
A free market is a necessary cause of a free society, but not a sufficient cause all in itself. Without both society is not free.
Also, are you suggesting that capitalism and democracy always go hand in hand? Are you familiar with the Scandinavian countries, which also have the highest quality of life in the world? Most of them are quite socialist, but everyone seems to feel free and satisfied and …happy.
None of them are socialist at all. They are market economies with heavy taxation and generous safety nets. Social democracies are not socialist. They offset these social nets with zero dollar minimum wages, school choice, and unbelievably free trade policies with basically zero protection for their own cherished industries. This all came about as a response to the Scandinavia of the 1970s that really got its Bernie on and crushed its own businesses. If the government or the community owns the means of production (socialism) a free society is impossible.
Apparently we’re not reading the same things. Like the Wall Street Journal and Money Magazine and Forbes and NYT. A higher percentage of families cannot afford to buy a house now than 50 years ago. Most families need more than one income. Most people carry more consumer and student load debt than they did 50 years ago. The ability to save and build wealth such that you can retire in comfort has shrunk to a smaller pool of people at the top. There may be other measures of quality of life that you’re looking at, but the concentration of wealth has shifted dramatically to the top very small tier. I’m not sure how you can look at the numbers and deny that.
Thats only if you take the consumer price index as your sole source of indicator. Would you rather shop in a grocery store in the 1970s or at Walmart? Would you rather have surgery back then or today? Which dentist would you rather have? These advancements and innovations are driven by free-market economies. They dont happen outside of it. Right now the US leads the world in medical research. Can the planet really afford for the US to destroy incentives by controlling costs? These things have to be thrown into the mix.
And I’m not sure what you mean by continually referring to force. Do you mean rule of law? Is the ideal a gov’t that makes no laws governing economic practices? Without stability, infrastructure, and resources business gets nowhere……. So any story about someone pulling them up by their bootstraps is total bullshit at the bottom of it all, because without that environment and access to resources, none of it would be possible……
As ive already said free market advocates have a nice healthy agenda for government to fulfill. Contract enforcement, monetary control, monopoly/neighborhood effect protections, etc. The choice isnt EITHER liberals forcing shit down our throats or else the wild west. The government needs to set up a basic infrastructure for the free market to operate within and then leave us alone.
But a country’s resources belong to all of it’s citizens, not just some.
No. No one has a right to whats in my bank account just because they happen to live next door. The computers at Apple dont belong to me because I am a US citizen.
So a person who succeeds in business should be rewarded for her hard work, for sure. But she should also be expected to give back in order to keep that stability and infrastructure in place, and also to acknowledge that the resources she used did not belong only to her.
Sure, taxes are a legit function of government. The government needs money to have a military, enforce contracts, break up monopolies, etc.
She should also not be allowed to utilize abusive means to grow her business – unfair or unsafe labor practices, exploiting resources and polluting the environment, etc. for her personal gain. Is that expectation that you’ll give back and refrain from abusing others unfair FORCE?
You can expect whatever you like and that wouldn’t be force. But hundreds of thousands of pages of restrictions, rules, regulations, minimum wages, etc. is force. If there is universal support for some law then fine. But it should only be allowed sparingly.
I guess you can describe it that way, but it seems unreasonable to me. And for those who continue to whine about it, I invite them to try to conduct their businesses in unstable countries where the infrastructure is unreliable, you may or may not have electricity on any given day, there may or may not be an accessible road to move your goods to market, they may get stolen along the way, rebels may come and take over your facility as soon as you get it up and running, etc. And then tell me about how some American dude pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Obviously hard work should be rewarded, but we always have to acknowledge that the environment in which you do business allows for and facilitates your success.
This is all just a gross caricature of what conservative economics advocates. No one is against the government building roads, a strong military, passing laws, etc. Obviously we need a market to begin with if we want one to be free. Going beyond that, as Friedman put it so well:
“Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals—the technique of the market place.”
I guess I’m not worried that the mean income in Denmark is relatively low – quality of life and the sharing of risk tell you much more about what it’s like to live somewhere.
I never shop at WalMart, so no, I would not rather shop there.
Just as you claim my view is a “gross caricature of what conservative economics advocates,” yours is a gross caricature as well. There has to be some way to account for the fact that our form of capitalism in the current environment allows companies to externalize their costs (environmental, social, resource* acquisition, etc.) in order to allow a small minority to become extremely wealthy while the majority sink into increased financial vulnerability. I get that the law of the jungle demonstrates how a species becomes stronger over time – the weak are culled out of the herd etc. Just as you can make an argument for the law of the jungle in the actual jungle, you can make an argument in favor of the economic law of the jungle. It totally works from a purely rational standpoint. You just can’t call yourselves civilized anymore.
I’m sure there are all kinds of typos here – I’m on my phone backstage at a very loud middle school Lion King rehearsal waiting for the next costume changeout. Hence the law of the jungle analogy. 🙂
*when I’m talking about shared resources I think you know I’m not talking about your bank account. Beyond the air and water and minerals and land that some people manage to get wealthy off of, the knowledge that is built up out of our research facilities that enables new medical technologies and treatments, for example, would not be possible if we as a nation had not invested in this system. The same is true for the majority of innovations. Therefore those individuals who become wealthy off of said innovations owe something back to the nation that pooled its resources to facilitate innovation, academic freedom, R&D networks, and all that.
1. Descartes. (and also, “objective” implies a view from nowhere, and I don’t know of any humans who have that view).
2. Valid and conclusive are not synonyms, but you’re now using them as if they are. Earlier you weren’t. Conclusive is generally taken as the stronger of the two, implying a sound argument.
3. Exactly my point. So would my argument about the purple grass be “conclusive” then? In the sense you were originally using the word?
6. Then let me put it this way. Constantly appealing to some hidden knowledge and/or intention that God has to explain away the contradictions in the Bible is failing to engage in a rational discussion. I think you can say “God’s ways are not our ways” and leave it at that. But then don’t condemn genocide and also ask people to be more Godly.
8. Exhibit A: you reject the idea of a God that evolves. Exhibit B: a large percentage of Christians today spend a great deal of time and money trying to force biblical commands from ancient times on us today in the 21st century. I could keep going with this.
9. And unless we can move past the binary of objective/subjective this is kind of a dead end. (And I would note that your earlier implication that intersubjective is somehow in the same camp with “imaginary” is deeply problematic.)
You don’t have to deny that human nature is real in order to deny that it gets you everything that conservatives want it to. Why do we do so much work to force people to be what they were “naturally” intended to be? You don’t have to force an elephant to enact “elephant nature,” but a whole lot of work goes into forcing girls to be girls and boys to be boys. And for those who can never contort themselves into the mold properly, the suicide rate is extremely high. That’s a problem.
I’ve been pretty clear on contradictions. “Go into the land and kill every man. woman, and child.” “God is love.” I have a problem with this.
I would say that humans are naturally social, and we have a natural tendency to build up such social constructions as language, economies, political systems, games, conventions, shared social practices, etc. It is in our best interest to get along and find a way to live together since peaceful interdependence increases our chances of survival and flourishing.
However, I don’t think that this requires that I force my conception of flourishing on you. I think it simply means that we come to some agreement about what the conditions are for life and flourishing. In some cases this will mean that I have the freedom not to live in the way that works best for you. High suicide rates and high rates of chronic depression among certain sectors of the population are signs that something is not working in the current setup, and so it behooves compassionate and reasonable people to go back and re-assess the shared social reality that we’ve created. Or we can cling rigidly to our traditional views of what human nature really is and allow that sector of the population to continue to suffer.
It’s quite possible that God does require that whole swaths of the population should be required to suffer, to never experience an environment that enables them to flourish, etc. I can see that as a clear possibility. But then to make the claim that this is a loving or compassionate God is to defy reason.
1. No. I am anti-Cartesian, and view the world from right here.
2. No. I am not claiming that valid and conclusive are synonymous. I am claiming that valid *and sound* arguments are conclusive.
3. No. See above.
6. No. I am not appealing to hidden knowledge. But you have still not explained the difference between mental gymnastics and logical distinctions.
[Edit: There is a sense in which a theodicy on this point “appeals to hidden knowledge”; i.e., divine knowledge that has not been revealed to or discovered by us. But such an appeal is far from an end to rational discourse, provided that there are rational reasons to think that God knows things that we do not. And of course there are such reasons: God is by definition omniscient (he knows everything); we are not omniscient (our knowledge is limited); and God has not revealed to us everything that he knows (special revelation is finite). Therefore, it stands to reason that God knows things we do not.]
8. God does not evolve or change (that is impossible). Our understanding of God and his revelation changes over time, but whether such change amounts to an evolution (where one kind of thing becomes another kind of thing) needs to be decided on a case by case basis.
9. Objective and subjective are distinct, intelligible, and knowable features of reality. These features are not bifurcated in experience nor are they reducible one to the other. Intersubjectivity either involves both aspects of reality, or just one, or just the other, or neither. Those are the logical options. My position is that it involves both.
The reality of human nature implies nothing about forced behavior. I don’t know and am not particularly interested in what “conservatives” want to “get” from human nature. I am interested in what is implied by human nature, in itself. If you insist on reading my points through an ideological grid, you will continue to misread my points.
The proposition that God is love is not contradicted by God’s command to wage total warfare. There is a hidden premise at work in your argument. That premise is the point under dispute. Thus far, you are merely begging the question.
Of course you need not force your conception of flourishing upon me or anyone else. But if you think that your conception of human flourishing is true, then please feel free to provide some reasons for your position. I promise to listen, even if it seems to me that you are rigidly clinging to a nontraditional view of human nature which has brought continual suffering to millions upon millions of people, even leading some of those who adopt your views to commit suicide rather than live in the world as you conceive it. (See how that works?)
1. Goodness no. I am anti-Cartesian (positively speaking, my philosophical views are basically Aristotelian-Thomistic), and view the world from right here. If you like, I would be happy to further discuss the differences between Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and Cartesianism.
2. No. I am not claiming that valid and conclusive are synonymous. I am claiming that valid *and sound* arguments are conclusive.
3. No. See above.
6. No. I am not appealing to hidden knowledge (I am appealing to logic). But you have still not explained the difference between mental gymnastics and logical distinctions.
[Edit: There is a sense in which a theodicy on this point “appeals to hidden knowledge”; i.e., divine knowledge that has not been revealed to or discovered by us. But such an appeal is far from an end to rational discourse, provided that there are rational reasons to think that God knows things that we do not. And of course there are such reasons: God is by definition omniscient (he knows everything); we are not omniscient (our knowledge is limited); and God has not revealed to us everything that he knows (special revelation is finite). Therefore, it stands to reason that God knows things we do not.]
8. God does not evolve or change (that is impossible). Our understanding of God and his revelation changes over time, but whether such change amounts to an evolutionary change (where one kind of thing becomes another kind of thing) or some other sort of change needs to be decided on a case by case basis.
9. Objective and subjective are distinct, intelligible, and knowable features of reality. These features are not bifurcated in experience nor are they reducible one to the other. Intersubjectivity either involves both aspects of reality, or just one, or just the other, or neither. Those are the logical options. My position is that it involves both, which is quite different from claiming or implying that it is in “the same camp with” the imaginative, if by that you mean reducible to the imaginative.
The reality of human nature implies nothing about forced behavior. I don’t know and am not particularly interested in what “conservatives” want to “get” from human nature. I am interested in what is implied by human nature, in itself. (If you insist on reading my points through an ideological grid, you will continue to misread my points.)
The proposition that God is love is not contradicted by God’s command to wage total warfare. There is a hidden premise at work in your argument. That premise is the point under dispute. Thus far, you are merely begging the question.
Of course you need not force your conception of flourishing upon me or anyone else. But if you think that your conception of human flourishing is true, then please feel free to provide some reasons for your position. I promise to listen, even if it seems to me that you are rigidly clinging to a nontraditional view of human nature which has brought continual suffering to millions upon millions of people, even leading people who adopt your views to commit suicide rather than live in the world as conceived by nontraditional agnostics. (See how that works?)
Rachel,
There has to be some way to account for the fact that our form of capitalism in the current environment allows companies to externalize their costs (environmental, social, resource* acquisition, etc.) in order to allow a small minority to become extremely wealthy while the majority sink into increased financial vulnerability. I get that the law of the jungle demonstrates how a species becomes stronger over time – the weak are culled out of the herd etc. Just as you can make an argument for the law of the jungle in the actual jungle, you can make an argument in favor of the economic law of the jungle. It totally works from a purely rational standpoint. You just can’t call yourselves civilized anymore.
First of all, many of these companies would go out of business without government bailouts and corporate welfare constantly bailing them out. Second, It is not enough to point at some getting rich and others getting less rich and claiming injustice. “Fair” is not the same as “equal”. Is something blocking these others from prosperity? If so, what is it? What aspect of the free a voluntary market is holding people down? Where are these people who have wonderful educations from top notch schools that cant get a job or provide for their familes? Very far and inbetween. The question isnt: “How do we stop people from getting richer than me”. The question is “how can we increase mobility for everyone else”. TO which there are obvious solutions. Education being the best place of all to begin.
Therefore those individuals who become wealthy off of said innovations owe something back to the nation that pooled its resources to facilitate innovation, academic freedom, R&D networks, and all that.”
This is taking alot for granted. When you say “owe something to the nation” what you really mean is “owe something to the government”. Which is not exactly the same thing. Did the nation benefit greatly from the invention of the automobile? Oh yes. The nation benefitted much more than Henry Ford was actually paid. If anything the nation owes HIM. The same is true of computers, electricity, etc. These do not become “pooled goods” just by entering the marketplace. Government gets the money we decide collectively it should recieve to advance common goals. Thats it. Nothing more is “owed”.
1. The point of referencing Descartes is to point out that as finite beings we necessarily experience things from a particular viewpoint in a particular time and place via senses that are less than reliable (note the example of the bent stick in the water, for example). If you’re claiming to have direct access to “reality” then I’m not sure where to go from here. And I would be interested to know how this relates to the trans issue. Is the idea that from a second-person perspective we can see or intuit what a trans or genderqueer person’s gender “really” and they’re just confused or misguided?
2. If I don’t accept the premises of your argument or the leaps you make after arriving at the conclusion, then it’s not a sound argument. Again, the purple grass argument…
3. Appeal to hidden information still going on here. You have left the realm of logical argumentation once you appeal to hidden information. I get that God is thought to be omniscient and all that. So the most we can say is that we as humans can’t really know anything about him. So we’re all agnostic. But you can’t get “God is just” or “God is love” if you’re still placing genocide in the “unethical” category.
8. So your other choice is he’s not loving and just, or genocide is permissible.
9. Those are the logical options. Based on what line of reasoning? Also, see #1 above.
Perhaps it would be more helpful if you would define what you mean by “The reality of human nature.” According to whom? What is the proof supporting your view? Why would others who don’t share your view be compelled to accept it?
And I don’t want to keep belaboring this issue, but claiming that I’m “begging the question” (which is a technical term that’s not quite accurately applied here) on the contradictory nature of both condemning genocide and commanding it doesn’t answer my question. I’m going to claim for the sake of argument that Hitler was commanded by God to eliminate the Jews as a punishment for their iniquities. Who are we to judge him? By appealing to the hidden information that we mere mortals cannot see or understand, I can show that genocide is justified. Done.
And also, God is love.
It is not enough to point at some getting rich and others getting less rich and claiming injustice.
It would be truly remarkable if the entire 99% were all becoming poorer out of sheer laziness. It just doesn’t seem statistically possible.
And on the topic of pooled resources – I guess I’m perfectly happy to have pharmaceutical companies, for example, charge prohibitively high prices if they managed to claw their way to the patents and products they currently have in a vacuum – absent from NIH funding and laboratory infrastructure and all of the physical, economic, and intellectual infrastructure that creates the environment that allows for R&D to flourish. As it is, they rely heavily on this environment. There are good reasons this isn’t happening in the most desolate, war-torn, and politically and socially unstable countries in the world. Because innovation requires stability, and access to the kinds of resources and facilities that make innovation possible. The deal is, you benefit from the stability ad resources and all that, and then you pay back into the system to allow it to continue.
Incidentally, one of the resources necessary is an educated and healthy workforce. But continuing a trend that drops the workforce further and further down financially doesn’t do justice to the fact that the availability of educated workers made your success possible.
And none of that even touches on the fact that our current setup allows companies to externalize so many of their social and environmental costs…
1. Our senses are reliable, such that we can tell that a straight stick held under water appears bent, while apart from the refraction of light by the water (an effect that we discern in part by relying on sense data), the stick appears as it is, straight. All human beings have direct access to reality in the sense previously indicated, as it is present in the mind via the senses. (The key underlying premise here is that physical things are comprised of form as well as matter.) This is not a “second person” or “third person” perspective. It is a metaphysical fact known by reason by way of reflection upon the physical things we know, e.g., that human beings exist, that they are not pigs, and so forth. This knowledge extends to distinctions within a species, including that between male and female.
2. Exactly, which is why it is important to know, for any argument, whether the premises are true.
3. Ask any scientist, and you can learn that there are reams of things that we do not know, which admission is not to profess agnosticism in lieu of scientific knowledge, given that there are things we do know. The premise that knowledge of some things does not entail knowledge of all things is not a departure from the realm of logical argument, but is precisely a logical point, formalized as a particular affirmative in the square of opposition.
8. The logical choices (as between contradictory premises) on the disputed point are (A) there are some circumstances in which genocide is just, and (B) there are never circumstances in which genocide is just. The Canaanite conquest, the Flood narrative, and various biblical apocalyptic narratives seem to indicate that genocide is sometimes just; namely, in cases where it is enjoined by God. Again, affirming that sometimes genocide is just is a particular affirmatives, which does not entail a universal affirmative (e.g., that some A is B does not entail that all A is B).
9. My comment is based on the line of reasoning that those options are logically exhaustive. You can disprove this by pointing out another logical option.
By the reality of human nature I mean that there are such things as human beings, as distinct from others kinds of things, and that this distinction is not merely mental, i.e. something that is imposed by the mind on an otherwise amorphous “object” of thought. The proof supporting my view is that we do in fact distinguish between human beings and, e.g., pigs and acorns and plastic bottles, and that any argument to the effect that such distinctions are merely products of the mind presupposes either that the human mind creates those distinctions, in which case we are back to positing the existence of human beings (with minds), or that some other, non-human mind creates those distinctions. If that other mind is exclusive of the reality of human beings (i.e., what we imagine to be our thoughts are not thoughts at all, or else simply the thoughts of another), then there is strictly speaking no discussion to be had between us, no intersubjectivity, since “we” don’t really exist. But if that other, non-human mind is inclusive of human beings, such that it and we exist, then there is no contradiction between saying that reality is both the product of a (creating) mind and present in (knowing) minds.
Again, compulsion by any external agent does not come into my concept of philosophy (as opposed to ideology) or philosophical discussion. Human beings are by nature rational, and reason is ordered first of all to truth, such that pursuing truth together is according to our nature. In other words, to learn and share and progress in knowledge is natural for mankind. Of course people are “free” to sit and starve (bodily and intellectually), or to compel the weak to do the same, but those are obviously not “freedoms” geared towards human flourishing.
Begging the question is a fallacy, and it does apply here insofar as you continue to claim that there is contradiction between the love of God and his taking the lives of people en masse. If you want to make your case, you will have to provide some arguments in support of your contention that there is a contradiction here. Regarding Hitler and Stalin and various other mass murderers, there are no reasons to believe that God commanded them to do what they did. Thus, we are to judge them and their fellows as fellow human beings, accountable to the laws of nature, according to which the murder of one human being (let alone millions of human beings) by another human is unjust. We are not to judge them as if they were real agents of an inscrutable divine command. If you disagree, I would be happy to hear your reasons.
My own case does not appeal in the first place to things we do not know, but to things we do know, including that God is good, and just, and he sometimes kills people en masse; i.e., commits and commands genocide. We even know why he does the latter, i.e., as judgment for sin. What we do not know is exactly how persons not yet capable of sin in the sense of an informed and deliberate choice to reject God can be justly subject to the same temporal consequences (death) as persons who can and have thus sinned. All we can do is surmise, on the basis of what we do know, how this can be the case.
Based on the conversation to this point, it seems to me that before we can profitably address the questions of how instances of God’s judgment of human beings can be logically reconciled with his justice, or how some gender roles might be based in nature and not only in convention, we first need to come to some understanding on more basic points, such as whether or not there are such things as human beings as distinct from other kinds of things, in what this distinction consists (human nature or whatever), how we know this, and how, if there are human beings, we really are and ought to be related to one another and to God, if such a thing exists (which also raises basic questions pertaining to the divine nature). So there’s that.
1. We don’t know that the stick isn’t bent via the senses. We know it via cognition. All the senses tell us is that the stick is bent when it’s in the water. We have to figure out through reason that in that instance (and many, many others) our senses are unreliable. Hence the whole “perception is theory laden” thing and all of the findings about how cognition organizes and makes sense of our perceptions for us real time, etc. In other words, basically all of philosophy and cognitive psychology since the 16th century. I’m not sure what you would have to do to get to unmediated knowledge of “Reality” via the senses, but it seems impossible to me. Humans are by nature situated in a time and a place and cannot take the omniscient view from nowhere, so there are going to be limitations on their understanding of the world. But that’s OK. We don’t have to have unmediated access to “Reality” in order to function and understand each other and all that. Of course, you can go the Descartes route and say that my senses and experience give me access to “Reality” because God guarantees it, but then you’re not going to get buy in from anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
2. So the five ways and other arguments for the existence of god are not conclusive unless you are already inclined to accept the premises or you make the jump from something as vague as “uncaused cause,” for example, to “Judeo-Christian God. It’s a pretty big jump.
3. But we’re not making absolute claims about these things. We might be making conjectures or hypotheses or arguing in favor of a theory, but we’re not saying “I know this to be true.” Saying “this is the best model we currently have to explain what’s going on here” is an entirely different animal than the types of claims that most religious people want to make about God.
8. It doesn’t have to be a universal affirmative. If your claim is “genocide is wrong” then one instance in which it was OK is the only counterpoint needed. You can now say “sometimes genocide is wrong.” Fine. But I’m not clear on where you get something like universal human rights out of that. And that doesn’t even touch the instances where God used an individual to make a point. God hardened Pharoah’s heart, for example, and a whole lot of people experienced a whole lot of pain and loss because of it, but it was necessary for God’s plan. It’s a coherent narrative, but it’s not consistent with human rights.
On the begging the question point, what implicit assumption am I making that already proves my argument? You haven’t explained that yet. If there’s no implicit assumption then there’s no begging the question. I teach this to college freshmen in critical thinking classes. I don’t know of any logic textbooks or any method of teaching logic that characterizes the begging the question fallacy the way you do.
If we know that God is good and just and all that based only on the Bible, then arguments that follow from that will only be compelling (or conclusive, if you prefer) to people who accept the Bible as wholly true and unimpeachable. And although I don’t share this view of the Bible, I think it’s a viable position to choose. I just think there’s no way to get universal human rights out of it. The Bible is an ancient text, and rights are a modern concept that didn’t exist until well after Biblical times. It’s anachronistic to impose one on the other.
All we can do is surmise, on the basis of what we do know, how this can be the case. This has moved into the realm of inductive arguments, which can be stronger and weaker, but not valid or sound (in my earlier comment I meant “strong” but typed “sound”). So you can possibly make a strong argument that God is good and just and whatever based on this, but it won’t be conclusive. And quite honestly I don’t see it as being very strong either. To my mind it’s better to take the “God’s ways are not our ways” route and simply argue that human rules don’t apply to God, or at least not in the same way, and so asking the genocide question or the rights question is just the wrong way to approach the issue. If whatever God does is by definition just and good, then those terms have an entirely different meaning in that context than they do when applied to human actions.
And on the last point – I’ve already answered this. I think all animals, including humans, have inborn capacities and needs and propensities, etc. In the case of humans, these develop in a complex and intensely social environment that has a significant impact on how the individual will develop. Concepts of gender, race, sexual orientation, left-handedness, dark-haired vs light-haired, large-craniumed vs small-craniumed, etc. have looked very different in varying cultural and historical contexts and have ebbed and flowed in their importance to a society based on the needs and interests of the time. And yet they’re central to the way an individual develops precisely because we invest them with so much significance and expend do much energy in trying to produce conformity. Do I think these culturally-contingent categories are built into human nature? No. So I’m guessing that the inborn capacities and needs and propensities, etc. that I refer to wouldn’t count as “human nature” as you define it, because traditionally that term carries a lot of extras with it that I think aren’t supported by any evidence. What I do know is this. If you have to work and work to force people into the mold that is their “nature,” and that mold causes them to be vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse, or forces them to live in a way that feels entirely unnatural, uncomfortable, and foreign to them, or serves as a handy lever on which to build unjust social hierarchies, then I fail to see what utility this “nature” thing has. There’s very little evidence for it if it shifts with the times and requires a great deal of artifice to produce. And in the end it maximizes human suffering in order to preserve the power of one group over another. I’m not especially concerned with whether the god of the bible is just or good. I’m interested in living in a world that maximizes justice and compassion and human flourishing. Maybe there’s a way to reconcile that with a conservative Christian view, but I don’t think it follows naturally from it.
1. That is a false dilemma, between sense data and cognition–both are required for knowledge. This is why I wrote that we know *in part* by relying on sense data that a straight stick held underwater appears bent. Of course we have to think about the data before arriving at a sound judgment; e.g., in discerning the properties of light relative to water and sticks and so forth. To use another example: Suppose you are driving through the country, and, seeing a bovine-shaped object ahead, form the judgment “there is a cow standing by the road”. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the “cow” is a cardboard figure of a cow. Did your senses deceive you? No. You merely made a wrong judgment. And here’s the thing: In order to discover this error, and form a correct judgment, you have to rely upon your senses. Same goes for the stick and the water and the refraction of light. Access to reality is not “unmediated” in the sense of being independent of contingent factors, but these factors do not preclude access to reality via sense data and cognition. Any argument that they do is self-falsifying; i.e., it purports to show that we can’t know things themselves, which is of course a statement about a thing itself, namely, a human being, particularly its intellectual faculty.
2. Exactly, which is why the premises in these arguments have to be understood and investigated. There is a sense in which the uncaused first cause is vague–it is wholly other than anything else. We mainly know what it is not, not what it is. But what is clear, according to Aquinas at any rate, is that there cannot possibly be more than one such being, and that any other being which exists is contingent upon this being. The Bible makes statements about “God” which seem to be incommensurate with a contingent being, one that depends upon another to sustain its existence. Rather, the God which the prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles worshiped is the creator and sustainer of all things, himself uncreated and independent, i.e., an uncaused first cause, of which there can only be one (again, according to St Thomas).
3. Sure, we can and do say “I know this to be true” all the time, and many times we do know what we say we know. Even the claim that knowledge is theory-laden is an absolute claim about knowledge–either we know that all knowledge is theory laden, or we don’t know this. If the former, then working with various models or paradigms and awareness of their limitations is consistent with certainty–we can justly claim to know things, even given our limitations and prejudices and so forth. If the latter, then, well, we shouldn’t go around making claims that knowledge is theory laden, since we don’t know this to be the case.
8. Human rights express our obligations to each other based on our common nature. God is not human, nor even a maximally mighty and wise demi-god or some other contingent thing. The implicit assumption in your charge of contradiction is that what would be unjust for humans would be unjust for God. But you have not argued that point, only assumed it, which is begging the question. You do raise the point in your most recent reply, in which you note that a “better” theodicy will incorporate the premise that God’s ways are not our ways. This is true, and such is my position, though I do not think it implies that God-talk is necessarily equivocal. With Aquinas, I hold that what we can say about God is meaningful by analogy. Thus, it is meaningful to ascribe to God the attributes that, say, classical theism and the biblical texts predicate of him, but because our understanding of these terms implies things that cannot pertain to God (e.g., composition), we cannot take such predication univocally.
Anyways, in classical / biblical theism, God is sovereign over life and death, he gives and he takes away by right. In one of his movies Clint Eastwood tells someone that “its a hell of thing to kill a man; you take away all he has and all he’s ever gonna have.” Well, there is truth in that, speaking man to man. But as I mentioned before, God’s power and plans extend beyond the taking of a life to the care of the soul, which, on a Christian understanding, survives death and awaits the resurrection of the body. Those Canaanite infants and persons drowned in the Flood and so on are no more or less dead than anyone who has ever died, nor do we know for each of them the particulars of what God has in store beyond death, anymore than we know this of one another. And yet it seems reasonable to hope for the best (certainly that is preferable to fearing the worst), given all the givens of the Bible, especially the parts at the end of the Gospels.
Finally, it is no part of human nature to “build unjust social hierarchies” or force people into a mold. Those things are contrary to human nature, and consequently unjust. That you seem to recognize that certain actions are unjust indicates that you have some knowledge, however little you like to admit it, of human nature, including what is required for human beings to flourish. Human nature is not something produced by art or artifice. It is inherent in human beings, as such. I am glad that you are interested in living in a world that maximizes justice and compassion and human flourishing. Indifference to such things would be contrary to our nature.
2. I don’t think it’s always a case of understanding. I understand the arguments perfectly well, I just don’t think the premises are true. For instance, Aristotle claimed that there’s can’t be an infinite regress. You might accept that as truth, or you might not. Why can’t there be? It seemed intuitive to Aristotle and many philosophers after him, but when you try to explain why there can’t be an infinite regress, it becomes clear that it is an assumption, and some may agree with it, but others may not. The same is true for all the arguments for the existence of god. You might accept the premises, or you might not. That doesn’t mean you don’t understand the argument – you just don’t accept the truth of the premises.
3. I’m talking about scientific language. How we use expressions like “know” and “true” in the vernacular is different. These are what Wittgenstein would call different language games, and it’s helpful not to get confused by the fact that some terms mean one thing is one context but another thing in a different context. The claim that observation is theory-laden is a description of how things seem to work in the world.
I think a difference here that’s probably unresolveable is that you seem to be approaching epistemic claims as if they’re purely binary – either I know or I do not know; either I believe or I do not believe. I think knowledge and belief can occur along a continuum. You can be relatively sure of something, for example. I also think your understanding of something can shift over time based on your experiences and the information available to you, and can vary based on your frame of reference.
So maybe a better example of perception and understanding being theory-laden is this. Take the old example of the blind men and the elephant. In ancient versions of the story the man who has ahold of the trunk describes it as a vine or a snake. In modern versions he describes it as a fire hose. In this case the very way we experience a thing – the aspects of it that seem relevant to us and the categories we use to process it are informed by our framework and previous experiences. Take the example of a study that was done to demonstrate the plasticity of the brain where individuals were fitted with glasses that made everything appear upside-down to them. Within a relatively short period they had adjusted and were seeing the world as being right-side up and when they took off the glasses, the world appeared upside down to them again. This suggests that even as we’re perceiving things our minds are reorganizing and processing the perceptions as a part of the process – not as a separate and distinct thing that happens after perception.
I think the more useful way to talk about perceiving and knowing isn’t based on a quest to achieve perfect unassailable knowledge. A better question to ask is “what degree of certainty and agreement do we need in order to go about our daily lives, to cooperate with others to achieve shared objectives and engage in the social relations that seem to be so important to humans?” So that’s a pragmatic approach that will not be acceptable to an individual coming from a conservative religious perspective, but the beauty of living in a free society is that I don’t have to adopt your viewpoint and beliefs. We can co-exist without agreeing on everything.
8. I have only been assuming that the term “universal,” which you were using originally, meant something like “applicable in every situation and context.” If in fact there are beings in the universe who do not have to respect human rights, then you can call them situational or contingent human rights, but not universal.
I understand classical/biblical theism. I question its applicability to anyone who doesn’t accept the truth of the bible. I can write a manifesto today and then argue that any number of universal laws follow from it. But to anyone who doesn’t accept my manifesto as truth, it won’t apply to their lives. They can understand it but simply not accept it. It’s not as simple as “if you understand it then you will believe it and it will apply to your life.”
I’m not claiming that it’s part of human nature to build unjust hierarchies. I’m inviting you to look around the world and observe that it happens with some frequency throughout history. If some people are starving and exploited and suicidal and unhappy and never have an opportunity to develop their capacities for creativity and curiosity and any number of other human propensities, then I think most people can agree that this is not flourishing. And you conveniently side-stepped my point there. These differences that people like to claim are “natural” shift a great deal throughout history, and many of them come into existence, or at least evolve and come to prominence,only when needed. For example, the concept of “race” did not exist until a coherent rationalization for slavery and colonialism was needed. If you have a whole range of “natural” categories that conveniently shift to serve social and political ends, that’s a reason to be suspicious about the “naturalness” of the category.
2. Sure, that is one the things that would have to be (and has been) further investigated, whether or not an actual infinite regress of causes is possible. As for the rest, my remarks show that there is not a “big leap” from the God of the Bible to the uncaused first cause of Aquinas’s “five ways”. That was the point.
3. I am not sure where you are getting the idea that I approach these matters in a binary fashion; its not even clear what you mean by that. It is true (per the law of noncontradiction) that one cannot both know and not know something at the same time and in the same sense, but there is a continuum of knowledge, from less perfect to more perfect. In addition to knowledge, there are other epistemic states such as belief, doubt, opinion, denial, ignorance, and so forth. Anyway, I am using knowledge in a philosophical sense, which includes what we know by way of common sense and modern science. Here’s an example of how knowing in these various senses ties together:
You notice that some trees, but not all trees, lose their leaves in the Fall. You refer to these trees as “deciduous”. One autumn day you notice a pine tree shedding its needles and conclude that pine trees are deciduous trees. But a little more experience shows that most pines retain their needles through the winter, and so you do some investigation into the causes of leaf (or needle) loss in the various cases. You learn that that particular pine tree was suffering from water stress or some type of disease, and that pines do not, as a matter of course, shed their needles when the weather turns cold. You go on to discover that those trees which do shed their leaves every autumn share a common property–they are sap-congealors-in the leaf stalk, which you decide is what, specifically, makes for a “deciduous” tree. Notice what has happened: your scientific understanding re deciduousness has changed, but through this change it remains the case that you know that some trees lose their leaves in autumn. In addition to knowing this, your knowledge has become more perfect through study, and a point of error has been corrected. Thus, the common sense (observation), scientific (discovering that sap congeals in the leaf stalk of certain trees), and philosophical (knowledge of causes, in this case, the cause of deciduousness) senses of knowledge work together.
The various thought experiments you mention illustrate that we rely upon our senses to correct errors in judgment brought about by different factors (otherwise we would not be able to identify the factors that cause errors in judgment, or the errors themselves). Yes, our minds are active in perception, but they are also receptive to things other than themselves, to be “informed” (as opposed to only “forming”).
Once again, I am not nearly as interested in what is useful as in what is true. The latter is the more fundamental matter, since we cannot know whether something is useful, or whether the ends to which we would use it are good, apart from knowledge of certain truths about things.
I am using “universal” as coextensive with human beings, in the sense that, as stated before, everything that is human has human rights. What that entails for things other than humans, God, angels, beasts, plants, etc, has no bearing on the universality of human rights in this sense.
If something is true, it applies to people whether they accept it or not. Of course it is possible to understand something and not accept it. For example, I understand various arguments for liberal skepticism/agnosticism, but I reject that view, at least in the permutations of it with which I am familiar.
You’ll have to be specific about where I side-stepped your point. Thanks, though, for the invitation to look around the world. And yes, starvation, exploitation, suicide, unhappiness, and lack of opportunity to develop one’s capacities are all incompatible with human flourishing. Its good to know that you know that much, at least.
Finally, race is not of the essence of human nature, else people who differ in race would differ in nature, which is not the case. So race is not “natural” in any sense of the word that would tell against the reality of human nature.